3 Mistakes Nonprofits Make with Digital Marketing - and How to Avoid Them

By Jacquelyn S. Rardin
Published January 20, 2025 Jan 20, 2025

You’ve probably heard lots of “quick” digital marketing tips for leveling up your nonprofit. 

  • Build a website and we’ll get flooded with donations!
  • Post every day and we’ll go viral!
  • Email constituents 1-3x a week, and our audiences will grow tenfold!

Not quite so simple, is it? 

With so many digital media myths circulating and influencing what you think you should do, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and fall into some common traps. 

Let’s unpack the top three mistakes I repeatedly see smaller nonprofit organizations make in managing digital marketing, and what you can do to turn them around.

Mistake #1: Neglecting your website in favor of other digital darlings

Your website is your most valuable digital marketing asset. It is the cornerstone of your online presence and credibility, where people go to learn more about you, where they decide if they connect with your mission and values, and where one can get energized to donate or buy tickets to events—all paramount to the survival of your organization.

While you may prioritize Instagram or email marketing over investing in maintaining or refreshing your outdated website, the success of your digital efforts rely heavily on the quality and relevance of your website. All initiatives—from raising awareness to generating donations—drive people to your website. If information is out of date or hard to find, the layout is cumbersome, or your story is unclear, this impacts user experience, and ultimately your credibility.

Solutions:

  1. Implement Regular Maintenance: Schedule a weekly or monthly web audit to review for outdated content, broken links, or missing information to ensure your website reflects current information.
  2. Focus on Accessibility and ADA Compliance:
    • Color & Text Contrast: use high contrast colors to improve legibility, especially when overlaying across images.
    • Navigation & Structure: Use headings and a logical, hierarchical layout so users can easily understand the structure and navigate through content.
    • Text Alternatives: Add alternative text descriptions to images so that screen readers can convey the content to visually impaired users.
    • Assistive Technology Compatibility: Ensure that the website works well with screen readers, voice recognition software, and text-to-speech tools.
    • Check Responsive Design: The website should be accessible and optimized for different devices and screen sizes, including mobile, tablet, and desktop uses. Fix any non-optimized pages or elements.

Mistake #2: Winging it! Not planning your digital content in advance

Digital content reigns supreme in driving marketing campaigns in today’s environment. Website, emails, social media, partner sites, media at large, you name it. 

While you want to remain agile and responsive to changing circumstances, it is vital to plan your campaigns and associated content in advance, so it is intentional and fulfills specific goals. Without a clear strategy, content becomes inconsistent and less impactful, creating missed opportunities.

Solutions:

  1. Create an Editorial Calendar: Free tools like Google Calendar or Google Sheets are a great way to plan timing and themes of key campaigns, social media posts, and emails, and what is needed and when to implement those ideas, such as research, graphics, staff or constituent testimonials, and so on. If your budget allows, you can also use discounted tools like Trello or Asana to take your calendar to the next level.
  2. Align Content with Your Goals: Map your content ideas to specific goals, such as increasing donations during a funding period, generating awareness and excitement around an event, recruiting volunteers, regular updates on organizational milestones or wins, staff recognition, you name it!
  3. Batch Create Content: Save time by setting aside designated “content creation days”. For example, every Monday afternoon from 2:00 to 5:00pm, you produce content for the next two weeks. Once completed, pre-schedule your email campaigns and social media content using tools such as Meta Suite or Metricool. This automates your content distribution instead of requiring manual sends or posts, saving you valuable time.


Pro Tip: MonkeyPod makes it easy to schedule and automate your email campaigns. Learn all about it by visiting MonkeyPod’s Knowledgebase.

Mistake #3: Thinking “more is more” on social media

No, you don’t need to be on every social channel. In fact, you may not need to be on any social channel at all, depending on your organization and your goals. Radical, I know! 

When it comes to social media, many nonprofits I have worked with fall for the assumption that they must be on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Threads, and more to engage audiences because “others are doing it” or some other form of market pressure. But because they lack the resources or capacity to keep up on all the channels, they post inconsistently, leading to audience attrition and algorithm slumps. 

Ultimately, spreading your organization too thin across platforms is a surefire way to kill your social media presence, exactly the opposite of what you want.

Solutions:

  1. Prioritize Your Platforms: After assessing your goals and channels, focus on 1-2 platforms where your audience is most active. For instance, if Facebook is where you have the most followers and traction with community-building initiatives (a primary goal for your organization) and your YouTube channel gains new followers each time you post a new impact video along with a boost in donations, consider these your top two platforms and commit to posting there regularly.
  2. Analyze Metrics: Use insights from each platform’s analytics tools to determine what type of content consistently works best. This will not only save you time when producing your content, it will ensure you are remaining relevant to your audience preferences, delivering the content they want.
  3. Quality Over Quantity: Posting frequency should always take a second seat to posting authentic quality content and engaging meaningfully with your followers and other pages online. Over-selling or over-pushing an event or funding opportunity rarely works. Continue spotlighting events and fundraising campaigns (of course!) but also weave in space for conversation and other types of content that encourages dialogue around your mission, your goals, or community, regional, or global impacts to your work. 

Bonus Insight: Holding an outsized vision for the time and resources available

Perhaps one of the most inadvertently systematic mistakes I see when working with small or micro nonprofit organizations is when they try to model or keep up with what other much larger, more deeply-resourced organizations are doing on their digital marketing fronts. This often leads to burnout or underwhelming results because the vision outsizes capacity.

Solutions:

  1. Conduct a Resource Audit: Assess your team’s time, skills, and budget to achieve realistic outcomes. For instance, if creating a weekly e-newsletter is killing your team’s ability to meet other priorities, scale back to 1-2x per month instead.
  2. Start Small and Scale: Pilot digital campaigns or initiatives to learn what works before scaling up. This allows you to test specific tactics and results before investing full resources.
  3. Leverage Partnerships: Partner with other organizations, volunteers, or affordable service providers for support, especially in areas that add skills, uplift a goal, or deliver on a priority outcome that is not currently feasible with existing team resources.

Ready to put these tips into action and strengthen your nonprofit digital marketing program? Start by focusing on just one of these areas this month. Whether it's auditing your website, creating a simple content calendar, or reassessing your social media strategy, taking small, intentional steps will help build a more effective digital presence. 

Have questions? Let's connect! I'd love to hear about your challenges and goals. 


Whether you’re looking for an email marketing provider or just a place to house all your data, MonkeyPod can help as you get your digital marketing strategy in place. Schedule a demo with the MonkeyPod team to learn more.


About Jacquelyn S. Rardin

Jacquelyn is the Founder and Principal of Mighty House Media, a purpose-driven consultancy dedicated to empowering solopreneurs, micro-businesses, and under-resourced nonprofits with accessible marketing solutions that champion impact, increase visibility, and drive sustainable growth.

Drawing from 30 years of marketing and business development experience across entrepreneurial, corporate, agency, and nonprofit environments, Jacquelyn brings a uniquely well-rounded kaleidoscopic perspective to digital marketing and storytelling. Her expertise spans holistic strategy, branding, and audience engagement. As a passionate advocate for accessibility and acceptance, Jacquelyn is also credentialed in ADA-compliance and is deeply connected to serving causes addressing neurodiversity and marginalized populations. 

Connect with Jacquelyn at Jacque@MightyHouseMedia.com

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