Why your charity needs a digital marketing strategy

Digital Marketing expert, David Somerville shares key reasons why having a digital marketing strategy is essential for any charity.

Aug 2024

According to the Charity Digital Skills Report, three quarters (76%) of charities surveyed say they have moved forward with digital this year and 80% say that digital is a priority for them.

Despite these positive indicators, still only 50% have a strategy in place for digital – this has gone up slightly from 48% since 2023. Whilst that’s great for the 50% that do, it does also mean that 50% of charities do not have one.

With so much emphasis in marketing now being on digital, having a documented digital or digital marketing strategy in place is critical to help guide you and ensure you are spending your valuable time and resources on the right activity.

In this article I will show the key reasons why I believe having a digital marketing strategy is essential for any charity – regardless of your size.

The fundamentals of strategy

Before we look at why you need one, let’s take a quick look at some of the fundamentals around strategy, starting off with this broad description of what a strategy is:

“A careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal (or goals), usually over a long period of time.”

A strategy can be applied to many situations and it’s likely that you will already have some form of charity or organisational strategy in place.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Another thing to be clear on is ‘strategy’ vs ‘tactics’ – these are sometimes used by people wrongly, which can lead to confusion.

A strategy is the big picture, high-level view and a strategic plan tells you where you are, what you want to achieve and how you will know what has been achieved.

Tactics however are the things you will implement specifically as part of the strategy. They are the ‘doing’ part, your actions as such. You will typically have lots of them to implement, therefore you make sure they are prioritised and measurable.

Digital marketing strategy or digital strategy?

You’ve probably heard both of these terms used before and they are sometimes used interchangeably.

I prefer to keep them separately ideally and define them as follows:

Digital Marketing Strategy – the use of digital channels to reach and engage your target audiences.

Digital Strategy – an even wider piece, that also considers the technological architecture (IT, software etc) that is required to fulfil your charity objectives.

In addition to these, you might have also seen a MarComms or Communications Strategy mentioned. These are often very similar to a digital marketing strategy, but usually include key messages for each audience group, plus might reflect both online and offline channels.

Why you need a digital marketing strategy

Here’s six clear benefits of why you need a digital marketing strategy for your charity.

1. It gives you a clear and documented plan – having something written down, even on a single page of paper then gives you a record of what needs to be achieved, how you will do that and how you will measure that.
2. It helps you to understand your audiences more – part of creating a strategy is to discuss and confirm who your key audiences are, then map out what you know about them and ideally get fresh insights directly from them. This ensures you are creating a strategy that helps provide what people need, on the right touchpoints, with the right messaging.
3. It will help give confidence and buy-in for digital activity with internal people, including trustees – showing others within the charity what you want to do and how you will measure this can help provide reassurance that you are doing the right things.
4. Avoids time-wasting and duplication – having something documented and shared across everyone means that people should stop working in silos and instead work more collaboratively to achieve common goals.
5. It can help to justify time, resources and budgets – if you find it hard to gain agreement for these, then a strategy will help you business-case what you need.
6. It helps you track the impact of your efforts – all good strategies should show what the key measures are that will be used to show what has happened. They can be used for reporting, showing both individual and collective impact.

These benefits would mostly also apply for any form of strategy – whether digital, MarComms or a broader organisational one.

Hopefully you have now understood a bit more about the basics of strategy and why you should look to implement a digital marketing strategy for your charity.

David recently ran a Lunch & Learn session for Link UP London on ‘How to create a digital marketing strategy’, which also provides a framework for the strategy itself. You can watch the recording of it here.

And if you want to learn more about this topic or get some support, then you can connect with David via https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsomerville