Crowdfunding and charitable donations are often the only way to get enough money for important causes. With violence against LGBTQ people rising to an all-time high in 2016, we’ve got a long way to go before we can take our foot off the gas. As a result, let’s talk about what we can do to improve the marketing of our crowdfunding campaigns and charities.
While door-to-door canvassing is still a useful tactic that can result in meaningful donations and influence on the local population, the internet has changed the world forever and opened up a new avenue for us to exploit. Instead of having to go outside and talk to individuals it’s possible to communicate with tens of thousands of people at once and have a far greater impact than ever before.
The Importance of Marketing for Crowdfunding and Charities
It’s easy to think that our causes are so important and meaningful that people will do whatever they can to help us. After all, why wouldn’t they? LGBTQ people are experiencing record rates of violence, and it’s easy to become cynical about the direction that the USA is heading in.
However, that’s not the way the world works. People are struggling to pay their bills and whatever money they have left over at the end of the month is only going to be given to those charities that they can’t ignore. As a result, marketing is becoming increasingly important for LGBT crowdfunding campaigns and charities.
No longer can they rely on loyal donors who give out of principle and alliance with the movement; instead, it’s necessary to market to the vast majority to earn donations and support. To achieve your biggest goals, that means implementing digital marketing campaigns to garner support online through social media, forums, and communities like Reddit.
Spreading Awareness Online
The internet is undoubtedly the most important medium in the world today, and without it, it’s impossible for a crowdfunding campaign or charity to go truly viral and earn support from the masses. Internet marketing is a very specific industry that has existed for decades and for which there is more literature than you could consume in a lifetime.
To distill all of that wisdom down into a few sentences, you need to understand that the internet is simply a collective of individuals who are bouncing around randomly looking for the latest thing.
Charities and crowdfunding campaigns should be focusing on three main digital marketing techniques; content marketing, media and influencer outreach, and paid advertising. While there are countless other techniques which have been proven to work, these three are the core of digital marketing and have been used since the beginning of the internet to grow some of the worlds biggest companies including Amazon and Google.
WordAgents Reviews the Top Tools
To get the greatest ROI for your crowdfunding campaign or charity, you need to utilize all of the software solutions available to you. As discussed in WordAgents reviews, software and tools are designed to automate the most tedious and complicated parts of digital marketing, giving you a huge advantage over those who try to do everything organically.
Without these tools, you’re shooting in the dark. The data that they can provide will influence where you spend your time, and the content that they can help to create could be the difference between your charity appearing on CNN or it fading into obscurity. Although they aren’t necessary for you to launch a successful charity or crowdfunding campaign, there is no reason why you shouldn’t take advantage of them since they are at your disposal, many of them for little to no cost.
iMovie or Windows Movie Maker
Articles are fantastic, but people are lazy, and in the era of social media nobody wants to spend ten minutes reading a post when they could watch a video for a fraction of the time. Plus, because of the visual and audio element, you can include far more information into a video than you could into a similar length article. Therefore, it’s wise to spend a few days creating the highest quality promotional video for your campaign as possible.
Sure, these two software solutions aren’t the most advanced programs in the market, but they are capable of producing fantastic movies. Unless you need special effects or large amounts of text, for movies that will include primarily voice actors and existing footage, iMovie or Windows Movie Maker is more than capable of creating a video for your campaign.
Using this two software you can create a wide range of videos including a few shorter clips that would be ideal for social media networks like Instagram and Snapchat, as well as for short features on news programs. Generally, it’s wise to create a few different lengths of your main feature video so that it can always be shown in its entirety by whatever organization chooses to feature it.
HootSuite for Social Media Posts
Social media has completely changed the way in which we interact with others in society, and it should be one of the main components of your digital marketing campaign. However, posting on social media can be a huge pain. Not only does each platform have their unique requirements for images and post lengths, but people also interact differently with them and therefore you need to slightly adjust your posts for each.
Perhaps the best solution on the market currently is HootSuite, which allows you to post to all of your social media networks from a single application. Rather than having to log into each of them, copy and paste your text over and choose your image, you can bulk send out messages to all of those networks at once.
But even more importantly than that, HootSuite gives you the ability to schedule out posts into the future. What this means is that you can schedule a social media post on Instagram for six months from now, which is fantastic because you can do all of your social media work upfronts and then forget about it.
Similarly, if you are looking to launch a specific element of your campaign, you can craft a complex marketing campaign beforehand. All of your social media posts can be lined up ready to go, and you’re completely handsfree when they go live, giving you the ability to focus on other elements like interviews or following through on your promises.
Photoshop for Graphical Design
Videos are incredibly important, but another element that you’ll need to consider is graphical design. Graphics are useful for social media accounts and also for use on your website blog (which every charity or crowdfunding campaign should have) and on news websites. Any new network that wants to feature your campaign will ask for images and logos aren’t enough; they’ll want graphics and photos which they can use to spice up their content.
Creating images like these using basic software like Canva or Gimp is possible, but Photoshop is the industry standard for a reason. Not only is it incredibly powerful and well-optimized, but it’s also the most intuitive software on the market, and it can be picked up in only a few days by following along with all of the free tutorials on the internet.
For a crowdfunding campaign or charity, being able to use Photoshop is a tremendous skill that will be incredibly useful throughout the lifetime of the campaign. Plus, those images can also be used in any videos that you create for extra emphasis.
WordAgents Reviews BuzzStream for Influencer and Media Outreach
One of the important elements that was mentioned earlier was outreach to both influencers on social media and news outlets across the worlds. These people don’t share content randomly, much of it is emailed to them, and then they are convinced to share it with the large audiences that they have at their disposal.
Taking advantage of this can be incredibly beneficial. BuzzStream is an email outreach software which allows you to search through a large database of existing media contacts, as well as giving you the ability to import details from smaller websites in your industry. Through the tool, you can customize and send out emails to all of these people and then manage the interactions that you have with them without ever needing to go into your email.
BuzzStream is particularly useful for campaigns which involve multiple people since many individuals can log into a single BuzzStream account and reply to the messages. These emails typically inform the recipient about the campaign that you are promoting, share with them a specific piece of continue and ask politely if they would consider sharing it with their audience.
Undoubtedly, the vast majority of those that receive these emails will delete them or reply saying no, but those that do agree can have a huge impact on your campaign. After all, it only takes one influencer with a million followers or a local news network to boost your drive to the national level. Therefore, email outreach is an incredibly useful tactic which should be utilized by every charity to maximize the publicity that their campaign and content gets from the media.
