Table of Contents
- Video Marketing For Nonprofits: Top 11 Strategies (With Simple Examples)
- What is video marketing for nonprofits?
- Benefits of nonprofit video marketing
- Drives better engagement
- Improves SEO ranking
- Increases conversion rate
- Generates higher click-through rates and open rates
- Boosts reach and awareness
- How to create a video marketing strategy for nonprofits
- Define goals
- Understand your audience
- Sort out the logistics
- Budget
- Timeline
- Tools
- Content calendar
- Top examples of video marketing for nonprofits
- Instrumentl
- Breast Cancer Now
- We Are First Descents
- Mama Hope
- Conclusion
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Sanketee
Date
Jul 28, 2023
Description
In this guide, we’re sharing the top 11 strategies of video marketing for nonprofits. Use these to build more credibility and increase pledged for your cause.
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Video Marketing For Nonprofits: Top 11 Strategies (With Simple Examples)
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Sanketee
Video Marketing For Nonprofits: Top 11 Strategies (With Simple Examples)
Most nonprofits are skeptical about investing their limited resources in video marketing. However, with the right strategy, it can be a substantial asset for your organization.
Video content is gripping, easy to consume, and diversifies your promotional efforts. They are effective mediums for communicating your cause to the right people and raising more donations.
Among different formats of nonprofit video marketing, testimonials are a non-pushy way of establishing credibility among potential supporters and driving more ROI.
But what exactly is the right way of conducting video marketing for nonprofits? To answer this, we have compiled a step-by-step guide to nonprofit video strategy to help you raise awareness and gain more supporters.
What is video marketing for nonprofits?
Nonprofit video marketing is a content outreach program to inspire, engage, and convert the audience into dedicated supporters.
Nonprofits produce and share videos that communicate a compelling narrative. Such content appeals to the audience’s emotions, convey authenticity, drives advocacy, and boosts donations.
Benefits of nonprofit video marketing
Marketers are increasingly relying on video marketing to make their campaigns more engaging and appealing to the audience. In fact, reports note that 92% of marketers find videos as a good ROI booster.
Here are some notable advantages of using video marketing for nonprofits:
Drives better engagement
Videos convey narratives through a memorable and emotional experience. As they deliver a combination of visuals and audio, they capture and retain attention quickly. This gets them invested in your organization and drives more engagement to your marketing channels.
Improves SEO ranking
Nonprofit video marketing can be an excellent tool for improving your website’s SEO ranking and driving more traffic.
As video content is more engaging than text-based promotions, they can increase dwell time on your website. Higher time-on-page metrics signal search engines that your website is conveying valuable information. This improves your website's overall ranking on search engine results pages.
Videos are also more shareable on social media than text-based content, which can further drive traffic to your website. It can also lead to backlinks from high-ranking websites. Moreover, by adding relevant keywords and tags, you can improve your website’s visibility in search engine results.
Increases conversion rate
It’s harder to get people on board where goodwill is the only drive. To gain more donations for your nonprofit, you must make them believe in your cause. Here, video marketing for nonprofits can be a great medium to increase website conversion rates.
A well-produced video makes it easier for your audience to understand your mission, your organization’s structure, and the viability of your cause. Presenting your appeal for support in the context of a story can evoke strong emotions and creates meaningful connections with your audience.
Portraying real people or scenarios through compelling video content makes your nonprofit look authentic. This fosters trust and makes viewers more likely to become active supporters of your organization.
Generates higher click-through rates and open rates
Emails are an indispensable tool for nurturing high-quality leads. By combining nonprofit video marketing with emails, you can encourage the recipients to open the email and check its content.
A compelling video thumbnail or a play button icon in an email can entice recipients to click on the video to watch it, improving the email open rate. As videos are easy to consume than long text-based content, your audience will be more likely to retain the information and take the desired action through the adjacent CTA. This boosts the overall click-through rates of your email marketing.
Boosts reach and awareness
Nonprofit video marketing is an effective medium for presenting complex social causes in a simpler form. This leads to better comprehension and audience interaction with your content.
Visually appealing and informative videos are also more shareable, boosting your reach on social media platforms. This also leads to the algorithm pushing your content to more feeds, increasing overall awareness for your cause.
How to create a video marketing strategy for nonprofits
Video marketing for nonprofits can drive enhanced support and improved ROI. But for that, you need careful planning and execution that convey your organization’s mission and inspire actions.
Here is an overview of what an effective nonprofit video strategy looks like to help you get started:
Define goals
Laying down clear video marketing goals will keep your efforts on track and lead to better benchmarking in the long run. Consider the following question while deciding on your video marketing objectives:
- Is driving more donations your primary goal?
- Are you looking to raise awareness about your cause?
- Do you want to recruit more volunteers?
- Do you want to market videos to promote your upcoming events?
However, the most common goal of nonprofit video storytelling is to build trust and turn viewers into dedicated and long-term supporters.
Understand your audience
Conduct thorough audience research to curate personalized videos and drive more impact. Collect first-party and third-party audience data and segment your viewers. This will lead to better targeting and help you focus your resources on high-quality leads.
The necessary audience demographics here include:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Religion and ethnicity
- Sexual orientation
- Interests and hobbies
- Digital activities
Use social listening to tap into audience conversations and see what drives their interests. Send out surveys to your supporters and beneficiaries with pointed questions like:
- How familiar are you with our mission?
- What do you want to know more about our work?
- What kind of videos would you like to see from us?
- What is your preferred channel for watching videos?
- What interests you more — short-term or long-term videos?
- How often do you want to receive our videos?
The collected insights will direct you to customize your nonprofit video storytelling and capture the interest of your target audience.
Sort out the logistics
Once you have a clear sense of purpose and viewer segments for your video marketing, nail down the logistics of your nonprofit video strategy. It includes:
Budget
Consider the expenses of video marketing for nonprofits, including scripts, filming, and editing. Then audit your budget and see what operational ranges you can afford while ensuring a decent ROI.
Alternatively, you could save on exorbitant filming costs and choose a tool like Testimonial.to to collect video testimonials at a large scale, all while being affordable.
Timeline
Detail the timeline of your nonprofit video strategy for each project. Estimate an end date for the production and count in expected delays.
Tools
To get social proof easily, you might want to simplify the process by using the right tools. For example, you can use:
- WeVideo: To make and edit high-quality videos
- Vidyard: To gather important data like shares, clickthrough behavior, etc
- Testimonial.to: To import social proof from various platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, etc.
Content calendar
Use a content calendar to streamline content posting, including when and where you post your videos. Outline your creative assets like infographics, photos, and interviews here for smoother video production.
- Refine your messaging
Refine your existing marketing messaging to align it with your nonprofit's mission and audience segments. Make tweaks so that it fits in a compelling video. Keep the narrative clear, concise, and impactful. Use nonprofit video storytelling techniques to make your nonprofit’s message more relatable.
- Choose relevant video hosting platforms
The next step is to choose a platform to post your nonprofit video marketing on. You want a channel where your target audience and existing supporters and the most active.
Make sure your organization’s marketing goals and audience preferences align with your chosen video-sharing hosts. Instead of focusing on one channel, distribute your efforts across 3-4 most impactful networks. Such an omnichannel nonprofit video strategy will offer multiple touchpoints and let you reach as many potential donors as possible.
You can host your very own Wall of Love on your website using Testimonial’s features. You can manage all your testimonials from a single dashboard and understand how your video testimonials are performing.
- Use different types of videos
- Mission and Impact Stories: Create videos that communicate how your nonprofit is making a positive difference in our world.
- Testimonials: Use video testimonials to showcase stories of individuals or communities that have benefited from your work. These act as social proof and communicates your credibility as a nonprofit.
- Educational Videos: Create videos around valuable information about your cause, issues, and solutions. Share tangible data on the impact of your organization.
- Behind-the-Scenes: Film your organization's daily operations and the people behind the scenes. This will humanize your campaign further and boost your authenticity.
- Fundraising Campaigns: Feature compelling videos to promote your fundraising campaigns. Communicate why you need donations and why the viewer should support your nonprofit.
- Event Coverage: Make videos on important events hosted or attended by your nonprofit.
Diversity in your video content portfolio will grow your engagement over time and retain audience interest. Here are some types of non-profit video storytelling you can use to market your cause:
- Leverage email marketing
Share your nonprofit videos through email marketing. Add appealing thumbnails and attention-grabbing subject lines to increase email open rate.
Include a powerful and relevant CTA directing to your ongoing campaign page, donation page, or channel subscription. You can also add social media widgets and urge the recipient to share the video.
- Promote content on social media
Social media channels are a powerful tool for reaching your target audience and boosting awareness around our nonprofit’s cause. With well-crafted videos, you can leverage platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc. to spread your mission and get more donations.
Post snippets of your marketing videos as reels and add the link to the full video in the description. Repost these on stories to maintain constant engagement. You can also create a campaign-specific hashtag to amplify your videos and encourage more online conversations around your cause.
Reply to comments and messages to engage with your audience. This will establish meaningful connections with potential supporters and get you high-quality leads to follow on later. You can also partner with relevant influencers to boost your organization’s credibility and collect more donations.
- Use SEO tactics
To enhance visibility, video marketing for nonprofits should incorporate proper SEO strategies. Conduct keyword research and add the relevant ones to your video titles and descriptions. Use relevant tags to improve SEO ranking on search engines and video platforms. This will boost organic traffic to your content and website and gain more supporters.
- Be consistent
To maximize the impact of video marketing for nonprofits, organizations have to be consistent with their efforts to create brand recognition. Even if you feature different video formats, maintain a cohesive visual style and messaging across all your content.
Besides using a content calendar, consider investing in marketing automation tools. These solutions track when your audience is the most active and publish content at accurate frequencies.
- Track key metrics
Track the performance of your videos and measure their impact against your predefined goals. Organizations should track KPIs such as views, watch time, engagement, and shares to measure the effectiveness of video marketing for nonprofits.
Reports note that 56% of video marketers consider leads and clicks their most used metrics to measure their video content’s ROI. So, keep an eye on open rates and CTR and compare the numbers with conversion rates to gain conclusive insight.
Make sure the KPI tracking is a crucial routine, not a formality. Use these insights to make prompt improvements and refine your nonprofit video strategy.
Top examples of video marketing for nonprofits
To drive the best campaign results, a little inspiration goes a long way. So, here are 5 examples of organizations acing video marketing for nonprofits for your to learn from:
Instrumentl
While our first example is not a nonprofit, Instrumentl helps fundraisers make the best use of their time and resources by streamlining their campaigning efforts.
The platform, besides other marketing efforts, relies on video testimonials to establish credibility and gain more clients.
Instrumentl’s website features testimonials from its nonprofit clients. To make the marketing more impactful, they include the client’s quote as text below every video testimonial. The videos are authentic with genuine people describing their experiences.
Breast Cancer Now
The above video by Breast Cancer Now delivers a powerful narration without using any dialogue. This nonprofit video storytelling style keeps the viewers hooked by not revealing what the little girl is up to until the very end.
The video hits the mark by offering a profound look at the impact of breast cancer on people’s lives through a mother-daughter relationship. In the end, the video subtly establishes why the problem of breast cancer needs immediate attention, encouraging actions from the viewers.
We Are First Descents
The above video by First Descents, a nonproft offering life-changing outdoor adventures for young adults diagnosed with cancer or MS, is the perfect example of how inspirational a short video can be.
The above video offers a view into the organization’s purpose the activities they offer, and how they are making a difference. It features the survivors benefiting from First Descents’ initiatives. It also introduces the founder who explains the drive behind their organization.
Mama Hope
Mama Hope raises awareness about the stereotypes black communities face in the popular media through a humorous take. The video features the young black boys reiterating the stereotypes they face.
Then the narrative showcases their talents and individual achievements to shatter the biases. Ultimately, the nonprofit also added bloopers and urged the viewers to share the video and donate to the cause.
Conclusion
People are more likely to make an effort when you put a face to the cause instead of making vague and righteous statements — and that’s exactly what video marketing for nonprofits achieves.
Here’s a TL;DR version:
- Run audience research.
- Tailor content according to audience segments.
- Choose the right platform to market your videos.
- Implement SEO practices
- Measure and improve campaign effectiveness
Don’t know how to leverage your nonprofit video storytelling to increase conversion rate? Use Testimonial to embed videos directly to your website without relying on developers.
To amplify your nonprofit campaigns and boost donations with video marketing, sign up for our free trial today!
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