Marketing For Animal Rescues

Marketing and advertising for your nonprofit involves creating awareness for your program and driving your supporters to action. You can use regular marketing tools to promote your mission for fundraising or to gain volunteers. Use clear messaging and great photography throughout the entire donor journey.

If you’re managing your nonprofit’s marketing, here are some marketing strategy tips that might help you out.

Common challenges to marketing

Let’s face it, time and resources are likely two of your biggest challenges. Expertise is definitely another one. The quickly changing marketing and fundraising space, including technology and donor-giving habits, makes it difficult for even the experts to keep up. 

The good news is that you’re probably overthinking it. In most cases, just doing the marketing basics really well can produce amazing results!

Marketing strategy for animal charities

With time, money, and expertise in mind, here’s how you can develop a simple yet effective marketing strategy for your nonprofit.

First, take inventory of those items and figure out a general game plan. In some cases, your marketing strategy will be to maximize the results of the time and effort you can spend. 

Second, determine your goals and outline the main steps needed to achieve those goals. This is an excellent time to focus on areas of opportunity or new programs you want to develop. You can also add partnership objectives to your marketing goals. 

Lastly, think about how you can create value with your marketing efforts for exponential results. One example might be to spend your time building a beautiful newsletter template that can be used each month rather than creating a single, one-time email.

Marketing channels & frequency

Every great marketing plan also has a great content strategy. Find out who your audience is and develop compelling content for your top marketing channels. You can create a few pieces of core content and repurpose them for different channels and promotions.

Here are a few marketing channels you can use and how often you should be using them.

Your website

The best place to invest some time and resources is your website. Even if people find you on Facebook, they will still visit your nonprofit or shelter website to learn more about you. There are several great options for making your own very professional, effective, and fully functional websites. 

Invest in branded and authentic photography and create some excellent mission-driven calls to action. In addition to promoting your mission and services, spend time creating unique content to motivate and educate your supporters.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Don’t let SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) intimidate you. Google helps make SEO easy to understand, and their PPC platform is actually quite simple to use. I’m talking about the basics of course, but the foundation is built on the basics. 

The reason Search Engine Marketing (SEM) should be considered in your high-level marketing strategy is because of how powerful it is when done right. Google, Bing, Facebook, YouTube, and Yelp are all Search Engines. SEO and SEM are about being found on these platforms, and if your supporters, volunteers, and donors can’t find you, then you have some work to do.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The foundation of SEO is two things. Creating content with the right words and in the proper structure.

If you cover your topic thoroughly, you don’t need to worry about “keywords” because you’ll capture “search intent.” Google, the leading search engine, wants to provide its search users with the best answer to the search. If your page talks about that topic in-depth, your page is more likely to rank higher than another website that barely covers it.

The structure of your content or page is also essential. Google likes what people like, so it’s important to make your page an excellent experience for your visitors. Include things like clear headlines and titles, authentic pictures, short paragraphs of text, links to other resources, and buttons and CTAs to learn more or donate.

Paid Advertising And Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

In most cases, paid advertising should be used to supplement the free channels. The reason is that the free channels are your best value and most sustainable because they are not reliant on PPC. With that said, PPC can work wonders for a nonprofit or rescue.

Google offers 501(c)(3) nonprofits a Grant for $10,000 a month in free advertising. The Google Grant is a great place to start, but it has its limitations.

Display advertising, Retargeting, and more dynamic PPC campaigns are easy to build and manage in Google’s AdWords. You can set daily and monthly budgets to easily test campaigns and control your budgets. Consider including a PPC budget to support events, fundraising, or new programs if you’ve already mastered the Grant.

Email marketing

Every organization should have email marketing and newsletters in its marketing strategy. Emails are a great way to connect with your audience because they can be content-driven. People will engage and make donations or purchases through email.

Email platforms are inexpensive and usually priced based on the email list sizes. Spend time early on improving your email and newsletter templates and plan your communications calendar. Send emails when you have something to say, which should be a few times a month.

Local advertising

Most nonprofits and rescue groups support a specific location, city, or state. Making local advertising a focus of your charity’s marketing strategy will significantly improve results and impact. And yes, marketing for “local” does require a few considerations to improve location-based intent.

First, claim all your local listings on directories like Google My Business, Bing Places, Yelp, etc. Check your area and industry to find other directories for your market. Ensure your address, contact information, and descriptions are consistent across all listings.

Next, when you are content with local intent, try including local terms, geographic keywords, and includes address information. By including city terms and location-based keywords, you help the search engines, and users know that the service is tied to a physical location.

Be creative!

Whether you’re with a nonprofit, charity, humane society, rescue group, or veterinary practice, every organization has a unique value proposition and opportunities. Find out what opportunities you have and get creative.

Once you have a good foundation for your marketing strategy, it’s time to include a few creative ideas to keep your supporters engaged.

Host movie nights via Zoom for fundraising or featured volunteer nights. Offer an “open to the public” day at your humane society and invite local press and radio stations. You can also leverage local corporate partnerships with cross-branded products or services.