3 Steps to advocate for digital marketing budget in your nonprofit

If you've worked in or even run a nonprofit for any amount of time, you most likely have faced the challenge of advocating for more digital marketing resources.

Here are three steps that have helped me advocate for more digital marketing budget and mobilize that budget to grow nonprofits:

1️⃣ Analyzing data.

2️⃣ Telling a true story with the data.

3️⃣ Reframing expenses as investments.

Most of the time your accounting team sees things in 2 buckets:

1. Revenue

2. Expenses

I'm not here to tell you that there is a third bucket. I'm not an accountant. And this framework makes sense.

But when building a budget, what if you saw your expenses as investments?

It's a small mental shift, but it changes the way you go about budgeting.

It forces you to strategically budget for items that are going to bring you a consistent return, rather than just sinking money into something that you don't see the returns on again.

Now, what if you saw digital marketing as an investment?

Of all items that you allocate resources towards, digital marketing is one that you potentially can track the most.

And yet, digital marketing tends to get the smallest allocation of resources in nonprofit organizations.

Here's a real life example and how to execute these 3 steps:

I worked in a digital marketing role in a nonprofit and I was building an annual budget for our department.

Analyzing The Data

After analyzing our website's data, I discovered that the bounce rate on our home page was 70%. At this point, the industry average bounce rate for nonprofits was ~60%.

We also knew that historically the majority of new visitors to our programs indicated that they found us either through a friend, or by finding our website.

If our website was already serving as one of the main sources to generate new program visitors, imagine how many new visitors we were missing by continuing to leave our website's home page un-optimized for engagement and conversion.

With this data, I was able to build a case for requesting $10,000 in our budget in order to do some conversion rate optimizations on our website's home page.

This may seem like a lot of money to some.

Telling a true story with data

But mind you, we had 2,500 people attending our programs weekly, and we were able to translate each program attendee into $2,400/year in donor funds (this is unusually high by the way). So with just 5 new visitors that come from our website, we'd be able to more than cover the cost of this website investment, the majority of which we would then re-invest into the programs to provide services to our program attendees.

Reframing

I was able to reframe this "expense" of doing work on our website, as an "investment", and the return on that investment would be an increased number of new visitors to our programs.

The Results

In the years to come we were able to decrease the bounce rate on the home page to below industry average, and we grew from 3 to 6 locations for the program!

It requires investigating the data, telling a story with the data, and reframing the problem.

The issue is that this process takes time and resources. Most nonprofits don't understand the return on investment for this process, so they don't bother with it, but it could unlock amazing potential for the impact you're making!

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What story is your data telling? Leave a comment below...

(This post was written by a human—me—with fingers typing on a keyboard)