Nonprofit Marketing and Advocacy Messages: 8 Tips to Connect Audiences

Nonprofit marketers aim for relationships, not simply messages, in order to allow audiences room to "hear" the advocacy, decide whether and how to engage, and build support for future activity. Eight cues help avoid advocacy marketing messes:

1. Knowing Audiences, good marketers continue researching the unknown to avoid assumptions. Message and delivery will not fit every taste, but advocacy marketing that divides or alienate even a core audience demonstrates poor understanding and awareness, too narrow a focus on message, or too heavy an emphasis on marketing at the expense of relationships.

2. Clear Goals and Objectives to lead audiences onto paths away from problems. Accessible efforts state their ultimate purpose, not lumps of challenges, large piles of unrelated issues, or massive obstacles no group could ever overcome. A group unable to articulate success presents a cloudy vision of its future, with unanticipated hazards along the way.

3. Context Frames to guide audiences through the maze of competing issues. Frames shape messages, structure purpose, and support urgency posed by a campaign. Too much information without context complicates good messages. Too much context without information arouses suspicion.

4. Consistent Perspective to inform an audience how and where attention must go. Abrupt shifts in tone and clashing styles create doubt and uncertainty, while making messages work harder than necessary with less precision.

5. Action Plans to strengthen audience involvement in solution discussions, not descriptions. What makes a "new", "innovative", "fresh", "novel", "unique", or "groundbreaking" approach effective contributes to its "buzz". "Why" and "how" an approach works adds substance. Acknowledging a legacy of success and failure within that field, instead of ignoring past and present experience, enhances overall credibility.

6. Demonstrated Support to connect audiences with something tangible and larger than themselves, from the moment of message launch. "Many" efforts can roll "lots of" support in the face of a "perceived" threat that "something is wrong", "few" can challenge a movement built upon good solid numbers as proof of strength.

7. Supporting Roles to reinforce audience and campaign legitimacy among the public through shared long-term responsibility. Whether highly structured or purely organic, good efforts present ways to sustain a message and grow activity matching a common vision.

8. Measured Outcomes to gain audience respect. By themselves, neither "impact" nor "benefit" capture well-defined or consistently applied measures of nonprofit activity. Evaluation through pure numbers fails to capture the full scale of a nonprofit's relevance. Results combining both data and stakeholder insights can better demonstrate effectiveness, reflect value, and position audiences to discuss areas of greater concern and opportunity.

Some groups work hard to build support through everyday services; others generate support through messages connected to issue campaigns and causes. Balancing results, audiences, processes, and causes in a broader effort towards relationship building for solutions separates good nonprofit marketers from pure messengers.