Is Your Nonprofit Blogging? Why You Should Get Writing

“Marketing without a blog is like holding a wine tasting without the wine. Your blog is that hero ingredient that gets people raving about you.” – Amy Butcher, MarketingProfs

We all know that if you can get people to rave about your nonprofit, they will probably support it if not also promote it. If you’re going to invest time in your website and social media presence, you should optimize your efforts through nonprofit blogging.

Blogging is a nonprofit marketer’s secret to successful SEO, a clean website, a wide array of shareable content, and most importantly, informed and excited donors and volunteers. In the following bullets, we will point you to what we mean and why we love nonprofit blogging.

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  • Another place to tell your story

“…after executing its mission, the most important thing a nonprofit can do is communicate that impact.” – Joe Waters, Hubspot

Nonprofit marketing specialist, Joe Walters, underlines that telling your story is second only to the actual work of your nonprofit. One of the most effective ways to communicate is through writing and imagery and one of the most accessible platforms for this content is a blog. Look back at our post on how to tell this story in: How Do You Sum Up Your Nonprofit Online?

  • Another method to understanding your mission

You may have heard the quote by David McCullough,

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly”

In short, if you devote the time to a blog, you are not only contributing to the blog itself, but also to the clarity of your nonprofit’s mission. You are taking the time to understand your mission enough to clearly articulate it to the world. And that is time well spent.

  • Successful SEO

With a blog you first produce additional written content, providing more room to incorporate SEO. However, it also provides you with another space for content in general as you can compile imagery, infographics, video and podcasts for your blogs.

Not only does this give you a leg up as far as informing your audience, but it also provides more room for SEO through your content’s titles, descriptions, captions and ALT tags. If you want to learn more, read ALT Text: The Ins & Outs of Using Photo Description Tags and Blogging & SEO Best Practices.

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  • Successful tracking

Unlike tradition press releases, with nonprofit blogging, you can analyze who came to your blog, how long they stayed, how they found it and much more with analytics. It’s no longer a mystery of what happened to your recent article or even what people are looking at on your site. If you have a targeted blog, you can better track what’s going on for your readers. Read more about Google Analytics and Successful Tracking.

  • A tidier website

Your nonprofit has a lot to say, but that doesn’t fit well with a clean and effective homepage. In order to remove some of the confusion when someone lands on your site, you need to ensure that your home page and consecutive landing pages are not too filled with text and other content.

The solution? Blogging, of course! With links to your blog, you can still say a lot on your site, fit in ample content for SEO, and keep your mission AND website concise. For more on effective landing pages, take a look at More Than Just Content.

  • A quieter place to say more

Providing a link to a blog also removes your content from the noise of social media and places your readers into a space where they can quietly read your story. This separate page provides room for the longer, more impactful stories of which your nonprofit is full. Write about your latest endeavor and your favorite success stories without being weary of the 145 character space limit on Twitter.

Need more of an incentive to get blogging, or simply want some help with it all? Contact ArcStone today and they’ll walk you through it. You can also read Nonprofit Content Marketing: Tools & Tracking for more ideas on how to get started.