The power of repurposing your nonprofit organization’s content
PRINTYou may have heard the expression “content is king”. This is especially true for resource-strapped nonprofit marcom professionals. With the trend of upcycling mason jars as centerpieces and old doors as coffee tables on the rise, it’s time for us ask ourselves this question, “Am I using my content to its fullest potential?” Chances are the answer is “no”.
Repurposing or upcycling content is an easy way to optimize your resources, stretch your marketing budget dollars and reinforce your brand message. It just takes a little planning and coordination.
Here are four tips to help you to start repurposing content:
Repurposing or upcycling content is an easy way to optimize your resources, stretch your marketing budget dollars and reinforce your brand message. Share on XSchedule your content
Planning ahead is critical. It’s difficult to successfully repurpose most content on the fly or in pieces. You may miss critical steps or duplicate work, eliminating any efficiencies you were trying to find. The best thing you could do for your marketing team is to establish a content calendar.
Your content calendar should outline all of your marketing campaigns for the year, such as appeals, events, social media, ads and public relations. Include campaigns you do every year such as year-end appeals and annual fundraisers as well as special occasions like the start of a new program or a new community partnership. Once you’ve got your calendar in place, you can plan consistent messaging and tactics that are timely, integrated and brand right.
Start with the big projects
The next step is to look for the long form projects that will take the most resources to develop. Give yourself enough time for repurposing as you write and design the content. Make a plan for the types of content you want to build out of each project.
For example, consider your annual report. This project comes around every year and for many of us, it’s a project that we accomplish on autopilot. But stop and think for a minute. What is actually in your annual report? Can you use the impact stats as infographics for social media posts? Can you use the client stories in direct mail appeals? Would you link the financials page of the annual report on your About Us webpage? Make a list of the content in your annual report and the tactics you could use to deploy it elsewhere. Then, create a plan to break up the finished annual report into these chunks of content. Lastly, store the content in an easily accessible place for future use.
Here’s an example of how my organization repurposed our fiscal year 2017 annual report [pdf].
- Impact stats broken up into nineteen individual infographics and shared throughout the year on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
- Impact stats used on program webpages
- Four client stories and photos used in print and e-newsletters throughout the year
- Four client stories and quotes used in press releases throughout the year
- Four client quotes and photos shared throughout the year on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
- Our Services and Our Mission pages used in a PowerPoint presentation for the CEO to present to prospective board members and in community partnership meetings
- Photos used on program webpages
- Finance page graphics used in printed program case statements
Other ways to repurpose content
It’s important to always think about how you can integrate your message in every campaign. You should never send out a direct mail appeal without also planning to send an email, deploy a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign and post on social media. Design a campaign that is impactful on all marketing platforms, both traditional and digital. Use the same messaging and images so that your message is consistent and clear but tailored to the platform.
Repurposing on the fly
Of course, there is always that opportunity that comes up unexpectedly. Sometimes it makes sense to stop what you are doing and make it happen. If you need last minute content for an ad or an appeal, it’s best to have evergreen content on hand that you could repurpose quickly into something new. If you have time, you could even build a library of “just in case” evergreen content to pull from when you need it.
Your marcom team is only as effective as the quality of content you produce. Establishing a consistent content publishing loop is critical to your success. Repurposing content helps you optimize resources. Don’t think of it as old content. With a little love, it can be timeless.
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Pam Georgiana
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- The power of repurposing your nonprofit organization’s content - February 19, 2019
