Content marketing for a nonprofit: two readers, one calendar, and consent before you publish anybody

A nonprofit website has two readers with opposite needs and most organisations only write for one of them. The donor wants the outcome, the cost per outcome and the evidence. The person you serve wants to know whether they qualify, where to go, what to bring and who to ask for. Writing for the donor and leaving the second reader with a phone number is the most common content failure in the sector, and it is the cheapest one to fix. The other two rules worth building in: a written release for any story about a person you serve, sitting inside the production process rather than after it, and a calendar driven by your fiscal year and the year end giving period rather than by a content template. Figure on $400 to $1,100 for a story produced by a freelancer, $1,000 to $2,500 a month for a part time communications contractor, and 3 to 7 percent of total expenses as a defensible communications budget. Those figures are my own working read, not sector survey data.

If what you need first is the strategy layer, the audiences and the one page plan, that is covered in marketing strategy for a nonprofit organisation. This page is about producing the content itself.

Write for two readers, and keep them apart

The two jobs need different words, different reading levels and different pages. Mixing them produces a site where a person in crisis has to read about your theory of change before finding an address.

	The donor or funder	The person you serve
Wants to know	What changes, for how many, at what cost, and how you know	Whether they qualify, what it costs them, where and when
Reads	Impact pages, the annual report, a named programme story	An eligibility page, a hours and location page, a what to bring list
Tone	Specific, numerate, plain	Short sentences, no jargon, no acronyms, translated where your community needs it
Decides on	Trust and evidence	Whether it looks like it will work for somebody like them

The service pages are usually the quickest win available to a nonprofit. They are searched for directly, they rarely have competition, and almost nobody writes them properly. One page per programme, naming eligibility, documents required, hours, cost to the participant, how long the wait is, and who to ask for when they arrive.

Consent belongs in the workflow, not at the end

The stories that move donors are about people, and those people are often in difficult circumstances, sometimes minors, sometimes clients of a confidential service. A release signed at the point where the story is collected protects them and you. One signed afterwards, under time pressure before a campaign, protects nobody.

What a workable process looks like: staff collecting the story carry the release form; the form names exactly where the story may appear and for how long; it includes the right to withdraw consent later and a real process for honouring that; a first name only or a pseudonym is always on the table; photographs are consented separately from words. For anyone under eighteen, a guardian signs and the young person is asked as well. Where your programme is clinical or legal, the confidentiality rules of that profession sit on top of all of this, so check with the staff who hold those obligations before you publish anything.

One editorial rule carries most of the weight: the person in the story should be able to read the finished piece and recognise themselves without wincing. If the draft needs them to be more desperate than they were to make the fundraising point, rewrite the fundraising point.

The calendar comes from your fiscal year

Nonprofit content has fixed immovable dates, which is an advantage if you plan around them. Year end giving concentrates a large share of individual donations into the last weeks of December, grant reports fall on funder deadlines, the annual report follows your fiscal close, and most programmes have a season.

So run the calendar backwards from those. Decide in advance which outcome each piece will feed: a story collected in July is the centrepiece of a December appeal and a paragraph in the annual report and a page on the site. Produce once, use three times. The organisations that struggle are the ones writing a newsletter in November and a grant report in February with no shared material between them, paying twice for the same interviews.

Content that serves your funding, not just your audience

Two pieces of writing earn more than anything else and both sit outside the usual content plan. The first is a clear cost per outcome explanation: what one unit of your work costs, what that figure includes, and what it excludes. Major donors and foundations ask it, and an organisation that has written it down answers in a sentence rather than a meeting. The second is an outcomes page that states what you measure, how you measure it and what you do not yet know, which is more persuasive to a sophisticated funder than any superlative.

Google Ad Grants is also worth naming here, because eligible nonprofits can access search advertising credit, and the programme has requirements about site quality, relevant keywords and account activity. Content work does double duty: the pages that help your service users are also the pages that make a grant account useful rather than dormant. Check current eligibility and the policy requirements directly with the programme before you plan around it.

What this costs when it comes out of programme money

• A story written in house: $150 to $500 of staff time, counting the interview, the draft and the approvals.
• A story from a freelance writer who interviews and photographs: $400 to $1,100.
• Part time communications contractor, fifteen to twenty five hours a month: $1,000 to $2,500.
• Annual report, written and designed: $2,000 to $9,000 depending on length and whether photography is included.
• Translating the core service pages into one additional language: $400 to $1,500.

These ranges are my own estimate of what the hours cost, and the translation line is the one I would protect first in a tight budget, because it is the difference between a service page working and not working for part of your community.

Impact, stories and annual reports: what communications staff ask

How do we show impact without overstating it?

Give the number you actually have, say what it counts, and say what it does not. A figure with its boundaries stated reads as competence. A rounded national statistic with no source attached reads as decoration, and funders have seen it before.

Should a small nonprofit run a blog?

Run service pages first, then an annual report, then stories tied to appeals. A blog is the last thing to add and the first thing to abandon, so if capacity is thin, put the hours into the pages a service user or a funder is actively searching for.

Who should write our stories, staff or a freelancer?

Programme staff collect them because they hold the relationship and the trust. A writer shapes them. Splitting it that way protects the consent process and still produces something readable.

Can we use donated professional work for content?

Yes, and set the scope tightly: a defined deliverable with a date, rather than an open ended offer of help. Pro bono work that drifts costs you more staff time in management than paying for a small, finished piece would have.

What should go in the annual report that usually gets left out?

What did not work, and what you changed because of it. Experienced funders look for it, and the organisations willing to write it are the ones that look like they are learning rather than performing.

What a donor is told when they ask who to give to

A person deciding where to give money for a cause in their city increasingly asks an assistant before they ask a friend, and the answer names a few organisations with a sentence about each, drawing on charity registries, news coverage, regulatory filings and whatever your own pages say. That is a short list, assembled without anyone visiting your site, and the organisations that come out of it well are usually the ones whose outcomes, costs and programme details are stated plainly in public rather than held in a PDF. The writing you do for the two readers above is the same writing those answers are built from. An hour with AI Knows Us will tell you whether your organisation makes that short list for your own cause and city, and what the answer is reading to decide.