How Can You Use Brand24 for Nonprofit Marketing

NGOs, as charity-oriented non-profits, should, among other things, focus their marketing efforts on building awareness online. Whether you are a marketer at a newly established NGO or one with many years on the market, social listening and online brand monitoring should be part of your strategy. 

Table of contents:

• What is an NGO?
• Why is nonprofit marketing important?
• How can Brand24 help with nonprofit marketing?
  • Strengthen brand awareness
  • Anti-crisis actions
  • Acquiring partners and influencers
  • Preventing misinformation
  • Analysis of traffic sources
• Brand24 in nonprofit marketing

What is an NGO?

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are organizations that are not-for-profit in their activities. In addition, they are not part of the state structure, hence their designation as “non-governmental.” They come by different names:

• non-governmental organizations,
• social organizations,
• NGO (short for non-governmental organization),
• non-profit organizations,
• third sector.

Why is nonprofit marketing important?

For NGOs, the principles are simple – if you want audiences to donate their time and money to your charitable activities, you need to foster a sense of identity with the purpose and meaning of the cause. Brand24 offers several extremely useful features in building a positive image of your NGO and gaining recognition in the market.

How can Brand24 help with nonprofit marketing?

Strengthen brand awareness

Brand awareness is about recognizing the brand’s distinctiveness and directing communication and marketing activities so that the recipient automatically, upon hearing the name, has the right associations with it.

In addition, brand awareness:

• fosters trust in the eyes of the audience;
• helps win loyal customers;
• facilitates building and strengthening relationships with customers;
• increases brand value and competitiveness;
• provides the brand with credibility.

Brand24 allows nonprofit organizations to boost their marketing efforts and strengthen brand awareness in multiple ways:

Monitoring mentions

Brand monitoring should be indispensable to the marketing plan for your nonprofit organization and reputation management.

Knowing by who, what, where, and how your organization is being talked about is the best defense against a potential social media crisis, increasing awareness, or achieving any other goal you set for yourself.

Tracking and analyzing the proper data set helps you make more informed marketing decisions. Protecting your organization’s reputation and its success depends on basing your efforts on social listening.

Author filters

If there is a lot of talk about your nonprofit organization online, catching and tracking all mentions can prove to be a breakneck task. Brand24 offers several proprietary filters to help you browse mentions and prioritize them. It is also a practical feature for systematizing PR activities.

• Sentiment Filter – allows you to limit mentions to only positive or only negative mentions;
• Importance Filter – allows you to limit mentions to only the most important ones;
• Source filter – allows you to limit mentions only to those from a selected source, e.g., blogs, Facebook;
• Influence Score – see mentions from FB or IG that contain certain types of interactions – likes, shares, or comments;
• Number of visits filter – you will be able to limit your mentions to only those that are greater than, precisely, or less than the number you specify;
• Tag filter – will allow you to filter mentions only by those you have tagged with a particular tag;
• Date filter – displays only new mentions that have been added since your last visit to the platform;
• Visited mentions filter – select only those mentions you have already visited or those you haven’t had a chance to review yet.

Email reports

Reports in Brand24 are daily or weekly updates of new mentions of your keywords. They are enabled by default, but you can easily turn them off or customize them to suit your needs. You can also set them up for your teammates. They come in handy if you don’t have time to check new mentions in the dashboard daily and need a quick summary of those that have come into the tool during your absence. This is a great advantage if it comes to nonprofit marketing.

PDF reports

PDF reports are very useful when you need to present the collected data in a way that is clear and pleasing to the eye. As a member of a nonprofit organization, you can provide your superiors with such summaries on an ongoing basis. This is a great way to quickly overview your social monitoring data. In addition, all PDF reports can be customized with different logos and colors.

Anti-crisis actions

Media monitoring is also valuable for your organization’s brand crises and overall nonprofit marketing. Charitable organizations are often more vulnerable to this state of affairs due to their embrace of political, social, and religious themes.

As an analogy to strengthening the organization’s awareness itself, tool functions are helpful here, such as:

• monitoring mentions
• hashtag monitoring
• email reports
• Storm Alerts

Storm Alerts are an additional feature that can prove extremely useful in such situations. Instant notifications notify you as soon as the number of mentions or social media reach changes by the percentage you set. They are enabled by default, but you can easily deactivate them. You can also adjust the numbers to suit your needs.

Acquiring partners and influencers

Any person, news portal, or company that, regardless of the organization, has mentioned it in its content is worth taking the steps of establishing cooperation. This is a great nonprofit marketing move. Due to the charitable nature of the NGO’s work and often a small budget for marketing activities, acquiring partners is difficult. However, if an organization without its participation appears in an article or post, there are much better chances of developing cooperation. 

In a recent interview with Ukrainian startup – lalafo, we learned that by monitoring mentions in Brand24, they managed to establish permanent cooperation with 16 news portals in Poland and 26 in Ukraine. How did they manage to achieve this?

Brand monitoring

If a nonprofit organization is talked about positively on the Internet, or if portals sharing its values seize on the topic and share content about it online independently of the brand, there is a high potential for gaining cooperation with a given news portal or at least getting insights from other potential partners. It’s not worth wasting any mention of your topic that appears online – as charities, NGOs need to get ahead of the curve to get as many donors as possible and should focus on it in their marketing efforts.

Monitoring hashtags

Like tracking mentions of your NGO’s area of operation for market analysis, hashtag monitoring is also helpful in acquiring partners. You can easily monitor comments across the Internet and select those sources that have potential value for your goals and will give value to nonprofit marketing.

Author filters

For larger organizations, but also for smaller ones, it makes sense to focus on acquiring partnerships that will get you the most publicity. Brand24 comes to the rescue with its proprietary filter that come in handy in your nonprofit marketing.

The Influence Score will give you insight into which source or author has the most influence on social media or the web (within given topic) – the higher the number, the more popular the reference is! You can easily select a specific number or slide the bar when you choose 7. The panel will show you all mentions from sources with an Influence Score of 7 and higher.

Preventing misinformation

There is always a risk that someone will overlook or confuse an important fact when mentioning your nonprofit organization. To prevent this from happening and to prevent misinformation and misrepresentation in the context of your organization’s activities, it is worth constantly monitoring whether the mentions that Brand24 catches are consistent with your NGO’s actual nature and activities. Such oversight of the organization’s visage and the topics around which its activities are centered is essential in nonprofit marketing, especially in the case of issues that arouse discussion and controversy in society. Disinformation campaigns are sometimes organized by opponents in such situations, which aim, among other things, to polarize society by imposing narratives that arouse a sense of threat, and fear, reinforce anti-science theses or antagonize specific individuals or groups.

Monitoring mentions

Monitoring mentions in the context of preventing the spread of misinformation is another useful feature for NGO operations. In addition to key phrases related to your nonprofit organization, you can expand your market analysis to include hashtags and key phrases related to your organization’s area of activity. For example, as an organization supporting Ukrainian refugees in Poland, you can monitor hashtags in this area, such as #refugeeswpolsce #wojnawukrainie #pomagamukrainie. Those who oppose accepting refugees in Poland can use popular hashtags to target supporters of a particular cause with their beliefs. Your NGO can report false content or discredit such users as an organization with such values. It greatly helps with your nonprofit marketing.

Interesting fact: Brand24 employees helped our neighbors by preventing the spread of disinformation and Russian propaganda by setting up a Twitter account where we published fake content shared online.

Analysis of traffic sources

Google Analytics is most often used to analyze and monitor website traffic. Although this tool is indispensable for the work of any marketer, we do not always get a complete traffic analysis from it. However, it is vital to understand where users are coming from, so you can invest more time in promoting these channels.

Monitoring mentions

It happens more than once that someone mentions a brand without providing a link to analyze the traffic source, and as a result, in Analytics, the results show as Organic and Direct.

Author filters

If you don’t want to analyze all the results in search of that one thing that might have generated a lot of traffic, the Influence Score filter comes to our aid, which helps extract those mentions that had the most significant reach. This allows you to start our investigation by reviewing the results that had the greatest potential to bring a large number of users to our website/portal/fan page. Therefore, when other analytical tools fail, Brand24 comes to the rescue.

Brand24 in nonprofit marketing

Brand24 is a tool dedicated to media monitoring. As such, it is adapted to the needs of large companies, one-person operations, and organizations that want to know what is being said online. You can use the Brand24 tool in many areas of your nonprofit marketing efforts. And if, after reading this article, you still don’t know precisely what you want from the tool, our consultants will be happy to guide you as you set up your first and subsequent projects. Check what Brand24 can provide for your organization.