Raising awareness of your not-for-profit or charity

Identifying relevant communication platforms is an essential consideration in your journey to raising awareness of your not-for-profit or charity. The days of only sending a newsletter out in the post four times a year have long since past. People’s expectation for more immediate and accessible information have given rise to a 24/7 news cycle. You need to pick and choose carefully where your organisation will play, to grow your audience.

Make no mistake, the world we live in today means communications are critical. People have shorter attention spans and information disappears quickly from the news cycle. You need strategies in place which constantly feed the cycle, yet also provide long term sustainable and affordable options to increasingly capturing an expanding audience.

To be able to effectively decide which platforms your organisation should use, you firstly need to have completed the other seven steps identified in an earlier blog in this series. This is part of phase of what is a 12 step process to raising awareness of your not-for-profit. Previously we talked about developing personas for your various audiences. This is where that knowledge will help you make a more informed decision about communication platforms are right for your not-for-profit.

Each persona will have a different set of communication platform their prefer to use. For example, Facebook overall has a 65% female usage, where Twitter is 65% male. This may not be true for your organisation, but you need to identify and rank the communications media they do use. You may even need to go and ask a few people who fall into each identified persona, to check.

Don’t leave out the traditional platforms either – newsletters still play a role, as do phone calls. However the website will be a main focal point. The great thing about content on your website is that is there as long as you want it to be. Done correctly, so it is in tune with what people search for, you will something which can constantly provide a source of interaction. Other media platforms will feed from this, but the web should be the centrepiece, and something we focus more on in other blogs where we discuss Inbound marketing.

Remember, dividing up your stakeholders is only step eight in the process in the second phase to increase awareness of your charity or not-for-profit. Following the other steps is critical to your success.

Just a reminder that these 12 steps to raising awareness of your not-for-profit or charity centre around engagement. Your organisations engagement will inevitably be emotional on some level, because there is a personal connection driving people towards your cause. Emotional engagement with an audience helps you increase awareness and strengthens your brand, which then becomes a increasingly valuable asset from which you can leverage the growth of the organisation.