Creating content is time consuming, we won’t lie about that. However, it makes a huge impact on your organization from getting new donors to donor retention to brand awareness.

If your staff is smaller or you don’t have a dedicated marketing team then this is something that often gets put on the back burner. Since you aren’t a marketing yourself, you may not feel comfortable leveraging volunteers to help you.

There are a few key ways you can leverage volunteers to help you with things from writing blog posts, taking photos, creating social media posts, etc. To be effective, here are a few tips.

Do your research and set your strategy

It helps to know what your goals are for your content. Putting a little bit of time on the front end will allow you to be more specific with your volunteers. That means you’ll get better quality work and minimize the back and forth.

If you don’t have anyone to help you create the strategy, find a consultant that can come in, short term, to help you build it out. Creating content for the sake of content doesn’t help and just wastes time. It is well worth the investment of time and/or money to ensure you’re efforts support your goals.

Set realistic timelines

It’s always good to plan ahead with your content strategy. Having a content calendar that lines up your topics with your big rocks like events, registration periods, donor campaigns, etc will be helpful. That will all come with your strategy. 

The quickest way to burn out your volunteers is to ask for things right away. You know they’re busy and have their own work and obligations. By giving them ample time to create the content will ensure you get higher quality work. It also increases the liklihood they’ll keep supporting you in this role.

A realistic timeline can vary. Start by asking them what their situation is. It will probably mean having a variety of timelines based off of the individual volunteers. Because you’re working off of their schedule, the sooner you can identify what that is the easier you can manage the project.

Set clear expectations

The worst thing you can do is reach out to vlunteers and say, “hey, can you help us create content.” That is vague and doesn’t really convey what the acutal requirement would be in both time and skill. In fact, one piece of final content might go through multip volunteers before its even published. You might have writers, video editors, photographers, etc.

 When you reach out to volunteers be clear with what you need. For example:

• Would you be available to take photos at our event? Here is the shot list of what we’re looking for.
• Could you write 1-2 blog posts for us a month? They would need to be about 750 words and we’ll provide the topics for you.
• We have a lot of video footage. Would you be able to create 2-3 30-60 second vidoes for us?

Knowing what you need and where you’ll use it will help you make a specific ask.

Get organized

Once this all gets started you’ll want to keep things organized. You’ll likely have different parts of the project coming in at different times. You’ll also want to make it easy for people to submit their stuff. Google Workspace is free for nonprofits and a great way to set this up.

This will make it easy for your volunteers to submit their materials and help you easily access when they’re ready to publish.

Identify the volunteers

Sometimes there are people you might not even consider that are great a content creation. You’ll want to ensure they have a skill set you can use so that the quality matches the work you’re doing.

Start by making a short list of the people that immediately come to mind. Reach out and have 1:1 conversations about the project you need their support on. Make sure to ask them who else they might know that would be a good fit. 

After that inital outreach, send out emails to your community to see who engages. You might be surprised! Your audience is looking for more ways to support you, they just may have not been asked in a way that aligns with their skill set and passions. Because you have all the planning and strategies in place you will be able to make a thoughtful ask with clear expectations. 

Pro Tip: This is a great opportunity to enlist Gen Z and Millenials as well!!!

Tips for consistency and project management

Undoubtedly, the hardest part of the whole thing is making sure deadlines are met and your content goes out on schedule. Here are a few tips that I recommend.

• Create a spreadsheet with all the information in a Google Sheet or something cloud based that everyone can access. This should have all deadlines and relevant information that is updated in real time.
• Communicate regularly. Create a weekly newsletter for your volunteers in the content space specifically. Send updates, share launches, and reminders. This weekly reminder will keep their individual tasks top of mind.
• Push out deadlines! If you need something on the 15th of the month, make the deadline the 1st. Give yourself a buffer so you aren’t stressed and you can accomodate life.

Conclusion

Volunteers are a great asset for things like content creation. By setting it up appropriately you can make it less stress for you and more successful for the organization. 

Messaging is a critical element in the success of your marketing. When you connect the right message with the right donor you see conversions. While this is easier when you’re having one-on-one conversations, it can be trickier to do this at scale. Here are a few tips to keep handy when you are creating content that connects on an emotional level with readers.

Put Yourself in Your Audience’s Shoes

It all starts with knowing who your ideal donor is. What are their motivations? Why do they give? What are their concerns? Creating your donor avatar will help you write your content in a more personal way. When you write, pretend you’re writing directly to them.

You may have multiple donor avatars, and that’s ok. For example, your monthly donor avatar might be different from your corporate sponsor from your major donors. When it comes to creating content you will want to have a variety that speaks to different audiences.

This also comes into play when you’re crafting social media posts, email newsletters, or any other type of mass communication. Being specific in who you talk to and hitting them where they are hanging out will make your content more successful.

Craft Compelling Stories

Stories are a big part of effective marketing. They help you connect to your audience and are a much better way to communicate the incredible work you’re doing vs spouting stats and data. People also remember stories much more.

Start collecting stories from those you serve. Share the reasons board members joined your organization. Interview sponsors on how they engage with their entire team to rally for your organization. 

These stories can be in a variety of ways. You can write them down and use them as a blog. Record a video interview via Zoom. Cut up highlights to use as Reels or TikToks. Seriously consider how video will be used as it connects with viewers even faster.

Get Personal with Language

You definitely want to sound professional. Building trust with your audience is critical after all. However, when you use language that’s in first-person it feels more like you’re having a conversation with them rather then speaking at them. 

Use ‘we’ or ‘us’ instead of ‘the organization’ or ‘the nonprofit.’ Bring them in and make them feel like they are a part of your team. Which one feels more welcoming?

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Reinforce Shared Values

Donors that are in alignment with your values will stick around longer and be more engaged with your organization. It is important that you consistently share your values in your content. Remind people whey they are connected to your organization.

Craft social media posts that highlight the different values of your organization. Build in your values to your website language. Write blog posts featuring the core elements of your organization for easy reference. 

Don’t forget, sharing your values with stores helps!

Be vulnerable

Building trust is crucial, and you can do that more easily by being honest and transparent. No doubt during the growth of your oganization you’ve had ups and downs. Thoughtfully sharing where you’re at with your community can rally their support around you. It also shows authenticity and that you are open with your communication.

While you don’t want to be out there talking about all the struggles you’re having, instead, share stories about obstacles you faced and how you’ve been working through them. Or, share the solution you’re working towards and ask how people can help you fill that gap. It helps your community feel as though they are a part of the solution and your organization.

Conclusion

Being emotional, open and honest with your community helps drive deeper connection. Those connections keep donors coming back to support you again and again. Think about these tips and how you can connect in a deeper way. 

Content is essential to support your marketing. When you create content consistently it helps you generate leads, reinforce yourself as a knowledge expert, support your fundraising efforts and more.  Understanding all the benefits of content can make it easier to prioritize it as a marketing activity.

What is content anyways?

There are really two forms of content that you’ll create, short form and long form.

Long form content includes things like YouTube videos, podcast episodes, blog posts. Short form content includes social media posts, video clips, email newsletters, infographics.

Having a content strategy doesn’t mean you have to make use of all the different types of content. Instead, think about what you can create consistently. You might feel more comfortable writing or recoding audio. Maybe you feel your best on video! Then utilize the short form content to promote on all the channels you are active on.

If you’re on the fence about how a content strategy could help your business than this blog post is for you!

Reinforcing Your Brand

Your content can showcase your organizations values, goals and reinforce messaging. It allows you to connect with your audience in a way that can distinguish you from your competitor and share your unique voice.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

• updates on your impact.
• staff announcements or behind the scenes content.

Increase your Visibility

The more content you create the better idea search engines have about your organization and who you serve. This helps them figure out what results are best suited for the searches people make. The more information on your website the easier it is and the better it is. 

It all starts with creating an search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that is alignment with your content strategy. It doesn’t have complex, just get started.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

• content ideas you get from keyword research.
• basic information on what your organization does.

Building Credibility

Sharing content regularly shows people that you are an authority in your space. It allows people to get to know you and why you are the person they should trust to do this work. By sharing different elements of what you do you’ll allow people to dive deeper into your organization and truly understand your area of expertise.

Building credibility helps you build trust with those that might need to utilize your services and/or people that are thinking about donating to your organization.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

• articles written by the experts on your staff.
• content from your community on what it’s like to work with you.

Generating Leads

A lead can be a lot of different things. It could be someone reaching out to have a conversation about being a donor, a new vendor to help you lower your prices, someone utilizing your services, email newsletter signups, etc. Think about the leads you need to generate and create content around that.

How you capture those leads comes from the calls-to-action you include on that post as well as the content topics.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

• donor spotlights.
• impact stories.

Nurturing Leads

Building relationships is the cornerstone of fundraising. While the bulk of it happens offline in personal conversations, your content can be a big support in this.

People will often go to your website to dive deeper and get more information. They will also go there to get additional questions answered that they maybe forgot to ask when they were with you. Having information there for your leads to consume can help you close more deals.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

• responses to your most commonly asked questions.
• responses to your most common objections.

Supporting Donor Retention

Once someone has given to you the next step is to get that second (and third and fourth) gift. Your content can reinforce the reasons why they gave in the first place. Because you’ll use that content to share on all your social channels and your email marketing, this content will show up for your donors regularly and keep you top of mind.

Here are some examples of content you could create:

• stories from your community and testimonials.
• impact that your donors have inspired.

Encouraging Social Sharing

You go through a lot of effort to create your content. So let’s make it sharable and easy for people to do so. That will increase your visibility and exposure. All of the topics listed above are great for social sharing. There are lots of ways you can encourage this. 

• make it easy with social share buttons on your posts.
• use calls-to-action to encourage sharing – you get what you ask for!
• create infographics that provide value.

Provide More Information About Your Audience

The more content you create, the more information you’ll gather. You’ll be able to see what topics your audience likes the most, what gets them to convert, and who they are. Make sure you have Google Analytics and other data trackers on your website so you can glean the info you need to make future decision.

Conclusion

Content can help support all areas of your organization with a little thought and care! By thinking about what you need your content to do first and then creating it can really make all the difference.