1. Awareness

One of the biggest challenges non-profit organisations face today is gaining online visibility and the process of digitizing. Only with large brand awareness, you can activate people to increase your impact as a non-profit, regardless of whether your non-profit is focused on B2B such as Goods to Give or on B2C. However, non-profits are struggling immensely with gaining enough online brand awareness. The enormous number of emerging charities is at the very cause of this, leading to ‘charity fatigue’.  

One of the approaches to gain online brand awareness – online advertising – suffers from this trend, as people are becoming numb to charity communications, and especially for online advertisements of non-profits. To tackle those saturated space for online advertisement and to make your non-profit standout, you should hyper tailor your approach to reach out to people online. Doing extensively keyword research and deep diving into what people are looking for is one of the viable solutions for that. Next, you can tailor your communication to the needs of your target audience to break through the online ads clutter.  

Another communication initiative that can be hyper tailored, are online newsletters. These newsletters can be personalised with several aspects: names, living area, area of interest, … . Personalised emails are highly effective in breaking through the clutter, as it increases opening rates by 26%.

To increase your own brand awareness, you could also benefit from the brand awareness of a more established organisation by creating a partnership with them. With partnerships, you can increase awareness for your organization, programs, and cause. Partnering up with another non-profit or a company is mutually beneficial. For example, for companies, 91% of consumers are more likely to switch to a brand that is associated with a charity organisation. Partnering up with another non-profit is also beneficial, as it gives you the opportunity to learn skills from each other and benefit from the funding, resources, and helping hands of the other non-profit; on top of benefiting from their brand awareness. Both for profit and non-profit partnerships, the consumers, employees, volunteers, … of your partner organisation can promote your own non-profit, which will boost your awareness.

2. Acquisition

To go further than just creating awareness, a next phase in the funnel of impact for non-profits is acquisition. In which you should try to trigger people to look at your website, social media, … . How can you stand out in the crowd of different organisations trying to achieve that? Well, as a non-profit you should try to aim for providing relevant information so that people are interested in learning more about your organisation. Profit minded companies use those relevant hooks all of the time to trigger attention, and non-profits can use that communication technique as well.  

By communicating about hot topics that are very vibrant in today’s society, you increase the chance of people buying attention to your message and not just ignoring it. Make a statement about current humanitarian hot topics such as the war in Ukraine and the elevating energy prices which pushes people to poverty. By communicating about topics that are so top of mind, you have your hook to catch people’s attention. And you can easily set up an action to convince them to visit your website or socials once you have captured their attention.

3. Activation

Whereas for profit organisation the next phase of activation is every time focused on purchases or closed deals, for non-profits the goal of this phase is different. Non-profits are focused on gaining donations in this stage, in any way possible. Whether it being cash donations, or buying something in return for their donation, or buying a product of which x% is used as a donation, … . Many non-profits try to activate their donors by letting them subscribe to an ongoing monthly fee.  

Instead, donation actions that only run for a limited time trigger more people to donate than a monthly fee. Whether you are a B2B or B2C focused non-profit, organising one temporary action to collect money will result in more donations. For example, the sticker action of the Red Cross or the cycling event of Kom op tegen Kanker. An additional benefit of those limited actions is the fact that it increases your awareness, as it is a one-time only event or action.

4. Retention

After activating people to donate to your non-profit, the next step is trying to retain them for repeating donations as well. The key in the retention phase for non-profits is two-fold: transparency and engagement. First, be transparent about your achievements. Create reports with key figures to make your contribution to society tangible. People are hesitant to trust charities, because they often think they do not know where their money will go to. Counter this distrust by transparently communicating the numbers to them, such as the number of trees planted, the number of kids that were able to attend school, or in case of Goods to Give the number of families who received quality products from the partnering brands.  

Next, you should also try to engage your donors. An ideal approach for that is by combining rational and emotional aspects. Rational elements can be supported by the report you have created that highlights your contributions factually. Emotionally, you can let the people you have helped with your non-profit take the floor. Let us say your non-profit allows children in third part of the world countries go to school. Then you could let those kids write a letter about how their life has changed because of the donations. By being transparent about the contributions of your non-profit and by engaging your donors with rational and emotional techniques, you will increase the chance that your donors will donate again.

5. Impact

The final phase is the one where you measure your impact. For profit organisations, this phase is called revenue as most of the time they measure their impact by the amount of revenue they have created. For non-profits, this phase is focused on impact instead of revenue, as they are not focused on the amount of turnover they have realised. Non-profits should choose one North Star Metric for this phase, which is the one measurement that is most predictive of a non-profit's long-term impact. For example, this can be the number of donations collected, the number of products received in case of Goods to Give, the number of families helped, the number of trees planted, the amount of plastic retrieved from the sea, .. . This metric should be aligned with the impact the non-profit wants to have on the society, so they can determine whether they have realised their envisioned impact and even increased their expectations or not.

Creating impact is the ultimate goal

We have created our own Impact Funnel AAARI with the stages Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention and Impact which can be used as a charity marketing framework for non-profits to increase their impact on society. By reflecting on an existing marketing framework AAARRR and using our gathered insights of our innovation track with the non-profit Goods to Give, we noticed that there was a need for an adapted (sales) funnel for charity marketing. Let this innovative framework be your guide to creating an impact as a non-profit organisation. In case you need a little help to visualize the concrete actions that your organisation should take in each phase of this funnel, we are always happy to help!