10 Best Practices for Your Nonprofit’s Blog

Blogging is an essential part of any organization’s strategy to build and maintain trust and open communication with its community. Regular posts improve your search engine results and amp up website traffic, increasing the opportunities for incoming donations. They are also critical connectors to social media, helping generate a healthy flow of content across platforms, which in turn can result in new followers.

Blogging also helps you share your stories to build meaningful relationships—putting you in a good position to ask your existing donors to give again.

Whether you’re thinking about launching your first blog or looking to improve an existing one, your nonprofit can benefit from these blogging best practices:

1. Post on a consistent schedule

To fully benefit from launching and maintaining your blog, you should plan to post on a regular schedule.

We all know that it’s easy for content creation to get pushed down your priority list when you already have other obligations. By creating a schedule for your blog right away, you’ll become more accountable for delivering content.

What this looks like for your organization will depend on the time you have to dedicate, but a good starting point is once a month. The more often you’re able to post, the more your search results will improve. As you get more comfortable creating content, you can increase the frequency of your posts.

Beyond increasing traffic to your website, posting regularly will give you plenty of resources for your other communication materials, like emails, newsletters and Annual Reports.

2. Become an Authority in Your Field

Keep your supporters updated with news about your organization’s industry and the overarching issues your nonprofit cares about. Tie in the role of your nonprofit and how this news or research impacts your work.

Your organization’s knowledge and engagement with contemporary issues can be expressed in many forms, including interviews and summaries of expert advice.

A great example is the Red Cross’ blog, which has large sections dedicated to tips and advice for dealing with disasters and safety.

3. Feature other experts in your field

You don’t always have to be the person writing your blog posts! You can bring in guest writers to publish on topics related to your work. For example, you can feature posts written by your partners and volunteers who have a wealth of knowledge on the problems your organization is working to address.

On their blog, the ASPCA illustrates their passion for protecting animal welfare as well as their knowledge of the pet industry by posting a letter from their CEO addressed to the governor of New Jersey regarding a pending pet purchasing bill.

Using this strategy allows you to share unique perspectives with your supporters and deepen their commitment to your cause.

4. Include Appealing Visuals

Engaging visuals help tell your story, make your posts far more sharable, and can help promote your brand. A good visual may be all you need in a post—a picture is worth 1,000 words, and a video is worth 1.8 million words.

5. Showcase Your Impact

Share success stories from your organization’s latest campaign and what you were able to achieve. Your donors always want to know where their money goes, and they will feel a stronger connection to your organization when they know how their contributions make a difference. You can even break it down into monetary amounts. For example, $100 may have purchased 10 mosquito nets to prevent malaria. If you can, include photos, videos, or infographics to illustrate your nonprofit’s impact.

If your nonprofit throws events, an event recap is a great way to showcase your organization’s success. Thank all who attended and donated, post photos, and motivate your supporters for your next event!

6. Go Behind the Scenes

Your blog is a great place to show the behind-the-scenes workings of your organization. Write a “Meet the Team” post or show your supporters the office. Your supporters will love to get an inside scoop on the things they don’t normally see, and this will help them connect to your organization on a more intimate level.

7. Say Thank You

While you should always acknowledge donors and volunteers with a letter, email, or phone call thanking them, an additional “thank you” blog post shows a lot of appreciation and can make your supporters feel good about their contributions. If a group of volunteers spent a weekend cleaning the beach, showcase this on your blog with photos, thank them for their hard work, and remind them of the positive impact they have made. If you reached a fundraising goal, thank everyone who donated, and let them know how their funds will influence your cause.

8. Ask For Feedback

A wonderful thing about your blog is that you can receive crucial feedback from your supporters. Not only can their comments be helpful, but they can help cultivate trust and open the door to continuous conversation.

9. Setup Google Analytics right away

Creating a blog is a great opportunity to understand your target audience and the impact of your posts. Who is reading your posts? And how many people do you reach?

To track this information, you’ll need to add Google Analytics to your blog.

While you might not be ready to evaluate this data right away, it’s still a best practice to start tracking metrics on your blog when you first launch it. That way, when you are ready to look at this information, you have a complete picture from the very beginning.

Setting up Google Analytics on your blog involves creating a tracking ID and installing it into the header of your blog site. To learn how to do it, you can review their resources and instructions. Alternatively, you might ask a web-savvy volunteer to help you with the task—or find an affordable freelancer on Upwork or Fiverr.

10. Incorporate your blog into your email marketing strategy

Make sure your blog doesn’t exist in a vacuum and that your content gets the attention it deserves.

Your blog is a great way to communicate impact to your supporters, and the best way to do it is to send an email update that includes your latest posts. By building your blog content into your email marketing strategy, you’ll also be able to reach a broader audience who might not otherwise know about your content.

Do you have a blog? What are your blogging best practices? We’d love to hear them.