Nonprofit campaign management may appear daunting. It's certainly a difficult process. In fact, 60% of nonprofits fail to raise over $500,000.

In this article, we'll break down the essentials of nonprofit campaign management. Our study-supported approach shows you how to plan, innovate, and collaborate to maximize the amount of funding raised for your nonprofit.

We've released an application that helps you efficiently manage your campaign so that you can focus on what really matters - the mission. So in this guide. we'll also look at our app and how you can use it for your nonprofit.

There are 4 essentials to managing a successful nonprofit:

1. Set the objective

- Divide the objective into a number of tasks

2. Team

-Create a team and foster collaboration

2. Marketing

-Raise awareness with marketing

3. Optional: Events

-Put on events to raise money for the cause

4. Funding - goals and execution

-Use the S.M.A.R.T method to set the appropriate goals for funding

-Execute the goals with innovative marketing strategies and fund-raising events

-Optional: pursue corporate sponsorships

Setting the objective

You're planning a nonprofit because your heart is rooted in an unchanging conviction. For the nonprofit, you must extrapolate that conviction so that it deals with a specific problem that has a specific mission.

Of course, that problem and that mission go hand in hand. The mission can be thought of as your contribution to solving that problem.

Overall, the problem and your mission constitute the objective of your nonprofit.

More than likely, details of the objective will change. You'll have to pivot to new ideas as you gather information and face obstacles. But the heart of the objective - where your conviction is - should remain firm.

First write 1 sentence that summarizes the whole mission. Treat this sentence as your thesis statement.

Next, follow up with a sequence of sentences describing the nuances of the mission and how it contributes to alleviating the problem you're passionate about.

Pro tip: Do some market research to validate the problem and mission. Understanding your target audience, as well as similar nonprofits, is critical to defining the objective.

Once you've set the objective...

..structure your plan to revolve around it.

Notably: Any project or set of tasks that you make for the campaign will hinge on the objective.

That's how we've structured our app in WeBase. Our 'Projects' table has various records of 'tasks' that center around the objective of the campaign.

Developing the team

Now that you've set the objective, the next step is to develop a team of people who share your conviction.

Successful nonprofits have a leadership board of people spearheading different parts of the plan.

Transparent collaboration and radical candor are features of good teamwork.

Our WeBase app was built from the ground up for good teamwork. You can schedule meetings in our 'team' table like this:

Marketing

Marketing is how you spread awareness about your cause. It's where you brand your mission.

Marketing can help: 

Marketing strategies that we'll discuss:

Marketing

Let's examine the best and usually most effective marketing process. It looks like this:

*Content marketing to reach people and build up a following on your website

      - It's advantageous to create a newsletter in the process to build up a database of emails

*Social media in conjunction with the content you're putting out. This is to grow the number of people following your mission

*Paid advertising in the form of ads on social media and sponsorships and/or collaboration of 'influencers' on various social outlets.

*Automate as much as possible!

The goal of your marketing is to create an image for your campaign. You can only spread awareness for you cause by branding your image. Creating an image, and then spread that image, is the only way to do that well.

So, you should take a visual, story-based approach to your content marketing and social media posts.

Our WeBase app is designed for you to customize your own marketing process. It enables you to set time tables, achievable goals for your marketing, measure your performance (increase retention rate, newsletter conversion rate, lower social ad CTR, and so on) , and follow a process to create and promote good content.

Again, make sure to automate. Our WeBase app can help with this. We also advise using a tool like Buffer to schedule social media posts and Zapier to automate other processes.

Event planning & hosting

Not all nonprofits host events. But our Webase nonprofit app has a table for event planning, so let's take a look at that.

One of the primary ways to raise money is to put on an event. That could be a dinner, an activity like a race, an auction, or more.

Get creative with the event you host!

Use the marketing tactics above to promote your event. Also send out events, perform email marketing, and pursue corporate sponsorships for it.

Our WeBase app provides a place to brainstorm event ideas, assign a collaborator(s) to spearhead each one, and notify people when the event is active.

Raise funds

All of the things we've talked about in this article culminate in fundraising. Marketing contributes to this by spreading awareness and creating image that people will put money in. A campaign event sometimes serves the sole purpose of raising money.

An essential of fundraising is to set good goals. You may want to use the S.M.A.R.T. method.

S: Specific. Write out a specific goal.

M: Measurable. The goal must be subject to metrics. You cannot change what you cannot measure.

A: Attainable. Set realistic goals. Make each one an achievable stepping stone.

R: Risky. Although the goal should be attainable, it should be risky enough to motivate people to work hard.

T: Time-bound. The fundraising should follow a timeline. In particular, set deadlines.

Three ways to raise money:

1) Donations

Charity events and actives are a method to do this. Another method is to set up an online account (ex: GoFundMe) and use social media and content marketing to drive traffic to it.

2) Sell something

A bake off or an auction are both common examples of selling something to raise money.

3) Corporate sponsorships

Partnerships with corporations are an effective way to raise funds for a nonprofit.

Our WeBase app provides a table that follows the S.M.AR.T. method to set and track donations.

Check out our app for nonprofit management here!

WeBase is a NoCode platform. That means that you can use our app as a template and customize it for your specific goals.

Thank you for reading!