For most non-profit organisations, budget is always a bone of contention. Their shoestring marketing budgets don’t really help in getting the word out there. Fortunately, in the digital age, there are plenty of things that NGO management or even volunteers can learn to do on their own that would help the organization gain exposure through the internet.
SEO and Social Media Marketing can seem like a herculean task but with a little research and planning you can find effective ways to do at least a little of it. We have some easy tips to give you the initial boost.
- Plan your goals – This is the first step to your online presence. Who do you want to target? What is your demography? Do you want to increase your reach? Do you need more people stepping forward and volunteering or are you looking for donations? Whatever your goals are, they must be specific as your communication should only be delivering one message at any given point. Give yourself a specific timeline, a fixed number of people you plan on reaching, and how much ground you plan on covering, and keep it realistic.
- Keywords and SEO – With Google tools, you can look up the popular keywords that relate to your cause and activities, and use these target keywords on your website, blog posts, and other online platforms depending on the number of searches for these keywords. Check for keywords that summarize your non-profit organization’s goals. Make the keywords relevant to the user who might be looking for that specific cause for example – a charity in a certain locality, a charity for a certain cause, etc.
- Quality content – Content is such an integral part of any online presence. Plan your content systematically. It should cover questions as to what your non-profit organisation stands for. Keep it simple, short, and interesting. Create an awareness of how your organisation contributes to the community and the work you do. Keep your readers engaged by providing material the readers will find relatable. Ensure that your keywords are in order so that your website or blog makes it to the top ten results in Google searches. Keep your audience in mind while planning and writing your content. Talk about past events, events that you plan on doing, accomplishments, recaps, and how people benefitted from the work you do. Publish regularly so that Google recognizes you. Consider doing videos for YouTube. Being the second largest search engine in the world YouTube will help raise your ranking. Add a good number of visuals to make the blogs more appealing.
- Make your site user-friendly – Keep your site simple and easy to navigate through to prevent people visiting your site from getting frustrated. Google ranks sites that users don’t bounce off. Keep your site light to enable quick load time and page speed. Considering that a lot of people now choose to browse from their phones, your site is mobile-friendly and enables people to quickly make a call, email, make a donation, and more.
- Make use of local SEO – Local SEO helps those around you to find you easily, and for an NGO that does local SEO and social media correctly, this can prove to have innumerable benefits. Add local keywords to your content – such as pairing your NGO name with your locality, making use of Google My Business, and being a part of local online communities.
- Keep yourself updated – Trends keep changing frequently and SEO and Social Media are an ever ever-evolving processes so keep yourself well informed. To help you to stay up to date follow some of the industry blogs and well-known NGOs so you’re always in the loop about what’s happening and can take advantage of relevant trends.
- Strategise your social media posts and blogs – Running an NGO takes a lot of time and naturally, the work you do comes before posting on social media and updating your website. At the same time, it’s important that your online presence isn’t dead. To combat this, plan your posts, emailers, and content ahead of time. When it comes to social media, there various social media tools, you can not only plan ahead but you can schedule your posts to be up on a particular day at a specific time.
We hope you found this post informative! You may also like reading about how hospitality brands can up their marketing sensitively in the Covid Era. If you do plan on outsourcing your SEO, take a look at our post on red flags to look out for when choosing your SEO Agency. If you’ve got any questions, reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
