I’m Julie Pham, WTIA’s VP of Community Engagement and Marketing. Amy Fawcett, the Digital Producer at WTIA, and I recently presented a guide to “Practical Marketing Tools for Nonprofits” at WordCamp Seattle 2017 on November 5th. We shared our experience with marketing WTIA as the organization has changed over the years.

Marketing for many nonprofits is considered overhead. Nearly 30 percent of nonprofits have no or very little budget for marketing, and yet it’s critical to getting people to understand what you do. Previously, WTIA did not have much of a marketing presence. An email was sent out once a month, and the WTIA website was very static. After being around for over thirty years, a lot of people knew who we are, but they didn’t know what we do, or what impact we have made. After a lot of changes, we’re happy with the direction WTIA’s marketing is headed.

The presentation at WordCamp Seattle 2017 focused on three website marketing tools: annual reports, microsites, and self-serve web forms. These tools were chosen because they are cost-effective and time-effective and they are flexible.

Here are the tips from the presentation:

Tool #1: Create Annual Reports to Showcase Success

An Annual report shows what a nonprofit accomplished in a year. We created the first annual report in 2015 for the previous year of 2014, and it’s been evolving ever since. The 2014 annual report only existed in PDF format. Then, in 2015, we created our first online annual report, and last year, we improved on that by including even more statistics to illustrate our impact. You can view our 2016 annual report here.

Here are tips to creating an online annual report.

1) Consider the overall story you want to tell

This is an annual report, so each year needs to have a different story. The 2014 annual report focused on taking stock of the industry. In 2015, we covered investing in cross-sector collaboration and starting to build new programs. In 2016, we discussed introducing these programs, and how much WTIA has grown into a big family.

2) Search online to get inspiration

When creating an annual report, you want to take a look online and find design and content inspiration. What are other similar nonprofits reporting on? Keep in mind your resources: Do you have someone on staff who can create what you’re thinking of? If not, what’s your budget? What’s your timeline? We like to release our annual report in early March to make sure the content is fresh.

3) Think about the content categories you’ll want to showcase year over year

Remember, your audience are your funders, supporters, the board, and future supporters. They want to know if you’re a successful organization that is making impact. Focus the content of the annual report on things that will impress them. A few things we always include are impact statistics, the budget, events and highlights, and testimonials.

4) Select the events and highlights from that past year

Focus your annual reports on the most successful events and highlights from the past year. These are excellent to showcase, and will help lead up to the overall story you’re trying to tell. We wanted our annual report to be online so people would be able to easily engage with our content. So in 2015, we began showcasing our highlights as clickable blog posts.

5) Find testimonials

Including testimonials in your annual report from well-respected people in the community can improve your brand further. Throughout the year, collect any nice comments about your organization that you receive. If you don’t have a ready collection of testimonials and need to ask for testimonials, make sure you give them some suggestions on what you’d like them to focus on.

6) Determine the impact stats you’ll share

People like stats because they are easier to digest. Think about what meaningful stats you want to show that support the overall story you want to tell. For our very first annual report, we just showed basic stats about our membership–how many members we have, where are they located, and our expenses and revenue. In later years, we had more stats to show our impact on the tech community.

7) Find images (original and stock) you’ll want to use

Photos are very important.They’re a great opportunity to show off your company culture. Photos are hard to come by, so we host a photo contest that offers a free WTIA membership as a reward. You can also remember to hire a photographer to take photos at your events, or try free online options such as Unsplash, Pixabay, and Google images labeled for reuse.

Tool #2: Utilize Microsites for Complex Programs

Microsites are mini-websites with their own navigation bar that live on your main website. Keeping the association with the parent brand (your company) is key. At WTIA, we use microsites for complex programs like our Benefits Program, bigger events and conferences, and also for when we need a placeholder for a dedicated website. This was the case for our apprenticeship program, Apprenti.

The main areas to focus on with Microsites:

1) Determine the goal

Determine the goal and function of the microsite. Is it to drive applications for a program, registration for an event, or to learn about a new product you want to sell? Decide how much functionality you’ll need.

2) Make a plan

Meet with the relevant internal stakeholders to plan for content. What content definitely needs to be included on the microsite? Write the plan and content in a Google or Word document first. It will force you to think through the hierarchy of the information.

This is what the WTIA Benefits Program microsite looks like today. The most important thing to notice is the secondary menu underneath the banner image. This is what makes it a microsite. The secondary menu stays in the same spot no matter which page you are on (see it in action here). We also left the WTIA menu intact so that our company brand doesn’t get lost.

You can also use microsites for bigger events and conferences. In the menu for the microsite to our FullConTech event, we have the main page link, speakers, register, FAQ, contact us, event playbooks, and information on past FullConTechs.

Tool #3: Offer Self-Serve Forms for Additional Content

Having original, fresh content on your website is ideal. The problem, however, is getting original content can be time consuming or expensive. More times than none, it’s both. Self-serve forms come down to making it easy for your audience to provide you with content and information that’s worth sharing.

We created self-serve forms to automate those requests, and it puts the responsibility on the person making the request. We basically tell people: help us help you by filling out this form. There are two major types of content you can gather through self-serve forms

1) Promoting partners’ content

Promoting other people’s content is one way to get original content to put on your site. It helps volunteers, sponsors, board members, and community partners turn to us as a platform to help promote things they care about, and it can go a long way in terms of building relationships. The problem, however, is that handling those requests can get time consuming. We get email requests all the time. “Can you post this?” “Can you promote this?” We say, “Sure, we’re happy to! You just need to fill out this form.”

There are two major kinds asks we receive from content contributors:

1. Promote the content on our social media or newsletter
2. Promote on the content on the WTIA blog

Consider these questions when creating self-serve promotion forms.

• What info do you get requests from all the time?
• What info do you need from people to make your work as easy as possible?
• What information do you find yourself explaining over and over again?
• What issues have emerged in the past? Address them in the form.
• Once the form has been created, are there any questions that you’re still fielding? Update your form to make it easier to use and understand.

2) Crowdsourcing original content and research

The other way to use self-serve forms for content generation is to crowdsource  information we want to get from our community. For these complex information request, we use Google Forms. WTIA has come up with two great examples: our Tech Universe Map resource and a Women in Tech Resource guide.

We want to promote the tech companies in our state. One of the big things WTIA is known for is our Tech Universe Map, which showcases the genealogy of tech companies in our region by way of where their founders worked previously. So, for example, you can see how many people who used to work at Microsoft started their own companies.

We are now trying to get more demographic information on local tech company founders. But that research is really time-consuming, and it’s difficult for us to get all the information out there. We then asked entrepreneurs who want to get featured on the map to fill out a self-serve form.

WTIA also gets lots of requests for information and resources around diversity in tech. We worked with Artemis Connection, a strategy consulting firm that collected resources on Women in Tech into a Google Doc, and we house that document on a page called Diversity & Inclusion Resources: Women in Tech. If a user thinks there’s a resource missing from the document, they can email us and we will add it. It’s a bit more of a manual approach, but it still works.

It can be hard to grow your marketing budget, but by putting in an effort using marketing tools like annual reports, microsites, and self-serve forms, you can maximize your limited time and budget.