10 Feb Nonprofit Marketing Must Have: Getting Your Team Engaged From the Heart

By: Jennifer Vickery, National Strategies Public Relations

We understand that as a nonprofit, you’re probably doing an enormous amount with limited resources. Perhaps you have different departments reporting into you, or you’re tasked with getting information at different meetings and then turning it into marketing initiatives. This can be completely overwhelming.

We’ll be exploring a way to get your whole team involved with marketing for your nonprofit in a way that is both fun and effective.

Working with others is always more fun than working alone. Create a marketing committee or set aside time for a monthly meeting where various team members, volunteers or associates get together to brainstorm.

Here’s what you can uncover:

Personal stories: Is there someone from your accounting department, for example, that has a personal story or was touched by your nonprofit? Perhaps you’d never really find out about how they’ve been impacted otherwise as we’re all so busy throughout the day. Having a dedicated individual from all departments report to a monthly marketing meeting allows you to uncover more personal connections than you would have done previously.

Uncovering connections: Nonprofits can be adaptable and often rely on many sources for things like fundraising, getting the message out, and supporting the community. When you have monthly marketing meetings with your team, you have more opportunities to uncover useful connections. You didn’t know that your IT person had a sister-in-law who owns the town’s coolest restaurant? Maybe they can have a night where proceeds benefit your nonprofit and you now have an insider-connection. Allow these connections to happen organically! They are more likely to happen when you get more people in the room or on Zoom talking about these things.

Creating new ideas: In nonprofit marketing, creativity is a must. We need to be creative in the messages we craft to grab people’s attention, fundraise and provide help to others. One person, or even a handful of people on the same team can muster amazing ideas; but think about the creativity that can be inspired by a larger team of people with different experience outside of marketing coming together. That’s where the magic can happen! We’ve seen event themes come about that would have never happened otherwise – and they were a huge hit! That’s just one example of many in which creativity can be born from a diverse team.

Leverage your organization’s team to support your efforts and watch your nonprofit soar to new heights with marketing that truly comes from the heart of your organization.

About Jennifer Vickery: Jennifer is the President and CEO of National Strategies Public Relations, a PR firm that focuses on nonprofits and organizations with corporate social responsibility initiatives. Her background is in national public relations campaigns where she oversees every aspect of PR strategy utilizing her 15+ years of senior-level experience. She’s worked for hundreds of national clientele through every facet of PR. She has extensive experience, which includes writing a regular column for a newspaper, producing a health television segment, serving as a radio personality for advocacy issues, producing a weekly radio show, to owning and running a successful public relations firm. Jennifer states media relations, community outreach and goodwill, in addition to strategic planning as her favorite aspects of PR.

Jennifer is truly inspired and lives every day knowing she is making an impact on the lives of people in the community by providing expert information and the best-of-the-best in businesses, community involvement and goodwill.