Nonprofit Marketing Free Tools to Promote Event – Success Story by Spina Bifida Association

As a nonprofit blog and digital web agency, we want your nonprofit to get proper attention. We also want you to know you can stand out, without a huge marketing budget. To prove I’m not making this stuff up, I’m pulling in the work of a friend working for the Spina Bifida Association and showing how she used Raw Short, Canva and other free tools for nonprofits to promote her organization’s upcoming event, the Spina Bifida Conference. All these tools together helped SBA establish consistent and clever branding.

1. Canva

Seeing as they don’t have a full-time designer, my friend LOVES Canva. If you’re unfamiliar with the tool, it basically is a go-to hub for designing blog images, social media posts, and infographics for non-designers. It has designer templates you can choose for your layout, text with various fonts, images and other graphic elements. Many of these aspects are free and the paid features are quite cheap.

You can see below SBA tied in their nonprofit’s colors and created fun posts to share on their social media networks and in their newsletters. Keep in mind this is very doable – the elements below were dragged and dropped into a template and then personalized through color, the logo and the text.

2. MailChimp

Another great nonprofit-friendly tool is MailChimp for email marketing. As seen in the email below, SBA pulled in images designed in Canva and encouraged their email database to get signed up for the early-bird deadline. Gain more insight into choosing the right email marketing software for you in “Our Picks of Email Marketing Software.”

3. RawShorts

This one seemed like an especially fun promotion strategy to me – using RawShorts, my friend made up a story surrounding her audience persona Suzy. I watched the video twice since it was fun visually and the information was easy to digest. You don’t need a video producer for something quick like this.

You simply choose a template based on your objective, upload your media, and then decide on text, transitions, effects and audio. From there you export it to place on your landing page, Facebook, YouTube or whatever else works for you. Notice the consistent branding SBA managed.

If you want a more in-depth or advanced video produced, check out these 8 examples by ArcStone.

4. Facebook

This cute post was a way to draw in the attention of their Facebook friends. It’s friendly, yet direct. They also kept their hashtag from earlier posts to augment branding.

Facebook loves to help your nonprofit promote its events or fundraisers. Learn more here.