Lou
Kotsinis

The 4 Steps to Growing Your Cause Online 

I’m always astounded when I watch my daughter play violin. It’s such a complex process. How can she coordinate all of those different motions to produce that beautiful sound? How can anyone play violin?  

Having watched her now for 8 years though, I’ve realized that playing violin is really just a series of steps:

1. Hold the violin properly on your shoulder

2. Align your left-hand fingers correctly on the fingerboard (if you’re right-handed)

3. Place your bow perpendicular over the strings, using proper fingering

4. Pull the bow up and down to produce a clear sound

Of course, there’s more to it than this. But breaking the process down into its basic components and proceeding in sequence makes it accessible and achievable.  

(Alexandra, age 5, at her first violin lesson).

This same principle applies to growing your cause online. What seems at first like an overwhelming challenge is quite simple when broken down into its component parts. From there, it requires discipline and drive, but the heavy lifting’s been done. 

So, if you’re looking to grow but are thinking “where do I even start?” this post is for you. 

The 4 Steps to Growing Your Cause Online

Each step rests upon the foundation of your organization’s story. Here, “story” can mean any or all of the following terms: mission, brand, messaging, positioning, or simply: story. It’s your story – your reason for existence – that drives the entire process. 

Step #1: The Foundation: Cultivating the Story

Any cause-based organization’s most powerful marketing asset is its story. Whether your mission is related to education, health, the environment, social or civic issues, your aim is to help the world – and therein lies a beautiful, human story. Your first step then, is to uncover and develop that message.  

Questions to Guide the Process: 

Story development is a topic unto itself, but in essence, you’re looking to address the following questions:

What’s our mission?

The starting point for story development is to define your mission – i.e., the reason your cause exists.

You can go deep here if you’d like, researching, discussing with internal stakeholders, talking to your best prospects, etc. But in truth, this one should be intuitive. If you can define what your organization does and why you do it, you have a working mission. 

Who is our audience?

As you’re developing your story, you’ll need to consider the people with whom you’ll be sharing that story. 

This too, doesn’t need to be an especially heavy lift. You probably already have a feel for your most important audiences. But in short, you’ll want to think deeply about who the groups and individuals are that you serve (i.e. program recipients), and that sustain you (i.e., donors, volunteers, etc). 

Organize potential audiences into these two groups, then consider which are the most critical to your growth. While you can, of course, have more than one audience, once you go beyond two or three key audiences, your story will lose its potency, as you’ll be diluting messaging to satisfy disparate groups. 

How do we adapt our story to our audience?

You’ve now established two important elements: your foundational messaging and your key audiences. The final step is to shape your messaging to meet the needs of specific audiences. 

Your story will resonate more deeply and thus, produce stronger results if you’re able to nuance it for your chosen audiences, based on the intended action you’re looking for. A prospect is more likely to respond if they see themselves in your story.  Wouldn’t they be more apt to take action if they felt you were speaking directly to them?  

Once you’ve created your story, defined your audiences, and tweaked your messaging for maximum effect, you’ve developed the fundamental element for effective outreach. Now the fun begins. 

Step 2. Website: Convey the Story 

Your website is the primary vehicle for conveying your story. The real estate is entirely yours; use it to engage audiences and move them toward your cause. For a deeper dive into what constitutes a great nonprofit website, check out my webinar, Optimizing Your Website for Growth and Happy Donors. When assessing your own website, here are the key things to consider.

Questions to Guide the Process

Does our website convincingly tell our story? 

In the previous step, you developed a narrative to engage your top prospects, one that was relatable and focused on getting them to take action. Your website should seamlessly and effectively deliver that story to the world, as follows:

– Story messaging should be prominently featured, logically organized and properly distributed across your site. Whether it’s text, video, or imagery, all of your content needs to focus on story, and in a way that is easily accessible to your audiences

– Wherever possible and appropriate, showcase the impact of your organization’s work. Of course, this should happen on a donation page – but also throughout the site as well. Cite data, provide testimonials, and feature personal stories that add weight to your storyline.   

Does it convey our brand? 

NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway defines brand as “the sum of associations, emotions, and memories that a consumer has towards a product or service.” This same definition applies to nonprofit causes. All of your program recipients, donors, board, and supporters have a certain set of feelings towards your cause. Does the experience you’re giving them online match and reinforce those feelings? 

Yes, your logo plays a role here, but more broadly, does your website provide the same benefits – education, consistency, quality, and so forth – that your cause is known for?  

Are visitors enjoying a great experience? 

Your website should be structured in a way that visitors can find what they’re looking for easily and intuitively – thereby not disrupting their experience of your story, and helping guide them toward an intended action. Not only should your website’s navigation help visitors delve deeper into your story, but all of your site’s technology, forms, and related action items should work flawlessly, helping to answer questions and foster a positive association toward your cause. 

Step 3. Social Media: Share the Story 

Your website is the anchor of your online story. Visitors can now find you via search, immerse themselves in your brand, and learn about the impact your cause delivers. 

But while the site serves a crucial role in capturing your story, you’ll also need to focus on getting that story out to the public at-large, on a continual and dynamic basis. That means developing your social media presence. 

Questions to Guide the Process:

Who comprises our online community? 

At the start of this post, I talked about understanding your audience to guide your messaging. The better you can nuance your story to the needs of your audience, the more likely that message will resonate and translate into action. 

This same principle applies to communicating on your social channels, and here you’ve got some advantages:

• First, just by paying attention to what people are saying on your social feeds, as well as what content they are liking and sharing, you’ll get a feel for who those audience members are in a general sense. 

• Second, all social platforms offer audience insight tools where you can get baseline data – like age, gender and location – that can help you build a stronger picture of who makes up your community.

Use this information to adapt and disseminate your story in ways that inspire your audiences and bring your online community together. 

How can we bring them value, based on our story? 

When it comes to social media, many organizations make the mistake of posting content that is primarily self-serving – i.e., “here’s our upcoming gala, here’s an award we won, we had a great time at XYZ event,” etc. But this approach does nothing to highlight your story (the reason why people want to follow you to begin with), and given that most people have limited time and thousands of other social pages competing for their attention, can actually have the effect of turning people away.   

Instead, think about your story and break it down into multiple components. Who do you serve? Why do you serve them? What impact have you made? And then, build posts and content from there. In other words, deliver value to your community. Define who they are and what they want to hear about, and build on that foundation. 

How can we get them to spread the word? 

While immersing your community in your story, you should be encouraging them to share that story with like-minded people. You can make a direct ask here, but the more effective option is to provide content that “shares itself,” namely content that’s:

Relevant – Are you solving problems and addressing needs?

Educational – Are you teaching in your area of expertise?   

Interesting – Are you posting content in a unique/nicely-packaged/authentic/engaging way?  

This builds on the value proposition I discussed above. If it’s content worth their time – and something they feel will benefit a friend or family member, your audience will spread your story for you. 

Step 4. Email: Personalize the Story 

The beauty of email is that it allows you to educate, inspire and connect with individuals based on what you’ve already learned about them. Utilize this platform to speak to your audience members one-on-one.

Questions to Guide the Process

Who comprises our email subscriber base? 

If there’s a throughline across the 4 Steps I’ve discussed here, it’s understanding your audience. Strong knowledge of audience leads to a high-performing website and a thriving social community; it also means that you’ll be able to tailor email communications to their interests, thereby increasing the chances that they’ll open and engage with your outreach. 

How can we segment our list based on interests?

Hopefully, you’re building your email lists through the good, old-fashioned double-opt-in method. As such, individuals have to fill out a form on your website or social page to join the list. That’s your opportunity to add questions that help you understand their interests.

You can gain additional feedback as you monitor the emails your subscribers open and the links that they click on within each email. As you gather this information, you can begin to segment your audiences into different interest groups and then – based on your core story – tweak your email to speak to each group in a personalized fashion.  

How can we provide value to each segment? 

Through segmentation, you’ll deliver value (another theme of this post) to your email subscribers, who rather than receiving a boring, standard list of generic announcements, will get content that speaks to their interest in your organization and meets their needs as stewards of your cause. 

So there they are – the 4 Steps to Growing Your Cause Online.

Cultivate. Tap into your story. Use it to inspire and engage.

Convey. Create a website that immerses audiences in your story.

Share. Based on your story, build a thriving social community. 

Personalize. Use email to nurture committed audience members.

Note that you don’t necessarily have to follow these steps in order. Employ them based on where you are in your marketing. But breaking things down this way makes the process achievable and allows you to focus on weaker areas.

Lastly, remember that nothing here is “one and done;” growing your cause online (just as offline) is a continual process. Embrace these steps as something that’s part of your organization’s DNA; make them a habit, and over time you will reap the rewards in the form of a large and vibrant community that supports your mission and continually spreads the word on your behalf. 

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