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Effective marketing is as important for charity schools as it is for businesses. However, nonprofit organizations do not have the luxury of a high marketing budget so it is important to learn and understand the different strategies for marketing yourself.
Learning how to market your charity school is not complicated. There are several simple and cost-effective strategies that you can use to raise awareness, ask for donations, and increase support for your charity school. In this blog post, we cover the best marketing strategies that charity schools can use to market themselves.
Table of Contents
Create marketing material
Do you mail your brochures to donors? Are you looking to put up school posters to promote your school? Any time that you interact with the general public, your charity school will need marketing material.
This marketing material will need to be branded for your school with information showing the accomplishments, services, and value that you offer. Therefore, it is essential that as a charity school, you have marketing materials such as school posters, brochures, and social media banners ready for advertising your charity school.
For-profit businesses and larger nonprofits usually have an in-house design team for preparing marketing material in-house, but for charity schools and smaller nonprofits, we recommend making use of PosterMyWall for creating marketing material for your charity school. The benefit of using this tool instead of hiring a freelancer or in-house designer is that you can get high-quality, marketing-ready graphics at a fraction of a cost.
TheGoodocs offers a great variety of design templates such as Newspaper Templates Free that you can customize with an easy-to-use interface in a few simple steps. Once you prepare a design, you can simply download a high-quality version for a nominal fee that you can then share digitally or get printed for distribution.
Focus on the results
The focus of your marketing efforts should not just be on creating awareness or sharing the vision of your charity school. Instead, you need to build trust with your target audience and there is no better way to do that than sharing tangible results that you have achieved.
Your marketing materials should include success stories and statistics that motivate people to get involved with your school. For example, you can add a success story about an alumnus and how the school changed their lives through education. Similarly, you can add statistics about how many children study at their organization, how much funds you have raised, or any other concrete measures of success.
Once you have the materials ready, you can promote your charity school through the following channels (depending on which one is the most feasible and accessible to you):
- Emails to donors and media outlets.
- Press releases.
- Landing page(s) on your website (if you have one).
- Op-eds in the local or national newspaper.
- Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Here is a good example of how you can share success stories on your website from The Citizens Foundation.
Make use of social media marketing
Social media marketing is a great low-cost strategy for charity schools to connect with their supporters and keep them engaged. To help you get started with social marketing, here is a short step-by-step guide that you can use to get started:
1. Select the right platform:
There are dozens of social platforms out there and each caters to different audiences. Therefore, to market your school effectively, you need to know which social media will work out best for you. For this, you can read this excellent guide from Campaign Monitor on how nonprofits can find the right social media sites.
2. Use the right tools to manage and promote your social profiles:
Once you know what social platforms you want to use for marketing, take your time to understand each site and its users and decide on how you can best make use of your marketing materials and resources for this.
One good resource that you can use is a social media management tool that helps you set up and monitor campaigns across multiple social networks. The good part is: a lot of great social media management tools, such as HootSuite, offer special discounts and training for nonprofits and educational institutes.
Remember to add a link to your social networks in your marketing material, emails, and website to make sure that people can stay connected with your charity school.
3. Make use of nonprofit tools available on social platforms:
Social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter offer tools that charity schools and nonprofits can use to make the most of their platform.
For instance, Facebook’s fundraising features allow you to include a Donate button on ads and on your social profile that you can use to directly collect donations from your audience.
Similarly, Twitter offers an ‘Ads for Good’ service where you receive credits that you can use to run ads on their platform and reach out to wider audiences across the globe.
You can explore and use features such as these to maximize your social marketing efforts.
4. Publish engaging content to raise awareness and increase interest
You should not limit yourself to post only about donations or fundraising events on social media. There is a great variety of topics that you can cover to market your charity school such as:
- Informational posts that create awareness and encourage more people to donate or volunteer.
- Acknowledgments to notable donors, volunteers, and team members who contribute to your school.
- Short videos from children, volunteers, or alumni that show the impact that you have on people’s lives.
To take inspiration on how you can do social media marketing as a charity school, you can take a look at how Children’s Literacy Initiative manages its social profile on Facebook. Here is one post from them that acknowledges a team member and sends out a positive message about their initiative.
Promote your cause by strengthening your marketing
Whether you are looking for more donors or volunteers, increasing awareness for education, or want to showcase the impact of your school, marketing is important. But with a restricted budget and no marketing resources, there is only so much that you can do. In this guide, we have listed down three cost-effective strategies that you can use to get started with your charity school’s marketing campaign.
