Marketing is essential for nonprofits. Not only is it needed to raise awareness of the cause you’re supporting, but it’s also vital for attracting donors and recruiting volunteers.

However, with many nonprofits under-resourced or, at the least, lacking a dedicated marketing team, getting exposure for your organization can be a daunting task.

Fortunately, there are some excellent marketing tools, solutions, and discounts for nonprofits that can help you do more with less.

Some of these tools make it easier and faster to do what you’re probably already doing, such as collaborating, designing logos, and writing articles, while others give you free or reduced access to services that would otherwise be very costly, such as paid ads and premium tools.

So, to support the recent release of our Gravity Forms Nonprofit License — one that gets you access to our powerful form builder and a useful set of add-ons for a reduced price — we’ve put together this guide on the top 10 essential marketing tools for nonprofits.

The best tools of this type will enable you to spend less time and money on marketing so that you can spend more time on the purpose of your nonprofit while also reaching more people.

Let’s jump in…

10 Essential Marketing Tools for Nonprofits

When it comes to our pick of essential nonprofit marketing tools, some are free, while others are discounted for nonprofits. However, they all come highly recommended and are sure to help you market your organization with increased effectiveness, efficiency, and affordability.

Let’s start with our powerful form builder that will help make your nonprofit site more interactive and better at facilitating communications and transactions between you and your target audience.

Gravity Forms

If, like 43% of the websites on the internet, you’re using WordPress for your site, then a powerful form plugin like Gravity Forms can really help you to market your nonprofit.

From creating optin forms to increase email marketing newsletter sign-ups to building surveys, polls, and quizzes that can be used to learn more about your audience and raise awareness of your nonprofit, our plugin has so many uses that it deserves a place in your marketing toolkit.

The form template library makes it easy to quickly add a range of useful forms to your site, including donation, event registration, application forms, and more. You can create forms from scratch and edit the templates using the drag-and-drop editor.

As mentioned, we have a Nonprofit License for Gravity Forms that gets you a great deal on this powerful online form builder for WordPress.

Mailchimp

If you’re looking for a way to communicate your mission and stay connected to your followers, users, and supporters, then an email marketing service like Mailchimp is one of the 10 essential marketing tools for nonprofits we recommend.

Mailchimp is a powerful email marketing service that allows you to build a list and add people to it. You can then send them messages via email, either on demand or by creating automated schedules.

To help you save time and simplify using this effective marketing channel, Mailchimp has an impressive selection of easily editable email templates.

You can also set up custom triggers that automatically send emails to your subscribers based on various factors. If you’ve been interested in making your marketing efforts more targeted and personalized to your audience, this feature is sure to come in handy.

If you need to manage multiple lists of subscribers, such as one for supporters and another for service users, Mailchimp can also easily handle that.

When it comes to getting visitors to your site onto your email marketing list, the previously mentioned Gravity Forms plugin has a ready-made solution for WordPress users. With the Gravity Forms Mailchimp Add-On, you can quickly connect your site to Mailchimp in the way you want.

Mailchimp has a free plan as well as free trials for their Standard and Essential plans. Furthermore, US-based and international nonprofits (and charities) can get 15% off all plans, thanks to the Mailchimp nonprofit discount scheme.

Gravity Flow

If you decide to use Gravity Forms, you can then also use one of our other tools, Gravity Flow, to help market your nonprofit.

Gravity Flow can do a lot, but one reason why we think it’s one of the top 10 essential marketing tools for nonprofits is that it can send marketing email campaigns from your website.

Therefore, if you’re not ready to sign up with a dedicated email marketing service like Mailchimp, you can use Gravity Flow to provide some of that functionality from inside your WordPress dashboard.

Another reason why we recommend Gravity Flow is that the custom workflows you can build with it can benefit nonprofits in many ways. Some examples include taking paper systems online, reducing manual workloads, and improving the experience of your users. If you’re looking to implement efficiency and time-saving measures, then Gravity Flow can definitely help.

You can read this case study to find out how the National Compassion Fund, part of the National Center for Victims of Crime nonprofit, used Gravity Flow to handle applications for support quickly and securely.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides insights into your site visitors.

At its most basic, it will show you how many people access your site each day, which pages they visit, and where they came from. However, it can do a lot more, such as track goals on your site, such as visitors using a donation form or joining your email newsletter, and reveal trends in visitor activity.

If you’re using Gravity Forms, you can use the Google Analytics Add-On to understand how your visitors interact with your forms.

Google Analytics is an essential marketing tool for nonprofits as it will let you see how effective your promotional efforts are. Without a tool like this, you’ll find it hard to know if you’re spending your time, money, and effort wisely.

You only have to add Google Analytics to your site once, and then you can log in to your account dashboard to uncover a wealth of data and information. Due to this, it’s a service that’s well worth adopting.

Grammarly

Typos, poor grammar, and content that’s hard to read can hurt your marketing efforts.

Thankfully, Grammarly can help with all of the above and more. Once you’ve signed up with Grammarly, it will check your writing as you go, either in your choice of app, including Google Docs, Word, or the optional Grammarly editor.

Grammarly can also check your writing on a range of other platforms, including email, social media, and other communication tools.

Grammarly is ideal if you’re prone to the occasional spelling mistake or you’d like suggestions on making your content more readable and engaging. It even has an AI-powered tool that aims to accelerate your writing process.

Nonprofits can currently get free access to some of the premium features of Grammarly.

Upslash

Your marketing content needs to look good as well as being well-written. However, creating eye-catching images and graphics can be time-consuming and difficult if you don’t already have the necessary skills.

But don’t worry! You can use Unsplash to access a vast library of high-quality images that are free to use. With categories that include street photography, business and work, people, and many more, you’re sure to be able to find images that are suitable for your nonprofit.

The images on Unsplash are made to be used freely, including for commercial and non-commercial projects.

Canva

If you do want to or need to, create your own images for marketing purposes, then Canva is an excellent option.

It’s a design tool that provides you with thousands of templates for all types of purposes, including logos, infographics, documents, business cards, and more. There are even video templates that you can use to promote your nonprofit.

All of the templates can be edited with the intuitive Cavana editor, making custom content available to everyone.

Whether you need personalized eye-catching images for your website, emails, or social media posts, Canva has you covered. Nonprofits can apply for free access to Canva, too.

Later

Later is a social media management tool that will help you become more efficient and effective when promoting your nonprofit online.

Some of the benefits of using Later include enabling you to create and schedule social media posts for all your accounts from a central dashboard, design high-quality social media content, get hashtag and commenting suggestions to increase your reach, and find suitable content you can use in your posts.

It even has an AI-powered caption-generation tool to help you craft your social media posts.

If you want to get on top of social media marketing, Later can help. You can also get a significant nonprofit discount on their plans.

Google Ads

Did you know you could be able to advertise your nonprofit with Google AdWords for free?

Thanks to Google Ad Grants, your nonprofit could get up to $10,000 worth of exposure on Google each month. This means that when people search for nonprofits like yours, your custom message or ad could be displayed in the Google search results ad panel.

As it only takes a few steps to find out if you qualify, and if you do, get started, it’s definitely worth looking into. Even if you’re already using the standard, paid Google Ads service, you can still potentially set up a Google Ad Grants account and access the free ad placement scheme.

Google also provides marketing help for nonprofits that might also be able to increase your online visibility.

Google Workspace for Nonprofits

Most of the Google tools are free, but nonprofits can get access to some of the premium extras for free by signing up to Google Workspace for Nonprofits.

A key feature of Google Workspace that will make your nonprofit look more professional is the ability to use your custom domain name with Gmail. You also won’t see ads in your inbox as you do with the free version of Gmail. Running video meetings with more participants is another perk of this service.

You can see exactly what you get with Google Workspace for Nonprofits and how to apply on this page.

Summary

As you can see, some excellent marketing tools exist for nonprofits.

Whether you get access for free or with a significant discount, there are many options for keeping your costs low and stretching your marketing budget further. The ability to get better results by embracing these tools shouldn’t be overlooked either.

To learn more about the Gravity Forms Nonprofit License, visit our pricing page.