People in the United States take many things for granted, but one of the biggest is consistent access to as much clean water as they want. From staying hydrated to bathing to treating infection & disease, water is the vital building block of life.

And for Elizabeth Shores, founder of the nonprofit organization Untapped Shores Summit, creating awareness of this important issue is her life’s work.

Using solar-powered water purification units that turn salt water into clean, drinkable water, Untapped Shores supplies communities with technology that is simple enough for young children to operate & is able to supply entire villages with needed water.

The organization’s website cites that a lack of clean water leads to a domino effect that threatens lives. Children in third world countries with no access to water often become so sick that they have to drop out of school.

Furthermore, the infant mortality rate is higher, & women frequently die in childbirth. People who need surgery develop infections from instruments that haven’t been sterilized.

Plus, all of the stress on the family puts undue burden on mothers, leaving them unable to pursue skills & training outside the home.

If these facts are news to you, you’re in good company. And that’s the hurdle a lot of nonprofit organizations have to overcome with how to market a charity: making potential donors aware of the cause & why the experience of people they’ve never met in countries they may have never even heard of are relevant to their lives.

The Customer Value Journey is about building that awareness, which will grow into a shared passion for the cause & transforms donors from strangers to the issue to passionate advocates for it.

And Untapped Shores is proof that a sales funnel marketing strategy is not just for businesses.

In fact, for organizations that don’t just want people to give money, but actually want them to get involved, it’s absolutely vital.

But just telling people about the cause & creating emotional appeal isn’t enough. Shores realized that if she was really going to build interest, the strategy couldn’t just be about donations alone.

She had to provide something of value to them in return.

And that was where her sales funnel marketing strategy for how to market a charity got started.

How Untapped Shores Used A Sales Funnel Strategy To Grow Their Donations With a Summit

Shores & her husband, Patrick, had a problem with their charity. They wanted to raise more money for clean water, but they found traditional practices for raising money, like silent auctions & fundraisers, to be exhausting & expensive to coordinate.

As if that wasn’t challenging enough, there were 200 individual villages in one country waiting for supplies for clean water, & if they were going to meet the need, they had to act fast.

They had tried using an ecommerce store to receive donations, but the user experience was confusing & the software itself was slow & too complicated to use for their purposes.

So they had to come up with something else—& to really get the desired amount of donations, they had to try a new angle.

Enter the Virtual Marketing Summit.

But wait. What does a marketing summit have to do with clean water? As it turns out, a lot.

In addition to providing clean water, another big part of Untapped Shores is using access to water to provide opportunities for women & mothers to grow professionally.

Using this part of the organization as their focus, the Shores decided to target business owners & entrepreneurs as their ideal donors & meet a very real need in that population: mentorship & coaching.

First, they got influential marketers together & asked them to participate in the summit, volunteering their time & donating resources for the event.

Then, they created a landing page promoting the free event that allowed attendees to sign up under the name of their favorite influencer or presenter.

Once they signed up, they were sent to a page with an interview from their favorite presenter providing some quick teachings.

They were then offered the chance to purchase a Millionaire Mentor Power Pack for $997 containing dozens of resources, tools & extra training from that presenter—with all proceeds directly benefiting the charity.

The strategy worked, resulting in 5-figure donations to provide clean water to Uganda.

Why The Seminar Sales Funnel Marketing Strategy Worked

The success of a nonprofit marketing strategy all goes back to relevance.

A big reason why many methods for how to market a charity fail is because people fail to not only see why the cause matters to them, but why donating to it is the best use of their money.

And the best way to make that happen is to ensure that they get something they need while the profits benefit the cause.

Untapped Shores found a way to meet a need for a very specific group of people—business owners—so they could then give the profits toward meeting the needs of villages.

Obviously, people got to attend the summit and receive a bundle with dozens of high-value resources from the presenters. But beyond that, the organization borrowed authority for themselves from high-profile entrepreneurs & influences as a way to give people an “in” to learn more about the organization.

The seminar attendees & customers came to get the resources for building their skill set & growing their businesses…but they left knowing about the need for clean water & opportunities for women in underprivileged villages.

In addition to accumulating 5-figure donations, Untapped Shores accumulated awareness of their cause as well.

You may have a different kind of business than a nonprofit & the question of how to market a charity may be far from your mind. But no matter what kind of business you own, the lesson still applies to you…

The goal of your sales funnel marketing is to meet a real need or solve a real problem for your customers, & reaching the exciting success your product or service brings them is what the Customer Value Journey is about.

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