San Diego's Krishen Iyer on Branding and Digital Marketing Suggestions for Nonprofit Organizations

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For nonprofit organizations, the race is always on for novel ideas to expand outreach. Thanks to digital marketing rising in popularity, the opportunity to revamp your nonprofit’s public awareness is here. Digital marketing gives your nonprofit a way to connect with corporate sponsors, loyal supporters, and potential donors. Here are some suggestions for keeping your branding and digital marketing on par with current trends.

Suggestion #1: Confirm whether your organization’s current brand messaging reflects its values.

How do you know if your brand identity is considered adequate? For starters, it should remind your nonprofit’s supporters why they support your organization. An effective brand identity provokes specific emotions and values from your supporter and reminds the supporter that your organization is directly aligned with those values.

It is imperative for you and your digital marketing team to know why your supporters support your nonprofit in the first place. What makes your organization different from like-minded nonprofits? The more aware your organization is of why supporters flock to your organization, the more successful they will develop their fundraising efforts, too. Typically, corporate sponsors already have a set of philanthropic values specific to their mission. When your nonprofit’s brand identity is communicated, corporate sponsors will be more likely to have a positive first impression of your organization in a digital setting.

Suggestion #2: Design and promote your brand.

Confirming whether your organization’s current brand messaging reflects its values focuses on your nonprofit’s base. Alternatively, branding your digital forms speaks to those who have yet to come in contact with your organization. Designing and promoting your brand fosters trustworthiness with your supporters, as well as a mutual understanding with corporate sponsors and potential donors regarding your organization’s mission.

For starters, you can use link-building to keep website visitors on your website’s page. If a new user clicks on a link from your nonprofit’s website that takes them to a different website, their confidence and security might diminish. To make sure that link building does not discourage donations or engagement, be sure to include your nonprofit’s logo on all website pages. Should you use link-building to send users to a different website, make sure that those forms also use your nonprofit’s logo. You can also rely on other branding tactics to build user confidence in your website and digital resources, such as a uniform color palette or font.

If you are reading this and dreading all of the website development work ahead of you, I have got you covered. Some website builders may give you authority to customize your site and branding tools more than others. Should you begin to think about switching website development tools, be sure to pick a platform that allows you to create branded external pages. It is also helpful to use a website platform that offers on-site registration and donations, as well as mobile designs, so that users can view your nonprofit’s content on the go.

Suggestion #3: Measure brand awareness as a means-test. 

Now that you have put in the work to bring your nonprofit’s brand to the next level, you want to make sure that the juice has been worth the squeeze. Fortunately, there are plenty of metrics at your disposal to make sure that your efforts have worked. Take website and referral traffic, for example. Look into website platforms and their metrics to assess whether you can see how many people have visited your website overall. You can also evaluate your website’s referral traffic, which measures how many visits to your site came from links on external websites.

Social media activity is another tried-and-true way to see if people are interacting with your brand. Likes, followers, retweets, comments, direct messages, etc. can offer insight into whether a new digital marketing campaign or pattern of content creation generates buzz. In addition, the share of voice metric takes into account how your nonprofit’s attention measures up to your counterparts. Share of voice can entail how many mentions your organization receives on social media or how much traffic your nonprofit’s website gains when the public searches for specific keywords.

About Krishen Iyer

Krishen Iyer is a California-based entrepreneur and graduate of San Diego State University. He has nearly two decades of experience brainstorming successful digital marketing and branding tactics for organizations, with a vertical focus on health and dental insurance clients. Iyer founded the Encinitas-based MAIS Consulting Services firm in 2020, where he and his team of experts identify contracting and marketing solutions for clientele in San Diego and beyond.

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