How I did it and how I'm measuring it's success.
First off, let me just say that I am in no way a marketing guru. I'm a designer, web and interaction to be specific. That being said, I am the solo editor/coder/designer/creator of a non-profit's website, Forever Amber Acres Animal Sanctuary (FAAAS for short). No, I don't get paid and no, I don't want to be paid for this work. FAAAS provides me with the freedom to learn and experiment with WordPress and in return all I have to do it keep their website nice and relatively up to date. It has been a wonderful experience and one of my favorite portfolio pieces. I would also like to clarify what a marketing campaign is.
A marketing campaign is a focused, tactical initiative to achieve a specific marketing goal.
So, enough with the introductions. How do I create a marketing campaign for a non-profit? How do I help bring in donations and provide new people with an amazing facility? Well first, analyze your brand. FAAAS has a simple 4 color scheme (white, turquoise, brown, and black). Their audience is usually local families with pets or other horse owners. The brand itself uses a lot of wholesome imagery of people in the barn helping the animals, very authentic and humble. They are also slightly religious with growing feelings of patriotism. For the website I use the fonts Impact and Palatino. Make sure when you are working with a brand they have fonts that are web-ready. Google Fonts has a huge selection.
Timeline
Now that you've taken a look at your brand, your audience, and hopefully you've reminded yourself of the goal somewhere in there. Now begin setting a timeline. Since a campaign is more targeted than a marketing plan, it will usually take less time. When working on this project, it took about 3 weeks to do the designing, testing, and reviewing. We planned for the campaign to actually run for a week. It's actually still running here.
Media
After setting a timeline, make sure you review which types of media you want to use to promote your campaign. FAAAS went with primarily Facebook and the website. There's also posts on Twitter and Instagram. We built graphics around each of these platforms and are using them to drive traffic to the website.
The landing page on the website was designed after crowd sourcing sites. They set an obvious goal and also show progress towards that goal with the additional option for social media sharing, imagery, and supporting text. It's also a simple design to replicate and customize to match your brand.
Measuring Success
Besides the overall goal of raising money, I also want to track the success of the webpage. I'm using Google's analytics tracker to keep an eye on an increase in traffic to the page as well as a sharing button for Facebook (it has a built in counter so not much effort needed there). Through Google Analytics I am able to target the specific page I want to measure. Not to mention it's free and can really help you develop ad campaigns.
Since FAAAS is so small, I've set a simple goal of having 15 users a day with at least 1 of those being new. I am expecting a fairly high bounce rate since this is a campaign asking for money, not a product that someone will be paying for. I also hope to keep my audience within the US.
Stay tuned for an update to this post next week where I'll let you know if we met our goal and how well the page did!