Marketing for Small Nonprofits: How to Thrive on a Slashed Budget
- Emily Willson
- 15 hours ago
- 5 min read
Budget-Friendly, Timesaving Advertising Strategies for Nonprofit Teams
As arts and nonprofit orgs look for places to cut expenses, marketing is often put on the chopping block. It’s not “core programming,” sure, but it is the way people find out about your core programming. It’s also crucial for maintaining relationships with your community, growing your brand reputation, and enticing new donors and patrons.
If you’re facing a major cut to your marketing dollars, you may have to hunker down in your laboratory and experiment with the resources you have at your disposal. With a little bit of ingenuity, you may find yourself looking at what you once thought was a lifeless marketing strategy and screaming, “It’s alive! It’s aliiiive!”
Whether you’re an executive director or a front-line marketer, we've got strategies to reanimate your marketing plan that won't drain your clock or your budget.
For the Execs:
Don’t gatekeep the budget.
Many arts and nonprofit marketers never receive an actual advertising budget—whether it’s gatekept by the ED, exists only as a line item under multiple program budgets, or never existed in the first place. If you’re an executive director, program manager, or otherwise leadership-type person, change this. If you want to empower your marketer to make long-term strategic decisions, give them an annual budget with specific goals so they can plan holistically, track their success year over year, and make quick changes to align with new events and initiatives.
Free up your marketer’s time.
Is your marketing staffer spending loads of time tabling at events? That’s a community outreach role. Are they doing a lot of fundraising? That’s a development role. Are they sitting in meetings where you’re dreaming up new programs, but you don’t have firm details yet? That’s a program manager’s role. Let your marketer focus on their actual job: generating new leads and re-engaging prior audience members and participants. That means engaging with patrons on social media, planning ad campaigns, writing press releases, and pitching reporters.
Plan marketing into grant proposals.
Advocate for a dedicated marketing line in your project budget for an upcoming grant proposal. If allowed, include not just ad dollars but also marketing staff effort to cover outreach, PR, web management, and ad planning time needed to effectively promote your project. Marketing is a fundable expense; we promise!
For the Marketers:
Allocate wisely.
Once you have an actual budget in hand, it’s tempting to spread it thin and evenly across each program, initiative, or event—but resist the urge! Start by listing everything your budget needs to touch, then get real with leadership about the expectations for each.
Maybe success is just a raw number of sign-ups/tickets sold, or maybe you're playing the long game by trying to reach a new niche audience. Some objectives might only require organic outreach (such as social media and eblasts), while others need a significant ad spend. Identify your high-impact goals and prioritize them in the budget accordingly.
Use the Costco approach.
Buying your ads in bulk can save you some serious cash! If several of your programs share a similar target audience, you can book multiple placements at once from the same outlet at a steep discount. While it's smart to keep some funds in reserve, using this consolidated approach for the bulk of your budget allows you to secure a better rate and maintain a consistent brand presence. It also helps keep you from getting sidetracked by last-minute sales pitches and gives you an out when your ED wants to buy an ad in their kids’ school program.
Ask for discounts.
Never, ever pay the retail price. Review their rates, then ask for a nonprofit discount. Tell them your budget is tight and ask if they’d be willing to accept an in-kind trade as part of the payment. Haggling may seem a little gauche, but it’s how we get the best price for our clients. Media outlets need your ad dollars—negotiate!
Use local and regional media outlet events listings.
While these take a bit of time, they are one of the most effective free ways to get in front of local audiences AND members of the press. If you do nothing else, do event listings.
Double down on email marketing.
E-newsletters are the silver bullet for arts organizations, especially as growth on some social media platforms has started to slow. It costs staff time and a monthly platform fee, but it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to engage your audience and increase event attendance.
Assess how it went.
You don’t need to track every tiny data point (see below), but pick a few metrics and look at the year as a whole and how each outlet performed. Maybe a certain ad placement worked well for one program but not for another. If you can, cross-reference ad reports with Google Analytics to ensure you’re seeing similar numbers. This information will help you plan for next year and even advocate for more marketing budget in the future.
Beware of these time-sucks, intrepid marketing scientists:
Google Ad Grants.
Unless you have the capacity to manage a Google Ad Grant (meaning: not just the time but the actual expertise), this can be more effort than it’s worth. The return won’t be high if you don’t know how to set up campaigns and maintain them. If you’re a one-person marketing department, you can probably take it off your list and put your precious time elsewhere for more impact (like event listings, which create backlinks, which will drive SEO!).
Excessive, meaningless reporting.
Look, we love data—it’s at the core of what we do. But lots of marketers spend way too much time pulling somewhat arbitrary or overly detailed reports that then sit in a folder, never to be referenced or reviewed again. If you don’t have the time or expertise to use the data, then it’s wasted energy. Focus on a handful of data points you actually care about (like engagement rate on social, not number of comments) and track those. Then throw the other 10,385,593 data points out the window.
Need more advice? Check out a few of our marketing blogs for all the details:
Or reach out to us for a free 30-minute consultation!
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