Your Free Digital Marketing Campaign Checklist

Marketing strategies and techniques for nonprofits and charities.

Digital transformation in the nonprofit sector is a hot topic.

Nonprofit and charitable workers are incredibly skilled, but often overworked and under-resourced. But we know building digital capacity in the sector is a priority, and there are many organizations like the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience building sector-wide capacity. 

However, the question I hear most often from clients and colleagues is: “I don’t even know where to start.”

If this sounds like you, I want to offer you one starting point. A digital marketing campaign checklist. 

Below I’m going to go through each section of the campaign checklist you can use to build out a campaign marketing strategy, and you can download the full checklist for future reference here. 

Outline Your Campaign Goal

• Awareness

• Sales

• Leads

• Engagement

The first place you want to start is; what are you looking to achieve? Once you narrow down what you want, you’ll be able to map how to get there. This list is broken down into how most marketing platforms divide campaign goals; Awareness, Sales, Leads, and Engagement. Marketing language is primarily capitalist and consumer focused, so here’s how these can apply to nonprofit organizations:

• Awareness

• Examples: Organizational Awareness, Issue Awareness

• Purpose: Reaching as many people as possible, repeatedly.

• Sales

• Examples: Donations, Symbolic Gift Shops

• Purpose: Getting your audience to make a financial transaction

• Leads

• Examples: New donor leads, petition signatures

• Purpose: Obtain contact information of someone interested in your organization with the ability to engage with them on future issues and asks.

• Engagement

• Examples: Petition signatures, social shares, letters to representatives

• Purpose: Get audiences to engage with your content and take action in some way.

Define Your Audiences

• Demographic

• Affinity Audiences

• Custom Audiences

• Lookalike Audiences

• Exclusions 

You will want to think of your audiences in the context of the goal you outlined above. Is your goal to reach as many people as possible? Your audience is going to be wide. Is your goal to get donations from interested supporters? Your audience will be narrowed down to those most likely to give. 

• Demographic: Age, Location, Gender

• Affinity Audiences: Interests and behaviours of users available to target in platforms like Meta and Google. This can include pet owners, avid news readers, and hundreds of options worth browsing. 

• Custom Audiences: An audience list you own and is unique to your organization; email subscribers, Instagram followers, website visitors etc.

• Lookalike Audiences: Algorithm built audiences based on your custom audiences of users that share similar characteristics. Lookalike audiences can be defined by percentages with 1% being most like your custom audience and 10% most diverse (but still close) from your audience.

• Exclusions: Users you want to exclude for any reason. For example if you are trying to find new donors specifically, you may want to exclude your current donor list. 

Choose Media Platforms

• Google

• Dynamic Search

• Performance Max

• Video

• Other

• Meta

• Dynamic Creative

• Lead Form

• Carousel

• Other

• Other:

• Social Toolkits

• Microsoft Ads

• TikTok 

There are a number of advertising platforms, and within those platforms there are a number of options. Research where your desired audience is, and what campaign type aligns with your goals. For example if you are generating leads; using Facebook and Google’s lead form ads will be more effective than advertising on TikTok. 

Create a Media Spend Budget

• By Platform

• Campaign Pacing

• Benchmarking goals

Whether you have a set budget or are looking to figure out how much you should spend, there are a considerations to help you budget your media spend:

• Different platforms have different average costs, and have different options for applying your budget. Research these differences and what makes sense with your goals and audiences before settling on a number.

• How you pace your budget will depend on your goal and strategy. For example, a petition campaign with a deadline will need enough time to build momentum and more budget spent at the end when the deadline is approaching, a brand awareness campaign that will run over a few months may benefit from a modest daily budget spread evenly.

• Use past performance to help benchmark your goals and plan your budget. If you know that past campaigns have cost $1 per petition signed and you need 500 petition signatures, then you should budget $500. If you don’t have past performance to reference there are many outside sources you can review, M+R Benchmarks are a great resource (but don't forget to convert from $USD to $CAD!).
  

Develop Content

• Key Messaging

• Call to Action

• Taglines

• Keyword Strategy

• Copy

• Meta copy considerations; dynamic content vs carousel etc

• Google copy; follow ad guidelines, integrate keywords

• Creative:

• Outline correct specs

• Preview creative as it will appear on the platforms 

• Consider any A/B Tests

Writing and making content can be where a lot of people want to start, but you will save yourself time and see better results if you start developing content after you’ve set up the basics of your strategy. You might whip up a great Instagram caption, but if you realize your strategy will work better with Google ads that have character limits you’ll end up rewriting a lot of your work. 

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This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it empowers you to start building your capacity.
If you or your organization need help with a campaign please schedule an appointment and I’m happy to discuss!

And don’t forget to download your free checklist.