Content Marketing for Nonprofits

Recently, I had the honor of previewing Kivi Leroux Miller’s new book, “Content Marketing for Nonprofits: A Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money.”

In it, the well-known and highly regarded fundraising consultant explores the world of content marketing for nonprofits in a way that is true to form for this inexhaustible font of fundraising and marketing knowledge.

As I note for the book’s back cover, content marketing is a brand-new world for the nonprofit sector, which historically has relied on traditional marketing for communicating with its donors and other supporters and potential supporters. Brand-new worlds can often be scary, especially if you try to go it alone.

In authoring this book, Leroux Miller offers herself up as your intrepid guide. Whether your organization is young and wiry or steadfastly entrenched in the “but we’ve always done it this way” sand trap, she talks — and walks — you through this new and vital approach to nonprofit communications. Her clean writing and authoritative-but-accessible style pull it all together in a way that feels like sipping tea and talking shop with a savvy friend and colleague.

That’s my take on the book, and lots of others in the fundraising world seem to agree.

Here, I talk with Leroux Miller about the book and the concept of content marketing.

FundRaising Success: What exactly is content marketing?
Kivi Leroux Miller: Traditional marketing is often about pushing your communications in front of people and saying, “Hey, you, please look here!” It interrupts people. With content marketing, you produce communications that people want to read and that attract them — and new people — to your organization. But to produce those kinds of communications usually requires a significant shift in mind-set within a nonprofit, and that’s what the book is about.