However slowly, the paradigm for Nonprofits is shifting.
Many visionaries in the sector have been working for years to shine a light into the unfair double standards applied to Nonprofits. They have shown how the whole system – and general views of the public for what a Nonprofit should and shouldn’t do – puts unnecessary hamstrings on these organizations.
This renders Nonprofits in clear disadvantage when wrestling the general public’s attention and support from the massive advertisement strategies the for-profit sector has on a regular basis.
With the advent of the internet, social media and the interconnectedness of most aspects of people’s lives, the way people interact, view and involve themselves with charity and Nonprofits is evolving. This in turn, influences the way we make effective decisions. This changes what strategies we take to run our Nonprofits efficiently, how we best designate the precious limited resources we have. And we do all this while trying to deliver the largest possible impact in our chosen causes, and how we communicate our achievements to the public.
And make no mistake, outreach and integration are as essential as the other two.
The people who’re already supporting you, should always feel like relevant pieces for your cause. At the same time, it is important to make sure your activities, messages, and accomplishments are constantly reaching new eyes! But for many years, the public would frown upon organizations that designated funds to advertising campaigns.
But, as I said at the beginning, the landscape of the Nonprofit sector is considerably different now than it was ten, or even as little as five years ago. Now we understand that the implementation of things like investments, longer timeframe planning, and advertisement is nothing more than a powerful tool that Nonprofits must use to be effective.
Of course, even though that attitude shift brings great opportunities with it, it also comes attached with new challenges and potential pitfalls. Which strategy can serve best your particular goal? What allotment of resources (time, money, volunteers) can be considered too little to have any real effect or too much to become a waste?
I’ve come to the realization that the answer is being implemented already, with great success, on the for-profit arena, and that’s SEO.
In the world we live in, a powerful Nonprofit SEO strategy can accomplish a great many things, not the least of which is to get a product, service or message across its intended audience.
Think of it this way, Nonprofits depend more than any other type of organization on their involvement with the people who would support them. You need to reach them, share your vision with them and make them feel part of process of solving a problem and helping a cause.
SEO can help you do all of that effectively, and at lower costs than traditional marketing strategies implemented in the past. This makes it the perfect tool to have a broader outreach and have passive systems proactively pulling in potential donors while keeping costs at a minimum.
But no matter how good SEO for Nonprofits is, implementing a tool you have little or no previous knowledge about can be challenging. To help with that, we decided to put together a short How-to guide of a few SEO tools and strategies you can, and should, implement for your Nonprofit immediately, for it will benefit your cause greatly.
