As a non-profit leader, you understand the importance of stretching every dollar. Nevertheless, it takes an investment to promote your organization’s mission and build its brand.
At Trillion, we work with many non-profit organizations on projects such as capital campaign design, impact report design, website design, brand refreshes, and more. The common thread that resonates with every leader of these organizations is our recommendations on ways to save money.
If you’re a fundraising or marketing professional, here are four often overlooked ways to save money on marketing expenses.
Save Money with a Special Mailing Permit
If you are mailing postcards, appeal letters, membership renewals, or similar things through the United States Postal Service, you should be using a non-profit postal permit, also known as an indicia. This special permit allows you to send mail at significantly reduced rates—less than $0.14 each when properly sorted and labeled.
There are parameters that need to be followed and some paperwork will need to be completed but with the help of a mail house, your workload is minimal. A mail house will prepare and sort your list, personalize each piece, collate, fold, insert and deliver it to the post office with efficiency. Even though you pay for this service, the savings in postage are significant and typically offset the mail house fees.
Below are some guidelines for saving money with a non-profit postal permit:
- Send at least 200 pieces at one time
- Mail up to 3.3 oz. and be charged for only 1 oz.
- Include proper bar codes and zip codes to save even more (Your mail house can help with this.)
- Use your mail house’s indicia to avoid an annual $225 permit fee
A non-profit postage permit can be issued directly to you at your local post office, but we recommend utilizing your mail house’s permit number instead. The mail houses usually utilize a regional distribution center that will process and distribute mail much faster than most local post offices. In this example, saving time equals saving money.
Check out our article, “How Nonprofits Can Save 88% on Postage by Using an Indicia”.
Get up to $120,000 a Year for Your Non-Profit
Imagine what you could do with $10,000 of in-kind advertising each month. Google offers some serious value in the form of a Google Ad Grant for organizations that qualify. With that kind of money you could recruit more volunteers, attract more donations, and share your story more broadly. It’s all added exposure and potential opportunities for your non-profit organization.
One major thing to be aware of is that governmental entities and organizations, hospitals and medical groups, schools, academic institutions, and universities are not eligible. However, philanthropic arms of educational institutions are.
Google has a 5-step process to begin participating in the program:
- See if you are eligible
- Apply for Google for Nonprofits
- Enroll in Google Ad Grants
- Create your account
- Submit your account for review
Once the account is approved, the ads will begin being served in search results.
There are guidelines that you need to follow, so promotional language such as “Buy Tickets” will be excluded. There is also a maximum bid of $2.00. Remember that you are not charged for each impression of an ad but rather if someone clicks on the ad. That’s one reason why Google wants to serve relevant ads and requires an actively managed Ads account. This means your ads are achieving minimum levels of activity and clicks. If someone on your team cannot manage the ads and your website, you will need to hire a team that will.
Advertising on the web can be very expensive and there’s nothing like receiving in-kind ad space. A $10,000 ad spend each month is an astronomical number for many smaller non-profits. It’s not uncommon to use less than the $10,000 grant, but that’s ok. Be prepared to hire a qualified person or team such as Trillion that can manage your Google Grant Ad campaign.
Use a Smart RFP Process
One of the most confusing times for a fundraising, development or marketing professional is when a design request for proposal (RFP) is shared with design studios and you get back dramatically different responses. This scenario results in many lost hours trying to compare apples to oranges in an effort to choose the best creative agency to complete your project. It’s a broken process from the very beginning if you don’t start with a smart RFP document.
We’ve written a great RFP article as a guide to help define project parameters and expectations. A more clearly defined RFP will yield responses from your creative agencies which are more easily compared. Plus, creative agencies want to know they have a chance of winning the project so a smartly prepared RFP will help you get the responses you want, from the most qualified companies. This will allow you to make a more informed decision more efficiently—saving your organization time and money.
Batch Projects Together
Save money by combining projects with your creative agency. This means you commit to work together over the coming months on multiple projects. You have to plan your creative needs three to six months or more into the future to make this fruitful. Creative agencies like Trillion appreciate these agreements because it helps us plan our workload in the very near future.
Depending upon the scope of the projects and time commitment, you could potentially save 5-20% on creative fees. In addition to saving fee costs, you can streamline the agreement review process, workflow, and accounting while you are working together. Again, this will save time and money for your organization.
Approach your creative agency by saying something like this, “We would like your company to work on X projects over the next X months for our organization. Are there any savings you can provide if we commit to you for these projects as a group?” Give it a try. Money will be saved.
We Like to Think Creatively
At Trillion, we enjoy working with our non-profit clients to create fresh approaches and visual identities. We’ve built a reputation for the quality and relevancy of our designs and the effectiveness of our work with our clients’ constituents. If you have a project coming up and need help with creative thinking and design, give us a call at 908.219.4703 or simply complete our short contact form and one of our partners will reach out to you promptly.
