4 Reasons Why So Many Nonprofits Fail to Produce Consistent New Content

Is Your Nonprofit’s Content Strategy Failing? This Could Be Why

Consistently publishing new content has a direct impact on the awareness of your cause and your growth in fulfilling your mission.

Conceptually, this isn’t hard to understand. The more people who know about your mission, understand why it’s important, and care about its success, the more donors you’ll acquire.

But how to execute an effective content strategy for nonprofits isn’t always clear.

See 7 benefits of content marketing for nonprofits

In the post above, you’ll also discover that 55% of nonprofits don’t even have a blog, let alone use it consistently. But content marketing isn’t just about a blog, though that’s a key component. And it’s not just about email, social media, video, and even direct mail.

A content marketing strategy blends these and other components together around a central purpose and in the pursuit of a primary goal. For nonprofits, that goal might be greater awareness, new donor acquisition, current donor retention, or something else.

For most nonprofits though, the best use of online content in particular is for growth of your brand awareness and the mission you’re fulfilling. To attract new supporters and engage existing ones.

The Content Marketing Institute made a nice distinction between mission and purpose in this article about improving your content marketing. Your mission concerns who or what you’re helping. Your mission is your cause, the thing in the world that’s wrong that you’re trying to make right. But your purpose is to raise awareness and funds so you can fulfill your mission.

See the difference?

Your content fulfills your purpose, not your mission. So if you’re producing inconsistent content, or none at all, you’re failing to achieve your purpose. And that’s one reason you don’t have as many new or recurring donors as you want.

So why do so many nonprofits fail to produce consistent content? Here are four reasons:

1. They Don’t Know Their Own Stories

Some organizations need an internal cultural reset. They need to help their staff and volunteers see the difference between mission and purpose. Feeding the poor may be your mission, but the reason you get to do that mission is because you’re also working hard to involve your donors and supporters in your work and your story.

But so many nonprofits don’t know their stories. Why? It’s very easy to focus all your energy on helping people that you forget to write down what just happened.

Those stories – the successes, the failures, and the flameouts – are the lifeblood of your nonprofit. Your stories fuel your content strategy. They give you something to say. Here’s what’s going great. Here’s where people are struggling. This is why this problem is so hard to solve, and why we need your help. This is the vicious enemy or force we’re up against.

All these stories and narratives depend on reporting back what’s happening in ‘the field.’

A ‘cultural reset’ means that your on-the-ground staff needs to set aside time to document with words, images, and videos what’s going on, whether it’s good news, bad news, or no news. There’s a reason there’s no news sometimes. Tell THAT story too.

And documenting doesn’t always mean other people’s stories. It could be their own stories – your workers and volunteers. What are they up against? How are they feeling?

For help telling impactful stories, see The Anatomy of Fundraising Storytelling.

2. Lack of Vision

To be clear, “content” is different from “fundraising.” Direct fundraising appeals may include stories as well (and should!), but that type of production has a different purpose than content marketing.

You can tell when you’ve done content marketing well when your volunteers, recurring donors, and followers can tell your story to someone they’ve just met. So, sometimes the return on investment from content marketing isn’t immediate, and sometimes it’s hard to measure.

Suppose a donor tells a friend about your charity and why they donate to you. A year goes by. Something happens in that friend’s life that triggers their memory of that conversation. They look you up, see your great online content, stories, blogs, and videos, and decide to…

Follow you on Facebook.

They see your Facebook posts the next six months. They share a few. They even post a couple times. And after six months, they’re so excited about your mission that they decide to…

Sign up for your newsletter.

Another six months go by, and after loving your newsletter, you send them a Giving Tuesday appeal, at which point they decide to…

Donate! Finally!

Again, this is hypothetical, but it’s very typical. People have different life cycles. Some will progress through this journey much faster. Some will take even longer. Some will fall out at some point.

But some will become recurring and lifelong donors, and some will even one day put you in their will.

Measuring the ROI from all that, down to each individual email, video, blog post, and web page is pretty difficult. But this is how you should be building for long term growth that escalates each year.

A lack of vision from nonprofit leadership will snip, nibble, and hamstring these efforts because they don’t see an immediate payoff. Don’t let that happen without a fight.

3. Too Much Indecision and Fear

I’ve seen blog posts and emails get run through an assembly line of approvals and revision requests that eventually lands them in some kind of washing machine purgatory, forever tumbling around in circles but never seeing the light of day.

And often, the reason for this is because someone doesn’t like how something is worded, or they’re worried about a claim being made that doesn’t have hard data, or they’re unsure about the accuracy of every detail within a story.

I’m in no way advocating for sloppiness or falsehood. Far from it.

But in a well-oiled content strategy, you’re going to be cranking out content consistently, month after month, year after year. After ten years, you’ll have produced hundreds, perhaps thousands of pieces of content. Do you think that one claim made without data in one article from seven years ago is worth rubbing your chins about for two weeks?

It’s not.

Online content comes and goes so quickly in most cases. Your goal is continual engagement and the delivery of value. You will revisit the same themes over and over. You will tell some of the same stories multiple times. You will cite the same studies repeatedly.

To execute your nonprofit’s content strategy without it devouring all your time, you simply can’t waste time parsing and wordsmithing your blogs and newsletters so finely that every one of them takes two weeks to publish. Good is good enough. Hardly anyone reads every word of most of the content they encounter online. Online content is about headlines, subheadings, themes, big ideas, images, links to other resources, and actions.

You’re not writing academic studies, term papers, or instruction manuals. Online content is not journalism in the traditional sense. It serves a different purpose. Again – I’m not saying be sloppy or don’t edit. I’m not saying to mislead.

The point is, don’t allow the paralysis of analysis to impede your content production.

4. Lack of Quality Content Writers

A quality writer of online content is not an English major. In fact, no college degree exists at this time specifically geared toward online content marketing.

The truth is, a quality online content writer possesses a very different set of skills, one of which is the ability to produce valuable and effective content quickly. 

Writing a nonprofit blog or newsletter should take less than four hours in most cases. Often, it can be done in less than three. And that’s not just the first draft. That’s the entire process, including publishing it on your website or sending it out to your email list.

Quality online content writers write fast.

But, they also write well.

What quality online content writers do:

1. They write fast – see above
2. They understand how to incorporate SEO keywords into their content
3. They know how to structure content for readability and clarity
4. They understand how and when to link to articles and pages within the website, and with other websites
5. They know how to write online headlines
6. They understand the critical importance of calls to action – on every page of the website and in every email
7. They know the purpose of content – not just to be read, but shared across multiple channels and in different forms

If you send a raw video testimonial from a volunteer in the field to a quality content writer, that writer could turn that single video into a blog, an email, social posts, possibly an infographic, perhaps a case study, and more. Perhaps more than one of each of these.

3 Reasons Why Every Nonprofit Needs to Produce More Content

Nonprofit Quarterly published an article a while back giving three reasons every nonprofit should be producing more content.

Producing content:

1. Positions you as a credible and trustworthy ‘brand’
2. Helps you stand out from the pack of nearly 2 million nonprofits in the US alone
3. Keeps you alive – it’s not enough to just do good work these days

With so many nonprofits, content is how you’ll get noticed. We don’t like to think of other nonprofits as competition, but in many ways they are, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you want them to fail. But it does mean you need to do whatever it takes for you to rise above them so you can better fulfill your mission.

So make your content plan. Then implement it.

It is that simple, and that complex, all at the same time.

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