Is Your Nonprofit Organization Recession Ready? These 6 Things Will Help You Prepare

Is Your Nonprofit Organization Recession Ready? These 6 Things Will Help You Prepare

by | Jun 24, 2020 | Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

Is Your Nonprofit Organization Recession Ready? These 6 Things Will Help You Prepare

Written By Amanda Cook

On

I was working in the nonprofit industry when the 2008 recession hit. If your nonprofit organization was like the ones I was working with, you probably didn’t feel the pain of that recession until 2009 or 2010. Nonprofits operate in a very cyclical nature — annual planning, giving cycles, recurring events, membership renewals, etc. — so by the time the economy started to recover, nonprofit organizations were still trying to understand what the true impact was going to be. All of the data indicates nonprofit organizations didn’t fare too terribly during that recession, because it was short by comparison. But at the time, difficult decisions and shifts in focus still had to be made.

When the economy is moving forward robustly, most leaders focus on growth and sales. But inevitably, when the economy slows and times get tough, that focus shifts. With so many people furloughed or laid-off during this time, they struggle to spend money in a way that keeps the economy moving in the right direction. 

Are we already in a recession? It depends on who you ask. Some economists liken it to a ‘medically induced coma’ while others say a global recession is imminent. Regardless of who you rely on for your economic outlook, history has proven that our economy has always expanded and retracted. As of December 2019, the U.S. economy has expanded for a record 126 straight months, the longest time period in the country’s history, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Put another way, the U.S. has avoided a recession for an entire calendar decade for the first time ever.

There’s no way to completely recession-proof your nonprofit organization but there are things you can do now to prepare for what’s to come. Whether the COVID-19 crisis drives the economy into the next recession or not, economists agree there will be another one, and it will be soon. Preparing for a recession takes work, but having those difficult conversations during a shrinking economy is much harder. Here are six things you can do today to be recession ready.

  1. Get back to the basics

    Return to your mission statement and prepare to focus your efforts on delivering on your core purpose. After all, it is what makes your nonprofit organization unique. In good times, many nonprofit organizations try new things, start new programs and services, and experiment with activities that may be nice to have, but not essential. When the economy contracts, focus on what is tried and true. Your stakeholders will be looking for value directly related to what they need.

    2. Stress test your budget

    Review your budget projections and start running scenarios in case you can’t host that one big event or you lose a major sponsorship or donor. Maybe your membership numbers will drop significantly because a particular industry has been hit hard by the recession. Many nonprofit organizations do not have diversified revenue streams, so one major hit to a program could be devastating. It is better to be prepared in that situation and see where you can cut expenses or increase revenue from other programs.

    3. Review and pivot your strategic plan 

    Nonprofit organizations rely heavily on their strategic plans, as they should. A lot of time and effort have gone into creating plans to help drive the organization forward. When economic downturns strike, leadership must act quickly but thoughtfully. In the face of uncertainty, it is not only okay, but prudent to pause on the activities outlined in the strategic plan. Your efforts can resume when the nonprofit organization is in a viable place, but not at all if you do nothing and lose too much ground by maintaining the status quo.

    4. Eliminate under-utilized programs and services

    Rather than making across-the-board cuts, prioritize core activities and focus on high ROI programs and services, but reduce expenses where possible. Take a look at all activities through a value and revenue lens to determine which should stay and which should go. You can reallocate some money saved to improve those high value core services and make them more profitable. I know it is hard to hear and even harder to do, but it’s okay to suspend and eliminate legacy programs that have outlived their usefulness and value.

    5. Fight the urge to cut marketing

    Typically, one of the first things considered as an easy elimination is marketing, but cutting marketing shouldn’t be the default reaction. Instead, during a time of economic downturn, you actually need more effective marketing to help you target with greater efficiency so that you are squeezing the most out of your marketing budget. It is a time to start marketing smarter and not harder. Smarter marketing efforts can help you drive more value and communicate the message more effectively at a time when it is critical to reach your audience. In times of uncertainty, your audience will be looking to you to provide value and guidance.

    6. Re-imagine your events

    Nonprofit organizations often rely heavily on events, whether for fundraising or trade association conferences and tradeshows. If we have learned anything from COVID-19, it is that things can change in an instant. Nonprofit organizations must begin to digitize their efforts. Maybe your nonprofit organization will return to in-person events as soon as stay-at-home orders are lifted, but you could be leaving money on the table by not incorporating some sort of digital component. Consider looking at how you can offer virtual experiences or hybrid experiences to draw in people that may not be willing to travel or want to stay involved and support your nonprofit organization, but can’t commit to an event.

    We’ve heard a recession is coming. We just don’t know when. The economy is on ice for the time being. Whether we’re just entering the recession or it is on the horizon, I encourage you to take these steps so you can weather the storm. Creating a contingency plan now is a lot easier than making decisions without data and under immense pressure. Once you have evaluated the possibilities, and you find yourself looking for help to recession-ready your nonprofit organization — sign up for a free initial marketing assessment (IMA) to get a no-commitment recommendation on what you can do to position your nonprofit organization for success.

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About Amanda Cook

Marketing Director Amanda Cook helps clients develop sophisticated marketing strategies that drive brand leadership, increase sales and elevate the customer experience. With over 15 years of experience, Amanda has delivered successful campaigns with bootstrapped budgets to leading marketing organizations at $1B companies. Whether local or global, she enjoys the challenge of uncovering a client’s business objectives and helping them build a strategy to succeed.

About &Marketing

&Marketing provides the robust outsourced marketing department growing companies need without the high overhead costs of big agencies or full-time employees. Our variable model empowers businesses to reach their growth goals through access to the guidance and expertise of senior level strategists and a flexible execution team.

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses: Part 2 (Digital Marketing)

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses: Part 2 (Digital Marketing)

by | Apr 13, 2020 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses: Part 2 (Digital Marketing)

Written By Amanda Cook

On

In Part 1 of this series, we explored content marketing, where we outlined ways to create and distribute content to your audience in an efficient and inexpensive way. Now, in Part 2, we’ll focus on three digital marketing tactics you can accomplish with a small budget that will yield big returns: SEO, paid search, and paid social media advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enables pages on your website to rank higher for certain keywords or online queries related to your product or service. In other words, when a prospective customer types one of your targeted keywords, phrases, or queries into Google, your website will appear within the first few pages of results. This ensures your target audience is always able to find you through an organic search. The higher you rank, the more traffic you’re likely to generate to your website.

In Part 1, we discussed the importance of keyword research in developing your content strategy. The same goes for SEO optimization. Brainstorm keywords that your audience is likely to use when searching online for a product or service like yours. Then use a tool like SEM Rush, Keywords Everywhere, or UberSuggest (they all have free versions) to validate those keywords and find related searches. These tools will allow you to determine the monthly search volume for those keywords and how difficult it will be to rank for them.

Next, implement these three approaches to optimize your site for SEO:

  • On-page SEO: This is the information on a webpage that readers can see, including headers, sentences, images and graphics that create the look and feel of a site. Make sure this content includes the keywords you identified wherever relevant. Keep in mind, it is important to balance on-page SEO with the user experience, so be careful to not compromise the readability of the content by overloading it with keywords (this is called keyword stuffing).

  • Off-page SEO: This involves efforts taken to improve SEO outside of your website. Any time another company/website with high authority links back to your page (known as backlinking), this will increase your own domain’s authority. It demonstrates popularity and legitimacy to search engines, which in turn identifies your website as a subject matter expert on that particular topic. Essentially, these sites are “vouching” for you.

While on-page SEO is completely in your control, off-page SEO is not. You need to find ways to convince other brands to promote your content. There are a few ways to go about this:

  • Create quality content that people will want to cite in their own blog articles 

  • Be active on social media and share your content (some research shows that having a strong social presence, as well as high engagement on your posts can boost your rankings) 

  • Pitch an idea for a guest blog with a reputable online publication 

  • Engage influencers (it’s possible to do this without draining your budget!)

Keep in mind that search engines are very sophisticated and use complex algorithms to determine legitimate backlinks versus poor quality backlinks. Legitimate backlinks will improve your rankings, but poor quality backlinks (i.e. from websites with little authority) may harm your rankings.

  • Technical SEO: Updating and enhancing the behind-the-scenes data on your website can lead to significant improvements in organic search rankings. You can do this by: 

    • Eliminating duplicate content 

    • Using strong keywords

    • Updating meta tags with keywords to better reflect on-page content

    • Increasing the speed of your site

    • Using structured data with consistent formatting

    • Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly

    • Repairing or removing broken links

Ultimately, SEO optimization is neither a one-and-done activity nor a quick fix. In addition to the time it takes to manually update for SEO best practices, it also requires ongoing monitoring. Also keep in mind that improvements take time to register with search engines. We typically instruct clients that it takes 8-12 weeks for SEO changes to come to fruition. 

Paid Search Advertising

Sometimes, no matter what you do, your company will never rank first on Google. This is largely due to high competition for popular keywords, or major players like YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn occupying the top spots. However, putting some money behind your efforts can allow your company to rise to the top of search results. This is called paid search or search advertising.

With search advertising on Google, you develop ads with keywords that link back to a landing page/website, select a customized audience, and set a budget. You only pay for the clicks you actually receive on your ads. This channel gives you the ability to direct people exactly where you want them to land on your website (typically a landing page created specifically for paid search) that encourages them to take action and potentially convert into a customer. Since you set your budget, you can spend as little or as much as you decide. As you monitor your ads and activity through your personal dashboard, you can make adjustments in real-time to maximize results (we talk more on that here: Three Ways to Monitor & Maintain Your Paid Search Account for Maximum Results).

Paid Social Media Advertising

While you can make strides through your organic social media feed, the proof is in the pudding when it comes to the pay-to-play game. It’s important to maintain your presence and post consistently (we talked about this in Part 1), but paid social advertising – especially if you have a limited following – can help increase the visibility of your content more quickly (and in a more targeted way). 

With paid social, you can target your ideal audience demographic using hundreds of data points collected from billions of users, build a customer journey through highly targeted content and offers, and direct people to your product and service to close the deal. This will also drive more qualified leads to your social channels and eventually build your following, which will help your organic feed have a greater impact.

Social media advertising works similarly to paid search advertising in that you set a budget and determine how much you are willing to spend. With anything, you get what you pay for, so take time to plan a strategy that combines organic posts and paid ads. Be sure to research which platform your audience uses the most. 

If you’d like an even more comprehensive look at how to develop your social media strategy, check out our social media playbook for growing businesses.

Final Thoughts

While most digital marketing tactics can be accomplished on a relatively small budget, many of them rely on a consistent, value-added content strategy to be most effective. &Marketing encourages all clients to develop original content to become a thought leader in their industries, drive brand awareness, and promote sales growth. The largest ROI comes from a well-defined strategy that combines paid digital marketing with strong content marketing.

If you are a small or growing business looking to start a marketing program or take your existing program to the next level, we have a suite of services tailored specifically for you! We know that one size does not fit all, so as your outsourced marketing partner, we provide a menu of scalable marketing services to help meet your unique needs and budget.

About the Author

Marketing Director Amanda Cook helps clients develop sophisticated marketing campaigns that drive brand leadership, increase sales and elevate the customer experience. With over 15 years of experience, Amanda has delivered successful campaigns with bootstrapped budgets to leading marketing organizations at $1B companies. Whether local or global, she enjoys the challenge of uncovering a client’s business objectives and helping them build a strategy to succeed.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses: Part 1 (Content Marketing)

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses: Part 1 (Content Marketing)

by | Apr 8, 2020 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses: Part 1 (Content Marketing)

Written By Amanda Cook

On

In our experience, many small or growing businesses have neither the time nor the resources to execute highly sophisticated marketing programs in-house. Some don’t even have a marketing team, let alone a marketing budget! We’ve also encountered large companies with limited resources and an inconsistent strategy. We often tell our clients that your marketing budget itself is not necessarily the problem, but rather how you use (or misuse) that budget.

It is possible to do a lot with a little and make a big impact, without breaking the bank. In this two-part blog series, we’ll show you how. In Part 1, we’ll focus on content marketing, and in Part 2, we’ll share inexpensive digital tactics you can implement to drive results..

Part 1: Content Marketing

When you break down content marketing into its various parts – keyword research, content calendars, the content funnel, etc – it can sound intimidating, expensive, and something that only a marketing mastermind understands. Honestly, it doesn’t have to be. Here are some effective content tactics that are free or relatively cheap to execute and will help drive your marketing into high gear.

Blogs

Creating a blog is an excellent way to lay the groundwork for your content marketing efforts. Blog posts offer regular opportunities for you to position your company as a thought leader, as well as “warm up” your leads by creating content that moves them along the buyer journey. Not only that, but your blog has potential to continue enhancing your brand’s presence long after you hit submit on a post. By infusing your copy with the right keywords, it will boost your SEO, which means prospective customers will be more likely to find your website when searching for information online that relates to your product or service.

When writing a blog, it’s important to create valuable content that resonates with your audience, but this doesn’t require you to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author! You and your team know your business and your customers better than anyone else, so set up a quick brainstorm to determine which topics may engage your audience. Additionally, you can supplement this with keyword research to determine what your audience searches for online related to your product or service (you can use a keyword platform like SEM Rush, Keywords Everywhere, or UberSuggest, all of which have free versions). From here, you can determine content ideas around these keywords and start to build a calendar.

 Here are some examples of content you can develop:

  • Write about each of your products and services

  • Present common issues your customers face and how you solve them

  • Answer frequently asked questions you receive during the sales process or customer interactions

  • Highlight or announce new features

  • Explain your start-up story or company’s mission

  • Write about trends in your industry

Every time you think to yourself, “I wish my customers knew….”, add it to the list of something to write about!

Email Newsletter

Digital technology is moving at the speed of light, as new platforms and apps are introduced almost daily. But no one can argue that the invention of email changed the face of everything. While it may feel like an old tactic, it is still one of the best channels for getting in front of your audience. Email works, and if you do it well, it can be one of your biggest drivers of ROI.

The average recipient of an email spends 1.1 seconds scanning an email before deciding if they want to read it. This means that the design of your email should be engaging and attention-grabbing, which isn’t very feasible through Gmail or Outlook. Although these two platforms are free, their capabilities are limited, so we recommend looking at other options. Mailchimp is a great alternative; it’s free for up to two thousand contacts and has a library of customizable email templates, which will allow you to bring more energy and life to your communications and show off your brand’s personality. It’s also an all-in-one marketing platform (website, automations, digital ads, social media, etc), should you be interested in pursuing these tactics.

Another advantage of using an email platform is the ability to track and capture activity, which enables you to better understand how your emails are performing and make adjustments to your approach as needed.

Now the question becomes: Who do you email and what do you send? For starters, you definitely want to send emails to existing customers, because your relationship with them does not end the minute you close the sale. Evidence shows it is far less expensive to retain customers than it is to get new ones, so you need to continue to engage them! You should also send emails to prospective customers, partners, and company contacts, all of which you likely have saved in your database. Your email newsletter should curate all of your activity from the last month (blogs, eBooks, company updates, events, etc) as well as offer promotions, announce events/webinars, run a contest, etc. The goal is to provide value to your audience and keep them aware of your brand, which will help you maintain current customers and eventually generate new ones.

Social Media

Maintaining an active presence on social media may seem like a full time job (and for some, it is!). But even with a low budget, you can still execute the basics of social media and start building your presence.

As with any tactic in marketing, social media starts with knowing your audience. Which social media platforms do they use? There are three simple ways to figure this out:

  • Distribute a survey to your customers and/or prospects to determine where and how they engage on social media.

  • Conduct secondary research online to see what information is available related to your target audience/demographics and social media use.

  • Check out your competitors’ social media pages. Which platforms do they use the most? Where do they see the most engagement?

You’ll find that Facebook and LinkedIn lend themselves better to sharing links (i.e. links to your blog posts), Twitter is often used for customer service, and Instagram is best for engaging visuals or short soundbites of content. But every audience is unique, so you won’t know for sure until you run some tests. As you learn more about your audience by seeing how they react to your content, you’ll be able to thoughtfully refine your strategy and ultimately turn them into customers for your business.

The most important thing to remember about social media is consistency and authenticity. Whether it’s every day or a couple times a week, find a cadence that you can maintain with valuable content. Posting content at random that isn’t relevant to your audience is a major turn-off!

If you’d like an even more comprehensive look at how to develop your social media strategy, check out our social media playbook for growing businesses. 

That’s a wrap for Part 1 of our “How to Market Your Business on a Shoestring Budget” blog series. Eventually, you will want to dive deeper into data and analytics to optimize your content marketing strategy – which takes additional time and resources. However, what we’ve outlined here is a great starting point. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll share some inexpensive digital marketing tactics to help you drive results.

In the meantime, if you are a small or growing business looking to start a marketing program or take your existing program to the next level, we have a suite of services tailored specifically for you! We know that one size does not fit all, so as your outsourced marketing partner, we provide a menu of scalable marketing services to help meet your unique needs and budget.

About the Author

Marketing Director Amanda Cook helps clients develop sophisticated marketing campaigns that drive brand leadership, increase sales and elevate the customer experience. With over 15 years of experience, Amanda has delivered successful campaigns with bootstrapped budgets to leading marketing organizations at $1B companies. Whether local or global, she enjoys the challenge of uncovering a client’s business objectives and helping them build a strategy to succeed.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.