REDF is a San Francisco-based foundation that invests multi-year grants in social enterprises — revenue-generating businesses with a clear social mission. We stepped into an advisory role to conduct a nonprofit digital marketing audit.
Their mission is to find jobs for millions of people who cannot get work due to histories of homelessness, incarceration, mental health issues, substance use or education. REDF’s national portfolio of growth stage social enterprises also receive specialized advisory services and in the end, our goal was to help their portfolio fully leverage the power of digital.
The end result? Customized strategy and nonprofit digital marketing roadmaps for each portfolio member to to drive their impact and grow their e-commerce customer base. Here was our process:
Before we can achieve a client’s goals, we need to know the lay of the land. Our discovery process allows us to assess existing efforts, successes, and opportunities before we dive in.
Our clients need help to change the world. Getting the right supporters on their side, and keeping them involved with the mission is critical to creating impact.
Good teams help generate a wealth of good ideas. We put these good ideas to the test and let the community tell us what resonates with them best.
We use data to inform our approach– always testing our assumptions before investing our clients’ limited resources. That’s why we first performed a digital marketing audit of REDF’s social enterprises to better understand where they needed the most help to leverage digital to drive their goals. Using this 30,000’ data, we then developed and presented a webinar to 50 staff members of the social enterprises. Lastly, we completed 20 audits of the social enterprises’ websites and social channels to provide specific and customized recommendations to improve their online performance.
For some portfolio members, REDF saw a need to invest more hands-on support for 5 portfolio members. After we understood the unique goals of each social enterprise, we narrowed in on the specific service area that would result in the highest ROI. This was an important first step, as these organizations had minimal marketing budgets, and we wanted to use every dollar to drive as much impact as possible. Our Account Strategists worked hand-in-hand with these 5 organizations, dramatically improving the performance of their Google Ad Grants, LinkedIn advertising, brand and messaging strategy, website UX, and more.
Our impact didn’t stop with the hands-on support. Since our engagements with the 5 social enterprises were limited to a few months each, it was critical to build their teams’ capacity to continue the work after our project ended. Through presentations and detailed reports, our account team explained their theory and process so the social enterprises could successfully execute the work themselves moving forward. After all, changing the world takes teamwork, and that’s something we don’t take lightly.
At Media Cause, we don’t measure success by increasing the number of website clicks or click-through rates for our clients– metrics are great, but they don’t mean success. We measure success by our clients’ inspiring real-life impact, like the dozens of people living in poverty that may finally have the opportunity for quality employment.
