A Nonprofit Marketing Plan Example to Inspire Your Organization Alyssa Conrardy April 16, 2018

Do you wish you had a roadmap that showed you exactly what you need to do to achieve your

nonprofit’s biggest goals through marketing? An effective nonprofit marketing plan can do just

that. While many nonprofit marketing plans simply sit on a shelf gathering dust, there IS a way

to build a better plan you’ll actually use – one that maps your marketing goals to your

organization’s goals and strategic plans, helps you prioritize and make time for what matters and

identifies the best strategies and tactics for moving your mission forward.

We create dozens of plans that check all of those boxes every year for our nonprofit clients.

Now, we’re pulling back the curtain and showing you how we do it with our Essential Nonprofit

Marketing Plan Template. The template is one part example, so you can see what a successful

nonprofit marketing plan looks like, and part workbook, so you can begin building your best

marketing plan and advancing your mission through marketing.

Here’s a look at what’s inside, and the elements you’ll need

to consider when building a nonprofit marketing plan for

your organization:

Mission and Vision

Every part of your marketing plan must stem from your mission and vision. A mission and vision

are so much more than just statements. They’re the grounding principles that define the future

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your nonprofit is working to create and the work you’re doing every day to get closer to that

reality. They determine the strategic priorities your organization sets, and those strategic

priorities guide where you should direct your marketing and communications efforts. It’s all

inextricably tied. We suggest you open your nonprofit marketing plan by stating your

organization’s mission statement and vision statement. This will ground everyone who interacts

with your plan in what matters most.

The Essential Nonprofit Marketing Plan Template assumes you already have an effective

mission and vision in place, but many organizations don’t. Many of our clients come to us with

mission and vision statements that are outdated, ineffective, or misaligned with their current

strategic direction. When that happens, we facilitate mission and vision workshops that help our

clients discover truly powerful mission and vision statements they’ll use for many years to come.

This is more than just messaging work. It’s strategic planning and organizational development

work that will guide the direction of your entire organization.

Learn more about mission and vision development here.

Nonprofit Marketing Audit

Before you begin to determine where you’re going from a marketing perspective, it’s essential to

evaluate where you’ve been. Whether your nonprofit’s marketing function is robust and

sophisticated or small and nascent, you surely have access to at least some marketing data and

insights that will inform your plans moving forward. In our Essential Nonprofit Marketing Plan

Template, we’ve made space for you to fill in information about your web traffic, social media

engagement, email engagement, and overall marketing activities. These are some of the things

most nonprofits are able to audit, even if they’ve never had a formal marketing plan. We suggest

auditing these areas with a consistent set of dates in mind (typically the most recent full calendar

year). When working with the template, feel free to skip (and delete) any pages you’re unable to

fill in, and add additional pages for other areas you’d like to assess, such as PR, events and

community outreach. For each area of assessment, we suggest highlighting a key observation

based on the data you’re