To connect with new supporters, your nonprofit needs to raise awareness for your programs and purpose using campaign advertising and marketing strategies. One of the best ways to do so is to promote your organization’s advocacy work and center specific aspects of your cause.

The key to any successful advocacy campaign is forging emotional connections between your beneficiaries and your audience, whether they’ve never heard of your cause before or are familiar and want to learn more before taking action. In this guide, we’ll review how to craft expert outreach material that appeals to your audience while empowering them to advocate for your cause.

1. Use Data-Driven Audience Targeting and Segmentation

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to advocacy marketing. The goals of a large nonprofit advocating for thousands of people will vary greatly from a small nonprofit with a target audience of only several hundred. 

To accurately pinpoint your audience’s motivations and tailor your content accordingly, you need to deeply understand your nonprofit’s target audience, and data-driven insights can help. 

Here’s how you can discover and appeal to your target audience effectively using data:

1. Collect audience data. As the foundation of your targeting efforts, where and how you collect data is a significant element of the process. Ensure that you use a database built for nonprofits that can store contact information, demographics, and data about each contact’s relationship with your organization so you have enough data to build your strategy. 
2. Create audience profiles. Before drafting any marketing messages, you should understand key characteristics that shape their motivations. Create a marketing persona for an ideal advocacy campaign participant that includes information like their age, occupation, knowledge of your cause, and priority policy goals to guide your messaging approach. For more specificity, create multiple personas based on your advocacy goals. 
3. Segment your audience. Once you know some initial information about your marketing audience, you can start crafting personalized messages. Sending custom communications is crucial for any successful marketing campaign, but it can be time-consuming and cumbersome without the right approach. Segmentation allows your nonprofit to send messages to people with similar traits so you can best appeal to them.

Once you’ve created your data-driven outreach strategies, continue improving your stored information by practicing good data hygiene. Regularly audit your database to consolidate duplicate records and standardize data entry so no information slips through the cracks.

2. Develop Themed Content Series

You’ll likely have many one-off marketing messages planned throughout your outreach strategy, especially to capitalize on relevant milestones or unexpected events for your campaign. However, you can build more consistent brand awareness and cultivate audience support by creating content series that highlight specific aspects of your advocacy work. 

Let’s make a hypothetical content series for a political campaign’s green initiative from the ground up. While political campaigns have different goals than nonprofit advocacy campaigns, both aim to inspire action from the wider public. Use the following example steps to create and customize your own content series:

1. Determine goals and objectives. Goals are overarching, whereas objectives are actions you’ll take to achieve your goals. This campaign hopes to build brand awareness, educate the public about environmentalism, and mobilize grassroots advocacy support around its candidate to push for change.
2. Choose marketing channels. Will your campaign be focused on direct mail outreach, email, social media, or a combination? Since our example campaign focuses on environmental advocacy, this campaign might opt for digital communications to reduce paper waste and engage younger audiences.
3. Develop content themes. For advocacy content, your focus should always be on the beneficiaries so the audience can build an emotional connection with them. For a video content series called “EcoProfiles: Lives Shaped by Nature,” the political campaign decides to focus on a different constituent in each video and how an environmental issue in their area has impacted their life. At the end of each story, the candidate reveals how their policy changes will transform the community for the better.

Once you’ve created an idea for your content series, start building out your content calendar. Make sure to start planning well in advance (several months at least), especially for content series that require you to source community contributors.

3. Take a Multichannel Approach

To spread your advocacy work as far as possible, you need to leverage multiple channels that your target audience prefers. You might use communication channels like direct mail, social media, email, text, and calls to get a hold of your audience. 

Taking a multichannel approach is important to present a uniform and seamless brand identity to your audience, helping them remember and connect with your nonprofit no matter where they see your marketing. A successful multichannel strategy should include:

• Consistent branding and messaging across all channels
• Coordinated message timing across channels
• Cross-promoting content across channels
• Unified calls to action 

Multichannel marketing is only possible with a robust software solution as the foundation. Choose marketing software that allows you to schedule posts and messages, view engagement data, and communicate directly with members of your audience.

4. Leverage Community Connections

Grassroots advocacy movements are so powerful because they’re built on communal relationships and collective emotional investment in a cause. Evoke a similar community-based sentiment in your advocacy campaign marketing that motivates people to support your cause. 

For instance, you might leverage community connections to:

• Cross-market your campaigns. Team up with another nonprofit or socially-minded business in your niche to broaden your marketing materials’ reach. For instance, the same eco-focused political campaign mentioned above might work with a local nature preserve to reach voters who are passionate about the environment.
• Organize community events. Whether you’re marching throughout your city, signing people up to vote, or hosting a panel of speakers, community events catch the public eye and can help spread your message widely. Plus, they can provide valuable opportunities for you to create or fortify relationships with potential supporters face-to-face.

As you explore options for collaboration in your community, ensure you partner with organizations that reflect your values, goals, and focus. For instance, a nonprofit focusing on environmentalism should avoid working with corporations known for their pollution.

As you plan your advocacy campaign marketing, remember that your constituents, beneficiaries, and cause should always be the focus. As long as you inform these stakeholders and take their input into account, you’ll create marketing content that feels genuine and secures more support for your mission.