The Background

We were appointed by the Access Community Group to deliver the Digital Enterprise Program Mentor sessions to twelve not-for-profit organisations. The delivery of the mentor sessions across these diverse set of not for profits co-incidentally came at a time of change for the community services industry with the proposed introduction of competitive tendering. Each not for profit approached us with differing needs but their objectives all had one thing in common – to improve their communications with their clients and better promote their services in a climate of funding uncertainty.

What We Did

For most of the organisations that participated in the mentoring program, we quickly identified that they had very broad target audiences, which they were trying to reach through their digital platforms. As a result, we educated them on how to identify what triggers people to use their service and then helped them to understand how to segment these client groups to target them accordingly.

Each not-for-profit was at a different phase in terms of their adoption of digital marketing techniques and we customized our approach for each one from setting up a Twitter account, to growing the number of likes on a mature Facebook page, to assistance with generating meaningful and relevant content through a blog post. For each organisation we helped them to develop a plan to make their digital marketing efforts more effective and time efficient.

Outcomes

We mentored the organisations on how to use their social media platforms and websites as their 21st century corporate brochure, shop window and way of being found.

Web presence – due to time constraints we chose to focus on the website home page which involved helping the organisations to better understand the unique value they offer in the community and communicate this on their homepage. This involved determining the organisation’s unique value and clearly communicating this to clients, keeping the page uncluttered by spotlighting core services and demonstrating the success of the service through client testimonials and case studies. Other recommendations included clearer promotion of events and automated event sign-up, content keyword optimization and visible calls to action.

Blog and content marketing – We assisted in the setting up and instruction on how to use a website blog for creating and distributing great content to attract, acquire and engage their target clients with the aim of driving ‘profitable’ customer action. We conducted creative workshops to determine what stories would connect with the target audience. We also mentored each client on the importance of adding easy to use and implement strategies such as ‘subscribe to my blog’ functionality so that the business could capture and be in charge of their client data rather than their customer information being in the ownership of social media platforms forcing paid advertising.

Social media marketing – Many of our sessions covered creative brainstorming sessions to work out what makes engaging and shareable social media content. Each of the organisations we mentored was very different in terms of the target market they were seeking to engage; from advising young people on sexual health (this was a tricky one) to the parents of pre-schoolers with autism. One of the not-for-profits increased their number of Facebook likes by 50% during the month we worked with them, through a combination of cross promotion across pages, the introduction of a blog and compelling storytelling.