By Kayleigh Alexandra

Your nonprofit’s content is a key element to your marketing. It drives traffic and spreads awareness, helping to increase donations and spread your cause to the world.

But visual content takes all that to the next level. It’s more effective than just written content, and it’s surprisingly easy to implement too. Read on for your handy guide to the what, why, and how of visual content marketing for nonprofits.

Further reading: How to Build Your Personal Brand at Conferences

What is visual content marketing?

You likely already know about content marketing. Put simply, it is the practice by brands, charities, and organizations of marketing through the creation and propagation of digital content such as blogs, videos, images, and so on.

Content marketing isn’t strictly advertorial in nature, but instead seeks to engage your audience through interesting, educational, or useful material. Visual content marketing capitalizes on the growing popularity of video, photography, infographics, interactive assets, and so on to better reach audiences.

Why use visual content marketing?

In a mobile-first age, visual content is convenient and digestible. Its aesthetic nature makes it more engaging than reams of copy, and gives marketers the freedom to deliver their message in a variety of creative ways. And the stats back it up: people can recall 65% of visual content up to three days after first viewing it, compared with just 10% for written content. This makes visual content more impactful with audiences, conveying your message with clarity.

In the same vein, visual content is more shareable than copy too. Articles with one image for every 75-100 words are shared almost twice as much as articles with fewer or no images. Consequently, your message can reach a much wider audience if it’s delivered in a visual style. While visual content shouldn’t replace your written posts, it should complement them. A diverse content strategy is more effective, seeing higher engagement and boosting awareness of your nonprofit as a result. Read more »

Going Beyond the One-Story-Fits-All Approach

By Mo Waja

Storytelling to drive “giving” or donations can feel a little repetitive. A common example is the classic profile piece featuring someone whom the nonprofit has impacted. This is the written, video, or audio piece that introduces an individual, describes a barrier, and then states how the organization helped that person to overcome the barrier. It’s straightforward, it’s easy, and it’s a tempting format to gravitate towards. What this generates is a one-story-fits-all approach where the central character may change, but the general storyline remains the same.

The challenge with this approach is twofold. Firstly, on the donor side of the equation, this format speaks only to a specific, results focused donor and often fails to resonate with or impact emotionally focused or outcomes driven donors. Secondly, swapping out the face behind a repetitive storyline fails to embrace what is unique about each story or to illustrate the full breadth of your programs’ impact.

When you’re selling a product, displaying your value proposition by way of a consistent story that showcases the scale of your impact (the number of people that your product helps or has helped) in the most efficient way possible is certainly a strategy that works; however, when it comes to your nonprofit story you’re not simply selling a product. Similar as systems like monthly giving may seem, you’re not even selling a subscription service. What you’re selling is an outcome and the emotion that goes along with it. So, for people to really connect with your organization, empathize with your population, and commit to giving, they need (and want) to understand the full scope of your positive impact – not solely on the direct beneficiaries of your organization’s mission, what we can call your primary population, but on all the people that surround and are connected to them. Read more »