5 Best Strategies to Boost Your Nonprofit’s Growth This Year

Growing your nonprofit requires acquiring new donors, retaining existing ones, and launching fundraisers that engage your audience. Of course, this is all easier said than done considering the necessary planning, relationship-building, and resource investments that go into a dedicated growth strategy.

Fortunately, this guide offers a few tips for expanding your nonprofit in new and dynamic ways, while also helping you stay organized and on track. Specifically, we’ll cover how to:

  1. Create an Annual Plan to Grow Your Nonprofit
  2. Promote Matching Gifts
  3. Consider Influencer Marketing
  4. Partner With Corporations to Grow Giving
  5. Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy

All of these strategies have the potential to grow your nonprofit. Assess your organization’s resources and growth goals to determine which approach best fits your unique situation.

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1. Create an Annual Plan to Grow Your Nonprofit

Sustainable growth requires a plan. Determine why your nonprofit wants to grow, what programs you want to expand, and how you plan to accomplish that expansion.

For example, an animal shelter might want to broaden its foster network to support more animals. To do so, they hope to grow their supporter base to provide more funding to fosters and secure more volunteers. To acquire more supporters, they plan to focus heavily on community outreach by hosting events and partnering with local organizations.

Translate your goal into concrete steps and compose a fundraising calendar. A fundraising calendar is essentially your nonprofit’s map for the future. Add every activity you’ll complete to accomplish your goal, whether that’s hosting a phone-a-thon or promoting your year-end campaign. Include details about who is handling what responsibility, how much everything will cost, and the expected return on investment for each activity.

2. Promote Matching Gifts

Growing revenue requires asking supporters to increase their donations to your nonprofit. However, some donors may be eligible for matching gifts, meaning they can double their impact for free.

When a supporter gives to your cause, they may be eligible to apply for an employer match, also known as a matching gift. This means an eligible $50 donation can become $100, without any extra cost to your donors.

However, many donors don’t know if they’re eligible, if their employer has matching gift requirements, or what matching gifts are. Resolve these issues and grow your nonprofit by promoting matching gifts. Try some of these ideas:

  • Create a dedicated matching gifts page. Any new or ongoing fundraising initiative can use a dedicated page on your website explaining what it is and how it works. Create a page specifically about matching gifts or add matching gifts to your pre-existing Ways to Give page with steps for getting started.
  • Follow up with donors. Matching gifts require donors to take several actions after making their initial gift. Encourage them to cross the finish line by following up with reminders to check eligibility and complete their employers’ matching gift request forms.
  • Promote matching gifts regularly. A matching gift request can be sent after every donation, so keep the concept fresh in supporters’ minds by regularly promoting them. For example, you might add a routine reminder in your newsletter, make social media posts about matching gifts, or add a matching gift reminder right on your donation page.

Additionally, matching gifts can also boost donor retention and engagement. After all, by enabling them to give more, supporters feel they’re making a bigger difference, increasing their investment in your nonprofit.

3. Consider Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become the most recent buzzword in nonprofit marketing, but reaching out to social media celebrities might not have occurred to many smaller nonprofits.

Fortunately, influencer marketing is more accessible than you might think. While major influencers with audiences of millions certainly have the widest reach, working with smaller influencers with a few thousand followers can sometimes be just as—if not more—effective at promoting your cause.

When reaching out to influencers, first assess their audiences and content. Choose individuals whose content aligns with your nonprofit’s offerings and mission or those who have audiences likely to be receptive to your cause. For instance, an Instagram account with a few thousand followers that shows off cute videos of their pet is likely a better partner for an animal rights nonprofit than a TikTok beauty influencer with millions of followers.

Additionally, look at your current support base. Peer-to-peer campaigns are essentially influencer marketing on a much smaller scale. In fact, dedicated supporters who participate in peer-to-peer campaigns are often called “ambassadors.” They have very small audiences—sometimes just their immediate friends and family—but they’re willing to advocate for your cause through word-of-mouth marketing.

4. Partner With Corporations to Grow Giving

Businesses, even small ones, have resources that can benefit your nonprofit. Whether it’s funding, event space, or products, accessing these resources may be as easy as asking for them, as long as your nonprofit has the right pitch.

To form successful corporate partnerships, follow these steps:

  • Identify potential sponsors. Determine which businesses will be receptive to a sponsorship agreement. These might be corporations that have philanthropic missions that align with yours or have sponsored other nonprofits in the past. Your board can be useful in sourcing these relationships and setting up introductions for your nonprofit.
  • Focus on sponsor benefits. Corporations partner with nonprofits for various reasons, including enriching their own business. Specifically, businesses want to partner with nonprofits where the expected reputation boost is worth the cost of support. 360MatchPro’s guide to corporate philanthropy recommends creating sponsorship tiers before starting these conversations as they provide a foundation for discussing the benefits:

An example of sponsorship tiers with the highest gold tier promising the most support in exchange for the highest donation amount.

  • Refine your pitch. For fundraisers that need many corporate sponsors, like an event, approach your most valued sponsors later in the process. By starting with lower and middle-value businesses, you’ll get experience giving your pitch, increasing your team’s confidence and gaining insight into how to improve your presentation.

Above all, thank corporate sponsors, no matter what agreement was reached. This lays the groundwork for potential future partnerships, which can earn your nonprofit a reliable stream of funding and resources.

5. Create an Inbound Marketing Strategy

There are two main types of marketing: inbound and outbound. Getting Attention’s guide to nonprofit advertising explains the difference between these concepts:

“Outbound marketing involves reaching out to the public using paid channels (i.e., advertising) to get them interested in your organization. Examples include print advertising, social media ads, pay-per-click advertising, radio ads, and telemarketing. Inbound marketing focuses on creating and distributing unpaid content to draw people into your mission. Inbound tactics can include search engine optimization (SEO), earned social media, blogging, and other forms of content production.”

So far, we have primarily focused on outbound marketing, which can help pull in new supporters over short periods. In contrast, inbound marketing is an investment in long-term growth as prospective donors discover your nonprofit and walk themselves through the conversion process with little direct action from you.

To power your inbound marketing strategy, keep SEO in mind when creating new content. SEO best practices make your content more search engine-friendly, increasing the chances that it will rank highly on search engine results pages and be seen by more prospective supporters.

For example, before writing a blog post about current environmental concerns, you might perform keyword research to see what topics are trending and what specific phrases and words searchers are using. This might help you discover that the keyword “energy consumption” has a higher search volume than “energy saving best practices,” but that the latter is less competitive. Which of these keywords you choose to target would then depend on your current goals.

Boosting Your Nonprofit’s Growth for the Long Term

Growing your nonprofit is exciting, but it should also be done so deliberately and with an eye to sustainability. Try long-term fundraisers like matching gifts or form long-lasting partnerships with influencers and businesses to attract new audiences. Above all, have a solid road map you can follow to ensure all your efforts are working toward the same goal.

Here are three other fundraising resources your nonprofit should check out:

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