4 Ways to Amplify Your Nonprofit’s Great Content

I love baseball and film. One of my favorite movies is “Field of Dreams.” I have a hard time thinking of a movie quote that is as widely known as, “If you build it, he will come.” This one line is the premise for the entire movie. 

Baseball season is in full swing and “Field of Dreams” is back on my mind. The MLB has made the "Field of Dreams" real, but the digital world has revoked the idea when it comes to content creation. If you create it, they will not necessarily come. Even if it is magical, wonderful and evokes all of the emotion, just creating content is not enough anymore. 

Generative artificial intelligence has turned the content faucet on full blast. Algorithms are shifting more frequently — not to mention they are getting more complex. There is more competition for our audience's attention in more ways than ever before.  

Why Good Content Isn’t Enough

I firmly believe that nonprofits create good — and often great — content. And nonprofits have all of the ingredients to do so. 

At each organization's core, it has an emotional story to tell. The hero’s journey is built into who the nonprofit is as an organization. It helps solve the real problems that people face and has a clear point of view on how to solve those problems. There’s also an engagement aspect of having a clear way for people to engage and be a part of the story. 

It’s easy to see why the corporate world can be jealous of the authentic, built-in story that nonprofits have to tell. However, people also want to be entertained. 

While content consumption habits show people have short attention spans, there is a growing trend of longform content consumption with high engagement rates, including  longform text content, as well as longform video essays on YouTube and TikTok’s 15-minute video exploration.

It makes me sad to see good content getting 50 views or moving social posts garnering 18 engagements, but these outcomes are not uncommon. When it comes to content discovery, the average reach is around 7.5% on Instagram and less than 6% on Facebook. Anecdotally, any Google search reveals hundreds of thousands of results. The search query, “how to help with food insecurity,” had 116,000,000 results when I checked earlier this month. 

There are countless data points that prove just creating content and waiting for the algorithm to pick it up and serve it to people will not lead to success. This doesn’t mean stop creating content, but we do need to think about content in terms of content marketing. 

Content creation is a big part of content marketing, but the “marketing” part of the term is key. Marketing is more than just creating content that communicates something and provides value. It also means purposefully delivering that content to your audiences in a meaningful and targeted way.

How to Amplify Content With the PESO Model

When creating content, it’s important to develop a content discovery plan for that content. I use the PESO model to think about how to amplify content. This allows me to think about all of the ways someone could discover this content. Here are those four ways.

Paid Media 

Yes, this means ads. There are lots of ways to pay to promote content —  boosted social posts, sponsored content, dedicated email blasts, display ads, native ads, search ads, etc. 

When using paid tactics, it’s important to ensure that the ads adequately show the content and promote its consumption. Let the content itself make the ask. In other words, don’t include a call to action (CTA), like “donate” or “support.” Instead use a soft CTA like “read the story,” “learn more” or “get to know X.”

When it comes to ads, the CTA is an indicator to the person seeing the ad about what your goal is. Using soft CTAs indicates that you are going to entertain as a result there is less pressure on the person clicking on the ad. As a result, soft CTAs can often result in higher click-through rates. 

As algorithms shift and evolve and it becomes harder to get content to rank organically, paid ads can help ensure that people see the content and give it an initial boost.

Earned Media

This means earning links to content from other sites. Today, everyone has a broadcast channel. Earned media used to focus on news outlet pickup, but today it should focus on people who have an engaged audience. This includes content aggregators, blogs and news outlets.

To engage with these people ensure:

• There’s a clear ask.
• The content is tied to a timely moment.
• The content entertains. 
• The content provides data that’s easy to understand and use. 

To get earned media, make your content easy to link to and ask for that link. Earned media is all about empowering people to take the story and make it part of their story — a similar concept to social. 

Shared Media

Shared media is about being social on social media. This can be easier said than done, but is key. The algorithms have gotten more robust and focus on content discovery. They prioritize quality content and keeping people on the platform. 

Here are several trends that I regularly see:

• Do less. Flooding pages with posts is not the right approach. 
• Encourage engagement on the platform. “Comment a smiley face for this” or “Comment your food of choice” can make a huge impact. This doesn’t have to be every post, but this does need to be part of the mix. 
• Have a plan for community management. Don’t delete every negative comment. Instead, have a structured way to respond to comments and direct messages. 

Social is inherently social, using it as a soapbox is often detrimental to social success. 

Owned Media

There are a lot of owned channels that nonprofits have — websites, emails, text messaging, direct mail, etc. These are the channels that your organization controls 100%. Think of them not as a library or filing cabinet, but as ad space. The banner on your homepage is a prominent promotional space. The body of emails are full of promotional space. 

This sounds intuitive, but this mindset can shift how you think about your content. Would you pay someone to put the piece of content from John at that one program at the top of the homepage? If the email about the project update cost money, would it still be sent? Many teams within organizations think about their owned channels as a place to put things for free. When the mindset shifts to think about the value of owned properties, it forces people to evolve their thinking. 

Ads can have a negative connotation, but they also can play an important role in driving people to good content. People are used to seeing ads throughout their digital experiences, so I’m a strong advocate for including some of those advertising standards on owned channels to promote things internally. Here are a few examples:

• Site search.
• Navigation.
• Related content.
• “House ads” on key pages and emails.

Content Discovery Requires Marketing

M+R’s 2024 “Benchmarks” report shared several stats that are leading indicators of nonprofits starting to put more emphasis on content marketing. 

• Digital ad spends increased by 13%. In today’s world, relying on algorithms to show people your content is not enough. 
• About 50% of nonprofits are working with influencers to help tell their stories. Of this, 79% of these engagements are meant to educate and persuade audiences. That means storytelling that is not tied to a direct ask and shows the value of entertaining.
• There was a 12% increase in the volume of emails sent by nonprofits. This shows an increase in stories being pushed to owned audiences. 

Once content is created, the work has just started. Marketing that content allows it to fulfill its potential and do more for your mission. 

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.