How to Write Awesome Blog Content for Your Nonprofit

Given that nine out of 10 organizations use content marketing to deepen relationships with customers, your nonprofit should be focusing now, more than ever, on your website’s blog to further boost your online presence. Not only does your blog increase engagement and leverage storytelling to draw in donors, but it can also help improve your SEO. One of the most important factors to good SEO is great blog content.

Below are some best practices on how you can create fantastic blog content for your nonprofit website.\

Why You Need Great Blog Content

It builds trust with your audience.

First, you should create great blog content so that people will understand the cause you support, the mission you’re advancing, and the impact donors can have. This will be much more likely if you have a high-quality, well-written post, whether it’s a letter from the president, an update from the field, or a press release.

These can boost your credibility and reliability, and viewers will be more likely to take your website more seriously and become repeat visitors. They will likely trust your site as a source of reliable content in the future as well.

It lowers your bounce rate.

Next, solid blog content for your nonprofit can lead to a lower bounce rate. On average, 75 percent of the people who come to your website leave after only viewing the page they entered through, whether it was your homepage or an internal page.

By creating blog posts that are interesting, clean, and well-structured, you can increase visitors’ chances of staying on your website. If your site looks sloppy, your visitors will go right back to Google and keep browsing, resulting in a higher bounce rate for your website and a negative impression for search engines.

You can share it on social media.

The final reason why blog content is so important is because it has a much higher chance to be shared on social media. In order for someone to share your article, however, you need to write posts that are worth sharing. Create valuable content and add clear social sharing buttons.

What Not to Do When Writing Nonprofit Blog Content

To give some background context, according to Google, “your SEO keywords are the key words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines ‘speaks the same language’ as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site.”

For example, let’s say you’re writing about volunteer opportunities in Nepal, and you choose the keyword “volunteering.” Your article may have little chance of ranking in search engines as “volunteering” is word that has high search volume. However, if you use a longer-tail keyword such as “volunteer programs Nepal,” your post has a much better chance of competing.

However, when writing new blog content, it’s important that you don’t write for Google; write for your nonprofit’s audience. As important as it is to have an SEO and keyword strategy, it’s equally important, if not more, to write content that people want to read. Google won’t rank your post if people are not reading it.

Another thing to avoid when writing your text is over-optimizing for Google, or overusing your keywords. Don’t stick your keyword all throughout your post just to meet your SEO requirements. This can impede readability.

What to Do When Writing Nonprofit Blog Content

As your first step, always think about what your audience would like to read. What is the goal of your blog? What do your readers want to know more about? Some ideas for good blog topics:

• Recent impact projects
• Upcoming conference information
• Upcoming events or campaigns
• Success stories
• Letters from the executive director

After you nail down a relevant topic for your audience, then you can think about ways to make your articles attractive for search engines and naturally weave in your keyword throughout your post.

Read Next: 29 Blog Post Ideas for Nonprofit Content Marketers

Tips for Writing Inspiration

Get inspiration from your own personal experiences.

Go back to the moments that inspired you to take on this mission. What pivotal experiences drew you to the cause? Even posts about problems or solutions that you have encountered at your job could potentially be helpful for someone else.

For example, if your nonprofit was able to raise a lot of money through peer-to-peer fundraising, share your knowledge and write a blog post on how others can do it as well.

Read other blogs and/or the news.

Browse online to see what others are writing about. Sometimes it’s helpful to just read article titles in order to get ideas for your own angle for a post.

Also, find out what is going on in the world and see what’s trending, maybe even from Twitter or Facebook. Then form your own opinions or analysis as it relates to your cause, and write about it.

Create a blog series.

Sometimes when you’re writing a blog post, you realize you’re actually writing two blog posts. You can always divide posts into two or more and create a blog series. That way you can be more thorough and also have more content.

You can also take advantage of this opportunity to invite qualified experts or influencers to write guest posts as part of your blog series.

Interact with your audience.

Sometimes people comment on your blog post with questions that may be difficult to answer. Use these comments or comments on social media as an opportunity for inspiration. Perhaps you can create brand new posts from questions that people raise in their comments.

Use internal search.

Your audience uses the internal search function on your page to search for information they are looking for on your site. With Google Analytics, you can see the terms people are searching for, which could give you inspiration for new blog posts.

We hope that this article has been useful for your to learn exactly why valuable blog content is important, the dos and don’ts in writing new content, and tips for figuring out what to write about. As always, if you would like to share your own personal experiences with blog content writing, please comment below.

This post was initially published on the Elevation Blog by Sara Lowe, communications and partnerships manager. Sara began volunteering with nonprofits at an early age, including helping her hometown military community at the USO, teaching useful skills to inmates at a local jail, and traveling to Cambodia to help implement sustainable farming practices in a small village.