We just had to share these online marketing trends for non-profits that are coming down the pipes for 2016.

We might not be able to literally see the future, but we can take what we already know and build on it to come up with the best ideas possible for you!

Here are some ideas for using these trends for a non-profit, so you can put together a killer non-profit online marketing schedule.

You’ll want to get on these right away, being the non-profit marketing visionary that you are.

Video Episodes of Amazing Stories

Your cause surely has some amazing stores to share?

If you can turn these stories into videos that people can watch online for free, you’ll be able to spread the word about your non-profit in a much easier way.

Video has always been an incredibly popular way to spread information, because most people would rather watch a video than read to consume content.

YouTube and Vimeo are the perfect vehicles, but you should share these videos on your Non-profit’s Facebook page, blog and Twitter.

People love to share heartwarming videos on social networks!

These videos don’t need to be high tech, so if you’re starting out on a small budget, you can record and edit these videos fairly easily.

All you need is a phone (most phones have a good video recorder these days), a digital video camera if you have one, and a simple editing software.

The concept of video is nothing new, BUT here’s the new spin you can put on it:

Create episodes like a TV show.

Give each episode a name like you see with many popular television shows.

Give them an episode number, like S1E4 (season 1 episode 4).

Create a list of credits, a title frame and a theme song.

You get the idea!

Wider use of Segmentation or Donors and non-donors, as well as others on an email list. 

Segmentation is made easy with email automation software and websites such as Infusionsoft and Mailchimp.

2015 saw a huge explosion of email marketing as a tool for spreading the word about fundraisers.

This is because email is and has always been the best way to reach out.

Just be sure to make it easy for your website visitors to fill out a form to get on your list, and then you can get to work with dividing them into groups, based on their specific interests.

In email marketing, this is called segmentation.

It’s good to put into practice, to make sure all the people on your list are always getting the content that interests them the most.

For a non-profit, this would mean dividing your list into groups such as…

• Past donors
• Frequent donors
• Those who haven’t donated
• Volunteers
• Beneficiaries

Segmentation is a good idea, because email marketing is all about personalized messages, and you can’t do that very well if you’re sending long-winded, broad emails to your whole list, who likely don’t have much in common.

This is one of the many ways to keep email subscribers engaged.

Using twitter for better SEO

According to this article from MOZ, Twitter has amped up their SEO.

This means you can leverage hashtags and keywords to get your non-profit found even easier on Google, by way of your tweets!

Make your tweets do double-duty by doing some keyword research on the topic behind your non-profit, and use the top keywords in your tweets.

You’re not only making announcements on Twitter, and getting those re-tweeted and favorited.

But these top tweets will show up first in Google!

Twitter has been working on this in 2015, so now you should focus on making this a priority in 2016.