Your non-profit’s website is its digital headquarters. It is the place where you share your story, collect donations, and connect with your community. But a website is only as powerful as the content it holds. Simply having a website is not enough; you need a thoughtful plan for what you will say, who you will say it to, and what you want them to do after they have read it. That plan is called a content strategy. It is the difference between shouting into the void and having a meaningful conversation with the people who care about your cause.

Creating content without a strategy is like trying to build a house without a blueprint. You might end up with a few nice rooms, but they probably will not connect in a logical way, and the structure will not be sound. A strong non-profit content strategy ensures that every blog post you write, every video you create, and every social media update you share works together to achieve your organization’s most important goals. It transforms your website from a simple online brochure into a dynamic engine for engagement, fundraising, and impact. This guide will walk you through the nine essential steps to building a content strategy that serves your audience and advances your mission.

Step 1: Define Your Content Goals and KPIs

Before you write a single word, you must know what you are trying to achieve. Your content goals should be specific, measurable, and directly tied to your organization’s overall objectives. Simply saying you want to “raise awareness” is too vague. Instead, get specific. What does success look like?

Connect Content to Organizational Goals

Think about your non-profit’s primary goals for the year. Is it to increase individual donations by 15%? Is it to recruit 50 new volunteers? Is it to establish your organization as a thought leader on a specific issue? Your content goals must directly support these larger aims.

Set SMART Content Goals

Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). Here are some examples:

• To increase website donations: “Increase online donations that originate from a blog post by 20% over the next six months.”
• To grow your email list: “Gain 500 new email subscribers through our website’s content lead magnets in the next quarter.”
• To increase organic traffic: “Increase organic search traffic to our blog by 30% within one year by targeting specific informational keywords.”

Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are the specific metrics you will use to track your progress toward your goals. For each goal, identify the KPIs you will monitor in Google Analytics.

• For traffic goals: Unique visitors, organic sessions, traffic sources.
• For engagement goals: Average time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, social shares.
• For conversion goals: Donation form completions, newsletter sign-ups, volunteer application submissions.

Step 2: Research and Understand Your Audience

You cannot create effective content if you do not know who you are creating it for. As we covered in our guide to SEO, understanding your audience is the foundation of all your marketing efforts. You need to go beyond basic demographics and understand their motivations, challenges, and information needs.

Create or Refine Your Audience Personas

If you have not already, develop detailed personas for your key audience segments: donors, volunteers, clients, and community partners. Give them names, backstories, and goals. What questions are they asking? What problems are they trying to solve? What kind of content would be most helpful to them? Your content should be created to serve the needs of these specific personas.

Gather Real-World Data

Do not just guess what your audience wants. Use data to find out.

• Survey your existing supporters: Ask your email subscribers and social media followers what topics they are most interested in.
• Talk to your frontline staff: Your program staff, fundraisers, and volunteer coordinators interact with your audience every day. Ask them about the most common questions and concerns they hear.
• Analyze your website and social media data: Look at which pages and posts are currently the most popular. This is a clear indicator of what resonates with your audience.

Step 3: Audit Your Existing Content

Before you create anything new, you need to take stock of what you already have. A content audit is the process of reviewing all the content on your website to determine what is working, what is not, and what can be improved.

Create a Content Inventory

Start by creating a spreadsheet of all the content on your website. For each page or blog post, list the URL, title, topic, and publication date. Then, pull in key metrics from Google Analytics for each piece of content, such as pageviews, average time on page, and bounce rate.

Analyze and Categorize Your Content

Once you have your inventory, go through each piece and decide what to do with it. You can generally categorize your content into four buckets:

• Keep: High-performing content that is still relevant and valuable.
• Update/Refresh: Content on an important topic that is getting some traffic but is outdated or could be more comprehensive.
• Consolidate: Multiple short posts on the same topic that could be combined into one authoritative guide.
• Delete: Low-quality, irrelevant, or redundant content that is getting no traffic and serves no purpose. (Be sure to redirect the URL!)

This process will not only clean up your website but also reveal content gaps—important topics that you are not currently covering.

Step 4: Conduct Keyword Research for Content Topics

Now that you know what topics your audience cares about and where the gaps are in your existing content, it is time to do keyword research to find the specific phrases you should target. This ensures that you are creating content that has a built-in audience on search engines.

We covered the tools and techniques for keyword research in depth in our SEO guide, but for content strategy, the focus is on finding informational keywords that can be turned into valuable content. Look for question-based keywords like “how to,” “what is,” and “why.” These are perfect for blog posts, guides, and FAQ pages.

Step 5: Brainstorm Content Ideas and Core Topics

With your goals, audience research, content audit, and keyword research in hand, you can now start brainstorming specific content ideas. This is where you bring everything together to create a list of potential topics that will serve your audience and achieve your goals.

Develop Content Pillars or Hubs

A great way to organize your content is to use the “content pillar” or “topic cluster” model. Identify 3-5 broad topics that are central to your mission. These are your pillars. For a mental health non-profit, pillars might be “Anxiety,” “Depression,” “Youth Mental Health,” and “Self-Care.”

Then, for each pillar, you can brainstorm a list of more specific sub-topics, which become your individual blog posts or “cluster” content. For the “Anxiety” pillar, you could create posts on “Symptoms of a Panic Attack,” “Breathing Exercises for Anxiety,” and “How to Support a Friend with Anxiety.” All these cluster posts would link back to a main, comprehensive “pillar page” about anxiety. This model is excellent for SEO and helps establish your organization as an authority on your core topics.

Step 6: Choose Your Content Formats

Content is more than just blog posts. Different people prefer to consume information in different ways. A successful content strategy uses a variety of formats to engage different segments of the audience.

Common Content Formats for Non-Profits

• Blog Posts & Articles: The foundation of most content strategies. Perfect for SEO, sharing expertise, and telling stories.
• Success Stories & Case Studies: The most powerful way to show your impact. These build trust and inspire donations.
• Videos: Highly engaging and great for showing your work in action, sharing testimonials, or explaining complex topics.
• Infographics: A visually appealing way to share data, statistics, or explain a process. Highly shareable on social media.
• Downloadable Guides & Reports: Excellent for lead generation. Offer a valuable resource (like an annual impact report or a guide to navigating a system) in exchange for an email address.

Step 7: Create an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a schedule that maps out when you will publish and promote your content. It is a critical tool for keeping your content strategy organized and ensuring a consistent publishing cadence. Your calendar can be a simple spreadsheet or a more advanced tool like Asana or Trello. It should include:

• The planned publication date.
• The working title of the content piece.
• The content format (e.g., blog post, video).
• Who is responsible for writing and editing.
• The primary keyword you are targeting.
• Which channels you will use to promote it (e.g., email, Facebook, Twitter).

Step 8: Establish a Content Creation and Promotion Workflow

Now it is time to actually create the content. A documented workflow ensures that every piece of content is high-quality and consistent with your brand voice. This process typically includes stages for outlining, drafting, editing, SEO optimization, and final approval. Once the content is published, the work is not over. You need a plan to promote it.

Do not just publish a post and hope people find it. Share it with your email list. Post it on all your social media channels. If you mention any partners or experts in your content, reach out and let them know. The more you promote your content, the more likely it is to be seen, shared, and linked to.

Step 9: Measure Your Results and Adapt

The final step is to measure your performance against the goals and KPIs you set in step one. Regularly review your Google Analytics dashboard to see how your content is performing. Which topics are resonating? Which formats are most engaging? Where is your traffic coming from? Use these insights to refine your strategy over time. A content strategy is not a static document; it is a living plan that should evolve as you learn more about what works for your audience.

Great content is the best fundraising tool in the world. It builds relationships, inspires trust, and moves people to act.

Conclusion: Building a Library of Value

A successful non-profit content strategy is about more than just marketing. It is about building a valuable resource for your community. It is about telling your story in a way that connects with people on a human level. By following these nine steps, you can move from random acts of content to a strategic plan that builds trust, engages your supporters, and provides a powerful, sustainable engine for achieving your mission. Each piece of high-quality content you create is an asset that can continue to serve your organization for years to come, attracting new supporters and making the case for your cause long after you hit “publish.”