Question

Topic: Advertising/PR

Best Places To Advertise Online For A Non-profit?

Posted by amoser on 6/29/2015 at 11:30 AM ET 125 Points
Hello!

I advertise for a small non-profit mental health agency. I am trying to find places online to advertise the mental health services/education programs that we offer here. Everything seems to be so expensive and way out of my budget. Where are some effective (yet, cheap!) places to advertise our mental health services online?

Thanks in advance for your input.
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  • Posted by mgoodman on 6/29/2015 at 11:46 AM Moderator
    One of the difficulties in advertising for a non-profit organization is that they are unable to place a dollar (or Euro, etc.) value on a new "customer." As a result, they don't have any idea how much to spend to attract a new "customer," and thus everything seems too expensive.

    They often gravitate to social media because it seems to be "free," but it doesn't take long for them to realize how much manpower it takes to feed the social media beast, or how much it costs if you want to buy real advertising on Facebook, et al.

    Someone here may come up with a clever idea for you, but my take is that with a very small budget you can't expect to deliver much in the way of results. Sorry.
  • Posted by amoser on 6/29/2015 at 1:11 PM Author
    As a mental health agency, I already understand that we cannot place a dollar value on a "customer" because we do not advertise products, we advertise so that people can be aware of the mental health services that we offer.

    In addition, we have a limited budget (I guess "small budget" weren't the right words to use). This means that there is money to be spent on advertising, we just have to be smart about the way that we go about spending it.

    With that being said, what are some places to advertise online where people would be most likely to see our advertisement and where we would get the most bang for our buck?

    I encourage other people to provide further feedback and strategies that have worked for them.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 6/29/2015 at 7:51 PM Accepted
    To work properly, online advertising needs to be tightly geo targeted depending on the catchment area for your services, and it needs to speak to highly specific needs. Ads on larger sites may reach more people, but if those folks are thousands of miles away, your ads are wasted. Similarly, simply because online ads are being seen and you're being told you're getting this number of impressions for this much money, you have NO way of knowing if those impressions are from real people or from ad bots. The recipient of the ad, human or bot, is not what matters, it's how much money it can make for the ad network.

    It's not so much the advertising that you need to focus on as the actions the ads ask people to do: call a specific number, respond to a specific webpage, and so on. Ads alone—unless they speak to specific needs and to particular issues people need help with—probably won't bring you new clients. Your best bet for new patients is probably your existing client base, which takes you away from online advertising and redirects you to e-mail messaging and direct mail.

    Craft these message sequences well and include solid calls to action and your ad spend increases in its overall effectiveness. If you take nothing else from this response, let it be this: unless your banners or text ads focus on driving an action you can measure and then follow up on, most online advertising for small nonprofits is a waste of money.

  • Posted on 6/30/2015 at 4:02 AM Member
    Facebook or upload a Youtube video
  • Posted by amoser on 6/30/2015 at 3:11 PM Author
    Gary Bloomer,

    Thank you for your response. I found it very helpful and I can take away a lot of good points from what you said!
  • Posted by mdlugozima on 6/30/2015 at 3:40 PM Accepted
    Try a limited campaign on Google AdWords. This is where you bid on keyword searches people are performing, and when Google returns a search engine results page (SERP), your ad will appear on the top or the top right side. And as Gary Bloomer advised, you have to geo-target your ads to the local zip codes you serve. BUT before you run ads, make sure your website is using good search engine optimization (SEO). Your website has to be what your ad promised. To compare it to an offline "bricks and mortar" example, you would not run an ad in your local newspaper that tells people to come to your business, but when they get there the building is decrepit, the signage is confusing, and the whole place looks uninviting. Make sure your website is "presentable" first. I call this "turning your site into a webutante" before you send out party invitations. Hope this makes some sense. There is a lot to the online marketing profession.
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