Communication is key. Whether you’re trying to coordinate with your team or reach out to current and potential donors, it’s important to stay on top of your game. Here are a handful of communication tools we’ve been using and raving about.
External Communication Tools
Sprout Social
Sprout Social isn’t just for social media scheduling. It also enables you to look over the messages and notifications coming in on any of your social media platforms and lets you respond right from your account. You can also access your newsfeeds and establish RSS feeds for keywords. Sprout Social’s smart system offers marketing analytics for you to see the best times for your nonprofit’s social media interactions.
Buffer
Buffer allows you to schedule your posts for social media ahead of time and curate content from other websites through feeds. Their basic template lets you upload an image, add text and choose which platform you want the post to come from. Not only is it free, but it’s also a timesaver for nonprofits that do their own social media marketing. With the ability to schedule posts weeks in advance, you won’t need to worry about falling behind on your posts.
Pardot
With Pardot, you can make email advertising easy and effective. The application, which is a product of Salesforce, focuses on B2B marketing and offers an automated solution so you don’t have to worry about precisely when or to whom you’ll be sending your marketing materials. It also features an in-depth analytics tool that lets you visualize what’s working for your nonprofit and what’s not.
Internal Communication Tools
Slack
We love Slack. Its easy-to-use system allows for everyone in your organization to be in contact with each other to get stuff done. The platform lets you have private, one-on-one conversations or create group channels. It allows for you to search for documents, threads and hashtags. It’s fun, too—you’re given the option of creating a channel for “water cooler talk” and customizing emojis. Nonprofits can get Slack for free, too, so long as they hold charitable status with the IRS, local tax service/charity commissions or local TechSoup Global partners.
Trello
We’ve written before about how using Trello can bring efficiency and clarity to an often chaotic workspace. Building boards with project-specific cards and tasks streamlines who is assigned to which task and when it’s due. You can make comments, change due dates and upload documents for other team members to download. This interactive to-do list can help your nonprofit when schedules don’t exactly match up and you need to track progress on projects. Nonprofit Hub uses Trello for mapping out strategic efforts like email marketing and drip campaigns, organizing our content calendar and keeping track of daily tasks. And, the kicker: Trello is free to use.
Kindful
Utilizing CRM is vital to your nonprofit achieving its mission. Kindful helps you do that by providing fundraising tools, organizing donor data and automating insight reports especially designed for nonprofits.
Having solid communications helps your overall fundraising strategy—whether that means managing your internal communications or engaging with your donors and volunteers with external communications. What’s your nonprofit’s winning stack of tools? Take to the comments below to let us know!
