Why Should My Nonprofit Organization Consider Marketing Consulting?

Marketing for nonprofit organizations requires a high level of empathy and digital knowledge to find success. For many nonprofits, internal marketing teams feel the strain of wanting to increase online donations and donor engagement but find themselves strapped for resources.

For these organizations, hiring an outside marketing partner might not be an option. Instead of outsourcing your marketing efforts, your nonprofit can still experience success with marketing consulting.

We’ll explore what it is and if your nonprofit marketing strategy calls for it.

What Is Nonprofit Marketing Consulting?

In short, marketing consulting is enlisting the help of marketing experts to provide insights, advice, and guidance for your organization. Through consistent meetings and feedback sessions, you will glean insights from subject matter experts to implement into your strategy.

At PHOS, our marketing consulting engagements are built on strong collaboration, data-driven recommendations, and nonprofit expertise to provide your organization with the insights to increase your impact and donor base.

When Should I Hire a Marketing Consultant?

The decision to work with a marketing consultant is often prompted by major organizational changes. We recommend consulting for nonprofit organizations that experience any of the following:

• Preparation for a Large Fundraising Event or Campaign: Key fundraising events like Giving Tuesday or End-of-Year Giving require ample time for planning and coordination. Working with a nonprofit marketing consultant allows you to effectively plan, monitor, and evaluate your fundraising marketing campaigns for big moments.
• Dissatisfaction with Marketing Results: After reviewing your results for the previous quarter or even the fiscal year, you might be disappointed with the effectiveness of your marketing. This could be a time to invite new perspectives into your marketing strategy for the next year.
• Large Changes in the Digital Marketing Landscape: Digital marketing is constantly changing. Having a marketing consultant helps you to find peace amidst the chaos of large online shifts like AI disruption, GA4 transition, or iOS changes.
• Experiencing Team Member Turnover: Nonprofit organizations typically have smaller internal marketing teams. Oftentimes, it may just be one person handling the whole organization’s marketing. If you have suffered from consistent marketing team turnover, it can be beneficial to hire a nonprofit consultant to implement consistency and even empower your new team members to deliver strong marketing strategies right away.
• Need to Restructure Your Marketing Goal and Objectives: Inviting expert counsel to restructure your marketing strategy can help you identify areas of opportunity and any blind spots you might have overlooked. This is often a result of not seeing the results you’d like to see or large changes in your organization’s donor strategy. Together, you can partner with experts to recreate a strong marketing plan.
• Bringing Marketing Back in House: If you’ve hired an outside organization to handle your marketing previously and are seeking to bring it back in-house, it’s a great time to hire a marketing consultant to ensure that your team is fully prepared to ramp up on execution.

The Benefits of Marketing Consulting

Now that you have a better understanding of what marketing consulting is and when you should consider introducing it to your organization, we can explore the value it brings to your nonprofit.

Grow Your Marketing Expertise

One of the most obvious benefits of engaging in marketing consulting is expanding your marketing expertise. When you enlist the help of marketing experts, you’ll automatically increase your marketing acumen with the insights you’ll be provided with on a regular basis.

During collaboration sessions, marketing experts can understand your organization and specific needs while offering sound advice, recommendations, and ideas to overcome your marketing challenges. Then, you’ll be empowered to carry out those solutions.

Maximize Your Limited Resources

As mentioned earlier, nonprofit organizations often don’t have large marketing budgets to leverage for their initiatives. This means resources, team members, tools, and paid advertising budgets have to be stewarded exceptionally well and earn results.

Hiring a nonprofit marketing consultant is cost-effective when compared to hiring a new team member or outsourcing your marketing efforts. You’ll be able to more confidently invest in initiatives that marketing experts are recommending, make more informed decisions about channel strategies, and see more results from your concentrated efforts.

Gain Insights from Marketing Forecasting

Your attention will likely be on your organization and its internal changes, leaving little time to anticipate the future of digital marketing. For digital marketing agencies like PHOS, who also carry out marketing execution for clients, it’s easy for us to keep our consulting clients up to date on the latest trends and changes that will impact them.

Through marketing consulting, you can rest assured that you might not have a pulse of potential disruptions or positive changes to capitalize on, but fortunately, our marketing experts will keep you updated.

Enjoy Shared Accountability

For small internal marketing teams (or teams with just one person), you might yearn for some sort of check-in to confirm what you’re working on is correct or that it’s even getting done.

Marketing consulting is not just a time to chat and discuss topics. It’s also a check-in to confirm that we’re making traction on our key focuses. Within our marketing consulting engagements, it’s common for clients to come away with homework and action items based on the challenges and solutions discussed. This ensures that things are not just spoken—but actioned.

Receive Advice and Brainstorming

You are gaining expert insights when you choose to leverage marketing consulting. But that’s not just for tackling challenges. There’s also room to dream up new opportunities or campaigns that your organization can integrate into your larger strategy.

This allows you to directly solve the issues at hand and also uncover innovative ideas that were previously out of reach because of a lack of resources, expertise, or time.

Stay on Track with Campaign and Event Planning

Yearlong, seasonal, or specific fundraising campaigns are essential to drawing more brand awareness for your cause as well as driving more donations. Marketing consulting amplifies your efforts through thorough discussions of the campaign plan, consistent monitoring of its performance after launch, and insights after the campaign concludes. All of these lead to richer, more impactful campaigns.

Get Channel Specific Recommendations

Your internal marketing team may already have a strong marketing background, but some channels might prove to be more difficult to find success on than others. Your marketing consulting engagement may focus specifically on channels that offer the most opportunities or are giving you the most challenges. You may want to improve your social media strategy, earn more action on your email campaigns, or even understand how to find success on Google Ad Grants.

Channel-specific recommendations allow our consultants to spend more time exploring specific marketing channels, platforms, and deliverables to improve your success.

Understand Your Digital Metrics

You know the value of digital marketing. But you might not fully understand how your marketing is performing. If you only look at bottom-of-the-funnel metrics like donations, you might miss out on valuable insights to better tailor your marketing strategy. Our consultants can decipher your digital metrics to identify trends, opportunities, and insights to affect your larger donation and engagement goals.

Partner with PHOS for Nonprofit Marketing Consulting

Marketing consulting is a wonderful opportunity for nonprofit organizations to improve their marketing efforts without investing a huge amount of money. We’ve worked with hundreds of organizations, including nonprofits, to provide value through our consulting services and ongoing marketing execution.

We love working with mission-driven organizations like nonprofits to increase their impact online. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help your organization improve your results, connect with us.