Full Audit + Marketing Strategy
Jett Hayes
Jett was very thorough in analyzing the digital marketing strategies of my nonprofit and suggesting specific improvements. He went page by page through my website and give detailed feedback with specific suggestions all explained in a way that was easy for me to understand. He also reviewed our four social media platforms and made recommendations that he knew were feasible for us to implement. Jett is knowledgeable, professional, and thoughtful in his digital marketing analysis. I would highly recommend him to any organization looking to improve their digital marketing approach.
Overview
Educate. Radiate. Elevate. (ERE) is a 501(c)3 non-profit operating in Texas and Ohio. It serves underprivileged and at-risk students, K-12, by providing tutoring, mentorship, and other resources.
Founded in late 2020, E.R.E. is a newer non-profit trying to gain inertia. Brand awareness is a huge concern for an up-and-coming nonprofit. E.R.E. also needs volunteers and donations to fuel its efforts, which it hopes to get through a variety of digital means.
Costs
E.R.E. relies on volunteers and donations for internal efforts, but it’s primary service is provided by skilled labor. As a former educator and the owner of a for-profit tutoring service, E.R.E.’s founder values skilled educators. Most of their tutors are paid – which requires steady capital. Another area in need of funding is technology – as a remote service, E.R.E. has to provide students with a laptop/tablet to facilitate learning.
🟦 Getting started:
Social Audit
E.R.E. has four active social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
During our initial call, the founder discussed the importance of organic growth and traffic, as funds were very limited. A resource E.R.E. did have to work with was Media Interns – who they used to write blogs, create graphics, and manage the social pages. While available to help, these interns were not trained copywriters, designers, or social managers.
As I evaluated the social media pages, a few things were clear:
-The content on these platform was unorganized, and lacked CTA’s
-The channels lacked clear strategy or messaging
-E.R.E was lacking compelling content
Website Audit
As mentioned, E.R.E. was looking to improve traffic to their website, as well as drive donations. I reviewed their website’s content, design, UX, and SEO. This was an area in need of work for multiple reasons, including:
– Inconsistent Messaging
– Poor User interface
– Convoluted Navigation
– Few CTA’s
– Poorly placed information + Wordy Copy
– Poor Flow
– Questionable Design Choices
– Poor Formatting
– Missing Alt text
– No Keyword or SEO Strategy
– Few Backlinks
Blog Audit
A properly used blog is a keystone for most good SEO strategies. E.R.E., as an education non-profit, has a decent niche to fill in the blog category.
E.R.E. already had a blog, but the template and format they used was in need of multiple updates, including:
– Keywords and a strategy
– Images and formatting (many blogs were just walls of text)
– CTA’s
– Internal linking
– A destination (blog pages were orphans)
🟪 Considerations
Limited Budget
E.R.E. needed improvements, but didn't have the budget to hire specialists, like Web designers, Social Media Managers, or Blog Copywriters.
Improvements needed to be low-budget and attainable.
Labor Skillset
E.R.E's internal employees were primarily young interns, with limited experience.
Suggestions and feedback, as well as standards moving forward, needed to be simple to understand and implement, as well as easy to teach.
🟧 Improvements
Social Media
To start, we needed to establish a recurrent plan and strategy for the four social media pages. I created an overview of the platforms that they used – What they were, the roles they play for businesses, and how best to take advantage of them.
The type and style of content E.R.E. produces is very important – it needs to be engaging, informative, and valuable – which is difficult for a non-profit. Social media, at it’s core, rewards engaging & enjoyable content, which is difficult for a business that produces little media.
We decided to focus content on a few topics to provide value to followers: Industry news, Relevant Events, E.R.E. News, Education, Holidays, and Blog Content. These content buckets provide a framework for creating and evaluating content for a less experienced team to work with.
Blogs
E.R.E.’s blog is very important to the success of their digital presence. Creating engaging content brings people to the website, allows authority to be established, and encourages backlinking/social sharing.
E.R.E.’s existing blog wasn’t bringing in their desired results for several reasons, which I identified and addressed.
First, they lacked any keyword strategy. From reading the blogs, you couldn’t tell anything about the brand, it’s intent, needs or location. I created a keyword document, as well as demonstrated the concept of creating keywords for a piece, to rectify this. Similarly, the blog pages lacked any CTA’s – there was not even a mention of E.R.E. as a company, the projects it was working on, it’s goals, or the need for donations; it was disconnected from its content. I created a template ‘needs paragraph’ based on one of their blogs and discussed with their team the rationale, and the process for creating one.
Next, formatting. E.R.E.’s blogs were massive walls of text, without punctuation, images, links, or other breaks. We implemented this change to improve readability and engagement. And finally, page linking. Their blogs were all orphan pages, with no links to other blogs, CTA’s, or other flow. We implemented ‘Next Blogs’ and other buttons to improve site engagement, page views, and user experience.
Website
This was an area of large improvement that is ongoing to this date. Due to budget restrictions, E.R.E. doesn’t currently have a web developer / designer, and as it’s website can be unintuitive and unpolished.
We were able to make some changes:
We create pages for a specific goal, and sometimes businesses forget that fact while building out a . E.R.E.’s site benefited greatly from a strategy and goal review of individual pages – “Why do we have this page, what does it do for our user?” We were able to trim a lot of extraneous content, streamline the flow of information, and create stronger CTA’s.
Image Quality: Many of the Sites pages had low resolution, blurry images, without descriptions or alt text. This was, for the most part, fixed.
Backlinks: E.R.E. was aware of backlinks, but having difficulty obtaining them. We strategized and implemented several methods to improve this. I also outlined several new potential avenues for obtaining them.
Navigation and User interface: This goes hand in hand with my concerns about design – I think that a well polished website is a huge indicator (in the users mind) of a pages authority and authenticity. We discussed the navigation and UI of the website in great detail: changes are still in progress.
🟩 Results
SEO is an ongoing process - in the months following our meeting organic traffic has steadily grown. Our backlinking strategy has been effective as well - ongoing efforts have continued to yield in quality links.
Regarding SEO,organic traffic has more than doubled. Social media channels are also improving, with higher post engagement and increased followers.
Takeaways 📣
Non-profits present a unique problem in marketing: they rely primarily on good will and donations, neither of which are inherent draws on digital channels. Trying to provide value to, and captivate, and audience with those limitations is difficult; with a limited budget it is even harder.
Educate. Radiate. Elevate has the mission, knowledge, and leadership to take it far - at the moment (barring changes in funding) their best path forward is through aggressive networking, outreach, and sticking to the strategies we implemented.
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Posted Jul 16, 2022
Working with a non-profit to optimize spending
