Yes, a Blog Is a Great Idea for Any Nonprofit. Here’s Why.
The humble blog has come a long way! Beyond just places to profile donors, staff, and community members, a nonprofit blog can be a valuable addition to your communications strategy.
While maintaining a blog will take an investment of time and resources, it’s one that’s ultimately well worth it in the long run.
Here’s why.
Social Media Content
Don’t stop at simply cross-posting your new blog post to your social media profiles. Take sentences or compelling phrases from the post, and create a graphic to share with a link back to the post. Use it as a driver from your social media profiles back to your website and email list. You can continue to share a single blog post – both excerpted this way and in full – over time, as long as the content remains relevant.
Email Marketing
Incorporate relevant blogs into email newsletters, donor appeals, and welcome sequences for new subscribers. When visitors land on your blog post, invite them to sign up to receive email notifications when you’ve posted a new one. Include a pop-up window on the page that collects their name and email address.
Engage Donors & Elected Officials
Maintaining a blog for our organization gives us a platform from which to educate, inform, and stir our supporters to action.
We can use our well-written and compelling blog pieces as content to share with our donors in between fundraising asks and with our elected officials. And if we use the strategy of pulling out important quotes and building additional content around each post, we can use our blogs as more than one touchpoint for both crowds!
Share Your Expertise
If you’ve been working in your issue area and within your community for a long time, you’ve undoubtedly built some level of expertise. A blog is a place for you to illustrate the needs of your community and even respond to current events and trending topics.
And when you post online, your words have the ability to spread far beyond your immediate area – to position you as a thought leader and amplify the collective voice of the people you serve.
Attract New Supporters
The concept of inbound marketing highlights efforts to bring people to you, instead of actively reaching out to them. When you write your blog with an eye to search engine optimization (SEO) and keep keywords, formatting, and accessibility in mind, blogs help drive traffic to your website and increase the visibility of your organization.
Promote Other Content
A blog can be a permanent home for other pieces of content like podcast episodes, reports, and infographics, keeping them available and easily accessible for the long haul. And if you follow SEO best practices for these posts, too, you can increase the reach of this additional content, as well.
Impress Funders
Your blog is a chance to show funders that your work reaches a wide audience and can potentially impact an even broader community. While every organization must prioritize the work they do in service of their community over the impression they make on funders, an intentional and well-thought-out communications strategy that includes a blog certainly can’t hurt matters!
A Nonprofit Blog Is More Than Just A Blog
Your nonprofit blog can serve so many purposes beyond a simple post on your website. Producing blog content and repurposing it as part of your email, social media, and fundraising strategies can help streamline and strengthen your messaging over time.
Focusing on a blog can help ground your communications strategy, ultimately giving you back the time and energy you’d otherwise spend cobbling it all together!
