5 Tools for Overwhelmed Nonprofit Marketers

I've attended a couple of Kivi Leroux Miller's webinars during the course of my degree program and have found them to be really helpful. I try to read her blog when I can and have signed up for her newsletters. I received one today that was interesting. I am nowhere being a good marketer, but I'd like to think that these tools will give me a nice head start (and she was even kind enough to provide examples).

1. The Marketing Bank

The single place where you keep all of your marketing stuff -- like the stuff that you are frequently asked to give to others--like your logos, or your boilerplate text, or the latest stats on this or that. Lots of different kinds of files belong in your marketing bank.

 

2. The Editorial Calendar

Help you see the content you need to create over the next several days, week, and months, depending on how you use them. You can create them by channel (e.g., a calendar for your newsletter and another for Facebook), by audience (e.g., how we'll communicate with parents this month, versus communicating with teachers), or by program (e.g., so you see how different programs are included throughout your communications channels). She created a few samples here.

3. Editorial and Design Style Guides

An editorial style sheet is a chart you fill out showing how you will use, format, and spell certain words. It can also include rules about abbreviations, capitalization, acronyms, and anything else related to how words, numbers, and punctuation appear in your publications. A graphic design style guide puts in writing all the various decisions you've made about how things should look both in print and online.

What goes in a editorial style guide.

What goes in your graphic design style guide.

 

4. A Personal System for Keeping Track of Everything

  This very helpful blog post provides ways to keep track of your busy schedule.

 

5. Affordable, Convenient Skill Building

Learn from others. Kivi says, "We are very lucky in the nonprofit marketing and fundraising world to have a very robust, open community of nonprofits, consultants and vendors who share lots of great stories, case studies, and best practices with each other. You need to make time to learn from them, and to use that to build your own skills." Makes sense. 

I plan to buy her book, The Nonprofit Marketing Guide, because I know that, starting out, I'll be doing a lot of this marketing stuff myself. I think this will be a good guide. No pun intended.