Nonprofit Lead Magnets: The Ultimate Guide
How to Write and Market a Lead Magnet Story that Attracts Lifelong, Committed Donors and Supporters
If you never acquired a single new donor for ten years, what would happen to your nonprofit?
Silly question, obviously. It would be utter disaster.
The tougher question of course is, how do you create a sustainable and effective donor acquisition pipeline?
While there are many avenues you can and should be pursuing, one of the most effective online acquisition funnels utilizes nonprofit lead magnets. With the proper marketing funnel working in the background, your nonprofit can use a lead magnet to attract and retain a consistent flow of new email subscribers and future donors.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
What Is a Lead Magnet?
In the marketing world, the term ‘lead magnet’ has come to mean anything your customers want that you can offer them for free in exchange for their contact information.
To be absolutely clear on this – the purpose of a lead magnet is to get contact information. Not to get a donation. Online, that means email. Yes, it’s good to get social media followers, as well as phone numbers and physical addresses. But email is job one. You can get everything else later once you have their email.
You don’t need a one-time donation from a stranger you never hear from again. Those are great of course, but you want ongoing committed supporters who give regularly. Some of these will turn into monthly donors, others into major donors, and still others will one day put your nonprofit in their wills and estate plans.
It all begins with getting their email address, and the best way to get that is using a lead magnet.
Examples of lead magnets include:
- Quizzes, surveys, and polls
- Stories and case studies
- Special reports
- Exclusive videos
- Webinars
- Podcast episodes
- Infographics
- Research studies
There are others, but hopefully you get the idea. These are all items you can offer people. But to get them, your website visitors must give you their email address.
To make that happen, the lead magnet you’re offering must be something they WANT.
That means it must be relevant, or timely, or captivating, or emotionally charged.
A food bank should not create a quiz that asks political views. But it could do a poll about your favorite fruit. That’s a pretty lowball offer though, because everyone has a favorite fruit, but not everyone cares about food banks.
Secrets to Lead Magnets That Actually Attract People
The first secret to an effective nonprofit lead magnet is that it attracts your ideal audience, not just anyone. It must be about something your likely donors will care about.
Next, it must engage that audience. The more effort they must expend to consume your lead magnet, the more likely they will choose to let you into their life. A poll takes very little effort to consume. A webinar takes much more.
But, webinars are also hard to produce consistently. You can use ‘evergreen’ webinars, meaning the same one gets re-marketed indefinitely. And if you can make it work, that’s a great strategy. For most nonprofits though, anything with higher production value is harder to pull off.
What do you want to see happen from your lead magnet? You want to draw them in. You want to touch their emotions. You want to get past their brains and into their hearts, break down their walls of mistrust and objection.
The way we do that best is with a Story of Impact.
Best Nonprofit Lead Magnet Idea: Stories of Impact
Businesses might call this a case study. For nonprofits, it’s a story.
If you can tell a great story about the difference your nonprofit made in the life of one beneficiary, or perhaps a small group, you will build your email list with new supporters who are excited to be there.
Let’s look at how to do that.
How to Write Your Story of Impact – 4-Step Guide
Telling a great story requires a combination of art and structure. But it begins before any of that. Here’s a 4-step guide to writing a great story.
1. Choose the Right Story
There are four primary features of a good lead magnet story.
Before and After
First, a great story has a clear before and after. What was life like before your nonprofit arrived, and how is it different now? How has the person’s life you are featuring changed for the better?
And yes, even performing arts nonprofits can do this. You could tell a story of a performer or artist, and how it has changed their life to be part of such a great production. You could tell a story of someone who attended a performance and how it affected their life.
Your Nonprofit Saves the Day
Second, a great lead magnet story must feature your nonprofit playing a critical role.
In other words, you must be a primary reason the beneficiary’s life changed for the better. Without you, they would not be where they are now.
If the change could have happened without you, it’s not a good story for a lead magnet. You want your readers to be drawn into the struggle your story subject faced, and watch as their life changed once they came in contact with your organization.
The impact must be linked to your influence.
Relevant Photos
Third, you need to have useful and relevant photos. An online lead magnet story cannot be just words. You will need a cover design. And inside the PDF you’ll eventually create, you’ll want photos to break up the text.
Is this relevant to this article?
Image credit:
Image by Ilona Ilyés from Pixabay
But not just any photos. You want pictures that relate to the story. Now, if the story happened ten years ago, that’s okay. You can still find photos of the places, and perhaps some of the people involved. The best of course is to have photos of the person the story is about.
There are certain nonprofits that have a hard time with this, because anonymity for the people they serve is crucial. For example, kids rescued from human trafficking, women escaping domestic violence.
Here, you want to tease out details of the story, and get photos that enhance the story.
A girl rescued from trafficking, for example, will know the places in her city where certain incidents took place. Get pictures of those. A woman escaping domestic violence might have visited a hospital, or fled to a store or a hotel. Or, there might be an object with particular significance to the story.
A good photographer will be able to help with these sorts of details. And it’s worth it.
Your readers will be captivated.
Lasting Transformation
Fourth, your story needs to have aged well.
This should be a story that happened a few years ago. The reason is because you don’t want to tell a great story and then find out the person relapsed, or the situation fell through, or they ended up in jail, or whatever outcome you don’t want to communicate.
Yes, not all stories end well, and nonprofits should not be afraid of telling those stories.
But not in a lead magnet.
This story must end well, and we must be able to see the lasting impact of your nonprofit’s influence. Why? Because you want to use this lead magnet for years. You want it to be an ‘evergreen’ asset.
2. Find a Compelling Structure
As any great novelist or screenwriter will tell you, great stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
But what does that mean? Does that mean you must tell your story chronologically? Not necessarily. But if you do decide to use a non-linear structure, you still must start at the beginning. In other words, you start at the place most likely to draw in your readers and make it impossible for them to stop reading.
For many nonprofit stories, that place is a moment of desperation. Put the reader into your beneficiary’s world. Find a moment where they faced something beyond their ability to handle it. Let your reader feel what they felt.
You probably won’t resolve that situation right away. Remember, your nonprofit’s role in the story will show how this person’s life changed. You don’t want to give that away at the start. You want to lead up to that.
Figure out the key turning points in the person’s life, and build the structure around those.
3. Inject Emotion into Your Structure
Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay
Make sure you spend enough time in the ‘before’ stage to make your readers feel what this person felt.
If they were hopeless, your readers should feel hopeless, and wonder how life could ever improve. If they were desperate, the reader should feel their desperation, that they had exhausted all possibilities and tried everything they could think of, and nothing worked. If they were discouraged, the reader should feel discouraged with them. In other words – you want empathy. You want your readers to feel what your beneficiary felt.
That way, when the turning point arrives, and your nonprofit enters the scene, the reader is enthralled at how the situation has turned – against their expectations.
Surprise is a powerful emotion. If you can surprise your readers, you have told a great story, one they will remember and possibly tell their friends and family about.
Then, when you describe their new life, the reader should see that the change produced is permanent. That’s why the best stories for lead magnets are ones that didn’t just happen this year. Their new life should have its own new direction, with new goals, and new hope and optimism.
Things should be tangibly, specifically, and inarguably far better than before. Not perfect. Just better.
How long should this story be?
Including a handful of photos and a large font (14 point recommended for PDFs), if you hit 20 pages, you’re pushing your luck. I don’t believe in absolute limits. Great stories are as long as they need to be. But ideally, you want your readers to be able to get through the whole thing in less than an hour. You’re not writing a book.
4. Avoid Self-Worship and Excessive Organizational Detail
A great story can’t be boring.
A great story can’t be boring.
A great story can’t be boring.
Got that? This cannot be stressed too much. And nothing is more boring that jumping out of a story into a bunch of organizational details and self-worship – how great our nonprofit is.
If a homeless ministry helps a guy get off the street, and that’s the story you’re telling, don’t take this opportunity to describe the entire free-meal part of the organization. Don’t tell us who founded it, how often they serve meals, what they serve, the number of people helped, where you get the food, or how long it’s been operating. And please, do not mention your budget or your need for more funds.
All of that stuff is boring. You’re telling a story.
The one exception to this is if any of those things played an essential role in the person’s story.
So, perhaps they arrived at the shelter on a day when the founder happened to be on site, and meeting that person had a huge impact on them. Then we do want to know about the founder – a little.
But keep the focus on the subject of the story.
Make sense? Don’t be boring.
What to Do After Writing Your Lead Magnet Story – Marketing and List Building
Once your non-boring, emotionally gripping, well-structured story is done, you need to prepare it for marketing and to serve its lead generation purpose.
Here’s your action plan:
- Design the story as an eBook/PDF.
- Design a cover – pay a graphic designer to do this.
- Create a landing page on your website, with an email signup form that connects to your email provider.
16-point nonprofit landing page checklist
- Write a thank-you page, on which you ‘upsell’ them by asking for a gift, and then a ‘downsell’ that asks them to share the eBook landing page with their friends, or sends them to a high-impact blog or other key web page on your site.
See 5 thank-you page essentials, with an example from ASPCA
- Write an email welcome series of at least 3 emails that engages them with your nonprofit, expands on your mission and the impact they can have, reminds them to read the eBook in case they didn’t, and shares at least one other story.
- Advertise the eBook on social media, through email (tell your list to share it with friends), and on Google Ad Grants. 4 insider secrets to get more clicks in Ad Grants.
And, consider promoting it at your fundraising events too – you have a captive audience. Tell them to share it on their social media accounts.
See the Anatomy of a Fundraising Story – 6 components of a great story
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