STEP 6

Find the Right Prospects to Support Your Mission

Look at the number of likes on this Instagram post from Girls Who Code, an organization with a mission of closing the gender gap in tech, one girl at a time.

If you go to Girls Who Code’s Instagram Profile, you’ll find their posts have a considerable amount of likes and comments. While they certainly share powerful stories, their success is rooted in their understanding of their audience and their ability to connect with those individuals.

Girls Who Code was able to find and target a specific audience that responds to their mission. By marketing to that specific audience over time, they learned how to better connect with them — by sharing powerful stories of girls making a difference through their program.

They don’t worry about people who don’t understand or support what they do — they focus on their most passionate online community members and that leads to their success.

And that’s the key. Successful nonprofit marketing plans are targeted toward very specific audiences — and this is what the concept of personas is all about. Personas are fictional characters that help marketers envision someone who might respond to their marketing messages.

For instance, a few personas for Girls Who Code might be:

A middle-aged woman in the tech industry who wants to support the next generation of women in coding.
The parent of a teenage daughter who’s interested in coding.
A young woman in a university coding program.

Once you’ve created your personas, you can start crafting a message that will connect with each one. Personas help humanize your marketing message since you can better imagine specific individuals you are speaking to rather than the entire world.