Are you trying to do your non-profit marketing on a shoestring budget? Are you looking for a cost-effective yet highly efficient way to engage your audience and gain support?
Here’s why user-generated content should be a part of your marketing strategy.
With many organizations out there with equally important missions, your non-profit needs to make some noise and stand out from the rest to attract new members and meet your fundraising goals. But marketing can be expensive.
A powerful yet cost-efficient way to market your non-profit is to leverage your community and use powerful storytelling with user-generated content. User-generated content is content texts, images, blogs, videos, social media posts, reviews, etc- shared by unpaid supporters and contributors. UGC is a great way to convince people that your cause is worth supporting and putting their money behind to create an actual impact.
Why user-generated content should be a part of non-profit marketing
User-generated content is the ultimate social proof it is all about your community validating your efforts and talking about how great you are. 92% of people are more likely to trust organic recommendations than any other type of advertising. Your members are your best advocates and what could be more authentic than their stories and experience?
When your community members talk about your work and the impact you create, they are marketing on your behalf for your cause and encouraging their peers and network to join in!
By giving them more reasons and opportunities to share their views and making it easy to do so, you can help your community be the voice of the cause. You can collect diverse perspectives and stories of people from different walks of life.
Your community posting and sharing images and videos about your cause is the best form of authentic social proof you can get to convince people to join you and your mission.
Why video is the future of non-profit marketing
Video is an engaging medium of visual story-telling. 57% of online donors make a donation after watching an inspirational fundraising video. It helps put a face to the name and humanizes the organization. It helps share real stories of people inspired and impacted by your efforts and helps convey emotions better than most other mediums.
5 reasons why UGC should be a part of your non-profit marketing strategy
Here are some ways in which UGC can benefit your organization and why it should be a part of your marketing strategy.
1. Reach a wider audience
Due to budget constraints, non-profits usually have to stay clear of big advertising campaigns that could reach a wide audience. However, with a user-generated campaign, you can reach a wide audience without the expenses. By getting your community to share about you, they are essentially doing unpaid marketing on your behalf!
With user-generated campaigns, you can go beyond your followers and reach out to a wider audience who may not have heard about you or your mission. And when they hear about you from a trustable and familiar source, they will pay attention.
2. Build trust and provide social proof
People trust people more than brands or organizations. So when your community talks about you, that content is more believable and relatable to the audience than any branded, owned posts or promotions you may come up with. Coming from a member, that content is seen as authentic and acts as strong social proof.
3. Humanize your cause
Your members or community will always be at the center of a UGC campaign whether it’s supporters, volunteers, sponsors or benefactors. Ask for their stories, their reason for volunteering, and how they benefit from being a part of it. UGC These are the conversations that will humanize your cause and also inspire others to join.
Non-profits and charities collected photos from community memebers of animals in the Australian bushfires of 2020 to share on social media and help raise funds to protect them
4. Drive engagement
Create a fun contest, offer prizes or provide some incentive to get your followers to share and engage. This will bring them closer to your brand, build a strong sense of community and start a conversation. Think of fun challenges or content ideas that your followers would enjoy posting and engaging on. You know your audience, find something relevant to them.
5. Strong visual storytelling
UGC has that unique quality of being personal and relatable. As the content is organic and genuine as it comes from a member. The stories of benefactors can move people and establish an emotional connection, motivating people to join, help and contribute. UGC is a great way to tell impactful stories that can drive action.
How to create a non-profit marketing campaign with UGC videos
Now that you know how to leverage your community here is how Vloggi can help you source advocacy videos. The Vloggi uploader tool is the simplest way to let your community members share their stories with you from any device in just 3 easy steps.
1. Build your landing page
Customize your landing page and ask custom questions. Give them prompts like ‘Why do you care about this cause?’ or ‘What made you want to support us?’ to help them share their thoughts, ideas and experience working alongside you.
2. Share your magic link
Share the unique upload link or QR code to your landing page to start collecting authentic community videos. Add the link to emails, social channels or use the QR code at events to invite your members and stakeholders to upload videos.
Vloggi accepts any format, resolution and orientation and standardizes them so your contributors won’t find it a hassle.
3. Grow your video library
Manage your customer videos, trim responses to the best parts and choose your favorites. You can add the names and locations of the contributors. Merge the clips to create compilations or download singular clips to publish anywhere and grow your social proof.
Once you collect clips and build a video library, you can use the clips on multiple platforms and marketing channels.
Member-generated content can be used as a part of your conversion emails, member retention and re-engagement campaigns. If you have regular events, meet-ups or volunteer drives, you can encourage the members to shoot and share videos of their activities at the event.
You can add these clips to your email campaigns, newsletters and social media.
Create your non-profit marketing campaign with UGC videos
User-generated campaigns are affordable, engaging and build trust. It is an authentic way to share stories of your community and why the cause is important to them.
If you’re looking for ideas of what sort of user-generated videos to collect, then check out how to gain supporters for your charity with UGC for non-profit organizations. To help you get started and plan your advocacy campaign, we have outlined some steps on how to build a powerful advocacy campaign with community video.
Feeling inspired?
If you already have a campaign idea in mind, that’s great! Simply register for free to get started or choose from any of these plans to find one that suits you best.
