As any nonprofit professional knows, implementing a thorough marketing strategy takes work. From segmenting audiences to drafting content to making cross-channel posts, tasks can quickly pile up and take more time than expected. Anything you can do to streamline content creation and lessen your staff’s workload will help you get more time back.
That’s where automated campaigns come in. By automating entire marketing journeys, you can save time while ensuring your messages reach the right audiences at the right times.
Whether you want to reach supporters through social media, SMS (text) marketing, or email, automation can help you do so efficiently. While the technical process will vary depending on your nonprofit’s software, the basics of creating automation campaigns boil down to a few steps.
1. Define your goals, audience, and communication channels.
First, determine who your automated campaign will target and its goals. For example, do you want to steward first-time donors, recruit volunteers, or promote an event to all past event guests? If you don’t have a target audience in mind, explore the supporter segments you already have in your database and revisit your current organizational priorities.
Then, choose communication channels to use for your automated campaign. You might focus solely on text messages or email marketing or design a campaign that integrates multiple channels.
Make sure to outline success metrics, too. These will largely depend on your goals and the channels you use, but may include:
- Conversion rates: The percentage of recipients who took a desired action, such as donating or signing up for an event
- Click-through rates (CTR): The percentage of recipients who clicked on the links in your message
- Number of opt-outs or unsubscribes: The number of recipients who requested to stop receiving messages during your automated campaign
If your goal is more difficult to track (such as “steward new donors” or “raise awareness of x issue”), you might focus on basic engagement metrics for the time being. Later, you can analyze data like retention rates and try to determine the role your automated campaign played in strengthening relationships and boosting retention.
2. Outline the donor or volunteer journey.
With your goals solidified, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about their long-term journeys. How might they end up taking your desired action? What steps would they take first, and what information would they need before taking the action? This is known as the donor (or volunteer) journey.
Typically, the donor journey involves four key stages: awareness, engagement, consideration, and conversion. Understanding your audience’s needs at each stage will help you design effective automated campaigns that gradually usher them along the journey.
For instance, say you’re creating a marketing campaign aimed at turning recurring volunteers into donors. Your volunteers’ journey might look like this:
- Awareness: The volunteer engages in their regular involvement activities, such as staffing an event or volunteering online. To make them aware of your need for monetary donations, your nonprofit could send a message highlighting your latest fundraising campaign.
- Engagement: The volunteer reads your informational messages and potentially clicks on links to learn more. When they do, your nonprofit provides more information about the connection between volunteering and donating, emphasizing how volunteers can increase their impact through monetary gifts.
- Consideration: While perusing your marketing materials, the volunteer considers giving. They may interact with more fundraising content, visit your campaign page, or check your social media accounts.
- Conversion and stewardship: Your nonprofit sends a personalized fundraising appeal after they’ve engaged several times, and the volunteer makes a donation. Immediately afterward, your nonprofit thanks them and adds them to a stewardship cadence (or an automated appreciation campaign) to build the relationship further.
This process can translate to plenty of different goals, and the timeline is highly flexible. Depending on your unique donor base and what action you want them to take at the end of this campaign, you might add more or fewer steps.
3. Draft content that builds on itself.
Next, build out the content you’ll include in your automated marketing campaign. Draft emails, text messages, and social media content that address different phases of the donor journey you outlined.
Instead of crafting disparate messages, ensure your content is clearly sequenced and builds on itself. For instance, don’t introduce the same fundraiser multiple times. Send one introduction message, then use follow-up marketing content to provide additional information, build a connection with the recipient, ask for a donation, and emphasize the fundraiser’s impact on your mission.
Make sure to personalize content, too. Use your automation tools to populate messages with each donor’s name, contribution amount, last event attended, cause area of interest, etc.
4. Set up automated triggers and workflows.
To create your automated workflow, you’ll need to use software with automation capabilities. This might be your CRM, an email marketing tool, or a text messaging app. Regardless, it must enable you to set up triggers (actions supporters take that spur an automated message) and workflows (sequences of messages and/or actions with specific rules).
For instance, Mogli’s guide to SMS marketing apps explains that if you use a texting app, it “should be able to automate everything from individually triggered reminders to complex text conversations.” This way, you can choose the right audience actions and set them up to trigger your new automated campaign.
Here are a few common actions you might use as triggers for your automated marketing campaign:
- Signing up to receive texts or emails. When new supporters sign up for your list, they should receive a series of welcome messages and information about your organization.
- Making a donation. Every donation should trigger a thank-you message, but you might build a lengthier donor acknowledgment campaign for certain types of donations.
- Registering for an event or volunteer opportunity. After they register, supporters should receive a confirmation message and additional details about the event’s logistics and any other actions they need to take.
- Birthdays and anniversaries. If you have supporters’ birthdays and giving anniversary dates in your CRM, you can trigger special messages or campaigns to deepen relationships. eCardWidget recommends sending dynamic digital birthday cards to make these messages stand out.
Remember, you can do more than just trigger the start of an automated campaign. Within your campaign’s workflow, you can include multiple triggers that take recipients down different pathways based on their actions.
You’ll need to determine your messages’ timing at this point, too. In your workflows, indicate how soon each message in the sequence should be sent (such as two days later, 24 hours later, instantly after donating, etc.).
5. Test your automated campaign.
When it’s complete, have a staff member or trusted volunteer complete the steps to trigger your new automated campaign. Verify that everything works properly, the visuals appear correctly, and every message is sent according to your schedule. Double-check your message content, clicking on links to ensure they work and take recipients to the right page.
If you’re unsure of any aspect of your campaign, consider A/B testing to gauge how your audience might react to different messages or subject lines.
This process creates two versions of a message, subject line, or text appeal and shares them with a group of audience members. Based on the results, you can easily compare engagement and determine if one resonates more with your audience than the other.
After launching your new campaign, don’t forget to evaluate its performance and determine ways to optimize future campaigns based on the results.
Automated marketing campaigns are powerful tools for building relationships and driving donations, so it’s vital to analyze their success and learn the most effective tactics for engaging your unique donor base.