Artificial intelligence doesn’t feel things (yet!), but we’ve all got a lot of feelings about AI. Recently we asked Big Sea Social Media Strategist and Content Writer Aviva Campbell, Big Sea Content Manager Dan O’Keefe, and Big Sea Senior Content Strategist Kerry Haze to sit down for a conversation about AI-generated content. What follows is that transcript, lightly edited for length. We talk through what AI looks like in our day-to-day work, what parts make us uneasy about it, and where it’s genuinely useful in the copywriting world.

Dan: AI, and especially our collective reaction to it, has gone through so many phases since ChatGPT launched back in 2022. How do you feel about AI in general in the year of our Lord 2026? Like, from a civilizational level?

Kerry: I used to be afraid of AI and worried that it would consume a lot of our humanity and many of our human-focused tasks, like writing and content marketing, but now I’m confident in saying that it will never replace us.

It’s been a while now since the main AI platforms launched, and it has become increasingly clear that you need real people to do real work. I don’t like the narrative that AI is here, it’s happening, it’s everywhere, and it’s not going anywhere. We can choose how we use AI, and we can choose to use it in ethical, moral, and sustainable ways. 

Aviva: Yeah, AI is impressive and terrifying at the same time. I’m not anti‑tech, obviously, but I don’t trust Big Tech to roll out world‑changing tools with any level of caution. We’ve already seen AI used for harm, surveillance, and warfare. But we’ve also seen it detect early cancer precursors and make social causes more impactful. So when people talk about AI “advancing civilization,” I’m like, sure, maybe. I’m hopeful about the good it could do, but I’m not naive to the bad it already has done.

Dan: Yeah, I can be a bit of a Luddite. My natural pessimism makes me susceptible to some of the more catastrophist talk about what AI could do to society. But I try to take that with a grain of salt, since a lot of the doomerism about AI is just as much a part of the hype machine as the utopianism.

Aviva: Outside of work, do y’all use AI in your everyday life?

Kerry: I don’t use AI in my everyday life, no.

Dan: I resisted for a while, but I’ve been impressed enough with Claude that I got a personal subscription. I don’t have a lot of occasions to use it, though. When I do, it’s usually as a more detailed search engine. I’ll ask it to recommend a handful of articles that approach some topic from a few different perspectives, or I’ll use it to track down some anecdote from 17 years ago that I half remember. It’s surprisingly good at that if you can give it enough context to work with.

Aviva: I use it when it’s genuinely helpful, like for quick summaries or reviews. Most recently, I used it to compare the price of cat trees. It’s revolutionized the way I search for things. Beyond that, I use it with extreme caution, and I’m very aware that my daughter’s generation is growing up with this stuff baked into everything. She’s 14, and she’s learning how to do things without AI first. I believe it should be a tool she uses later in life rather than a shortcut she relies on while her brain is still developing.

Kerry: How do you feel about different models of AI? About ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. Gemini, etc.?

Dan: Claude’s definitely my favorite. There’s something both about the quality of its responses and its user interface that just feels more convincingly thorough, “thoughtful” (I’ll put quotes around that), and trustworthy than ChatGPT does. Chalk it up to good UX design and a dash more transparency.

Kerry: Yeah, I appreciate that we aren’t using ChatGPT at Big Sea anymore. Claude has a bit more of a content-focused lens around it, compared to other AI platforms. For content writing specifically, I used to use something called Jasper, and I really enjoyed that platform as it was so specifically attuned to helping someone create outlines, website copy, social media posts, ad copy, print copy, and other written marketing copy.

Aviva: Claude is also the one I trust the most right now; as a corporation, Anthropic seems to be the most transparent and grounded. That said, Gemini is exciting for its Google Workspace integrations. I’ve been using its email synthesis feature more and more. And ChatGPT, while powerful, hallucinates the most and has the shadiest data ethics and privacy policies, so I rarely, if ever, use it.

Dan: Where in your workflow do you find AI most helpful? Strategy? Brainstorming? Editing? Do you use it a little in each step?

Aviva: I use it almost every day when brainstorming, researching, editing, and creating reports. If I need a list of angles or trending topics related to a client’s niche, it’s awesome. It’s also useful when I’ve got long video transcripts that I need to chop up to create short-form videos for social media; it can help me pinpoint story arcs and key timestamps, which is a huge timesaver. 

Kerry: Yeah, it’s really helpful for brainstorming ideas, drafting first outlines or rough drafts for blogs or landing pages, and then reporting and gathering data on how pieces of content are performing. It’s also proving to be beneficial for keyword research if you connect your visibility platform to it, like SEMrush. 

Where I draw the line is that I will not let it fully write something and call it done. A first draft is fine as a starting point, but human eyes need to be on every single part of it.

Kerry: Aviva, do you feel like AI is making it harder to cut through on social media?

Aviva: Yes and no. There’s a lot more social media content since the genesis of generative AI, but much of it is copy‑pasted from generic chatbots. You can absolutely tell when a bot wrote a post, and your target audiences don’t love that. 

I have a question. Do you think we’re heading toward a world where people assume everything is AI until proven otherwise? How do we adapt to that?

Dan: I do worry about that. It’s definitely made people more suspicious of a certain sort of polish that used to take real time and effort to achieve. And that’s a shame, because those skills are still worth developing and that kind of writing has some real uses. Lately I find myself tempted to throw in little asides or structure things a little unevenly just so my writing doesn’t have that characteristic AI homogeneity. 

Kerry: I think we’re headed toward a world where it’ll be increasingly clear when something is AI and when something isn’t. Sure, things have gotten more advanced and more intense, but I think we’ll start to recognize and value human-created content that’s wild, free, has an opinion, and maybe even includes a few errors over the shiny, glossy, AI slop that’s on the internet right now. 

Dan: How is AEO/GEO changing how you write and organize content?

Aviva: It’s pushing me to structure content in a way that’s easier for models to parse. Content needs to be technically sound and factual, but in digital marketing, it also needs to be evocative. My outlines focus on how information gets chunked and retrieved by large language models (LLMs) now, but the meat of my writing relies on the same logic it always has: clarity and connection. 

Dan: Yeah, a lot of what makes for good AEO/GEO builds on search engine optimization (SEO) fundamentals that have been in place for our writing process for a while—clear writing, easily scannable section headers, accurate and comprehensive answers, attentiveness to real people’s actual search habits online. All these virtues transfer over from one specialty to the other.

I do worry sometimes that writing for AEO can make our writing a little choppier, since the impulse is to make major statements as retrievable as possible, shorn of their context in the rest of the blog. That’s not a bad impulse, but it is a little in tension with making a longer piece an enjoyable and smoothly flowing read from beginning to end.

Kerry: AEO isn’t really changing how I write, but it is changing the structure of our content. Blogs should include FAQs if possible, and you should answer the main question in the first few sentences of the blog. You want citable sources in your content, and you want to have an author listed for each blog. We were doing a lot of the same things when SEO was the only acronym we were using, but AEO has just exacerbated it a bit and made it more important to have a solid structure for content going forward for all our clients. 

Dan: At Big Sea, we’ve always prided ourselves on writing for people over algorithms. Does the need to get cited in LLMs and AI overviews make that harder? Are the algorithms winning?

Kerry: I think this is a big issue and probably my biggest worry when it comes to writing with AI overviews and answer engines in mind—homogenization. You brought this up earlier, Dan. AI recombines what already exists, so the more writing it handles, the more your AI content writing ends up sounding like the 10 other articles already ranking on search engines for that topic. We’re already seeing this everywhere. You read something, and you think, “I’ve read this before,” because, in a way, you have. 

I don’t want the algorithms to win. I want real, honest, human, thoughtful content to win in the end. Yes, we might have to play by some of the rules to get cited by Google and AI search engines more and more often, but that doesn’t mean we have to regurgitate the same content and remove our humanity from our writing.

Aviva: Yes. Writing for AI citation requires adherence to formulas, but there is still plenty of room for color, charm, and originality.

Kerry: Aviva, you’ve worked on Big Sea’s official AI Policy and Task Force. Could you talk about what we’re doing to define how and when to use AI and what its limits are?

Aviva: We’re identifying where AI helps us move faster without compromising the quality or humanity of our work. And we’re creating clear norms around usage, data privacy, and transparency in our processes. 

Dan: Any final thoughts? 

Aviva: AI is powerful, and it’s changing everything, but we shouldn’t treat it like an inevitability we have to succumb to. We get to decide how we use it. If we stay skeptical and intentional, we’ll be better off.

Kerry: We shouldn’t be afraid of AI. We should learn how to use it and adapt it to what we need when we’re creating content, but it’s never the end-all-be-all. Humans will always be needed in the content creation and content strategy process. Full stop.

Want to join the conversation? Tell us where you land on AI in your marketing and content work. Follow us on LinkedIn and drop your take in the comments, or send us a message directly. We read every one!

The post Three Content Writers Interview Each Other About AI appeared first on Big Sea.

Fortunately, clear, memorable communication is what we nonprofit marketers do best. This blog post covers what to measure when you’re making the case to your board, how to make the numbers trustworthy, and how to present them so busy board members believe and remember them. We’ve included a step-by-step guide you can follow before your next meeting.

Boards Tend to Tune Out Vanity Metrics

Impressions, follower counts, and social media engagement rates feel like progress to marketing teams because we’re down in the trenches, working with those numbers in Google Analytics every day. But to a board, they’re typically less impressive—or at least less obviously meaningful. A director can’t govern on a number that doesn’t directly connect to money or mission, so a report built on reach and engagement gives them nothing to approve, fund, or defend. A jump in website traffic from organic search means little to them until it turns into donors or dollars.

Boards think in the language of outcomes:

• Revenue and donations raised
• New donors acquired
• Donors retained year over year
• Donation conversion rate and the return on investment (ROI)
• Recurring monthly donations

These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) leadership cares about. Your job is to show how the leading indicators your team watches feed these nonprofit KPIs, whatever the channel. It doesn’t matter whether the result came from email marketing, paid advertising like Facebook ads, Google Ad Grants, search engine optimization (SEO), or peer-to-peer fundraising. Translate your metrics into the results a director came to the meeting to hear. Show them how today’s improved email open rate or email click-through rate (CTR) turns into tomorrow’s increased giving and volunteer sign-ups.

Report the Handful of Numbers that Map to Money and Mission

A board packet crammed with every measurable data point buries the numbers that matter. Pick 3-5 outcome metrics tied directly to organizational goals, and leave the rest in your working dashboard. 

These are the metrics boards tend to act on, and what each one tells them:

• Cost to Raise a Dollar: This is your total marketing and fundraising spend divided by dollars raised. Boards use it to judge efficiency, and it reframes marketing as an investment instead of an expense.
• Donor Acquisition Cost: This is what you spend to bring in one new donor. It puts marketing campaign budgets in terms a board already understands.
• Donor Retention Rate: This is the share of last year’s donors who gave again. Keeping a donor costs far less than finding a new one, and that math lands with a board.
• Average Gift Size: This shows whether your donors are giving more over time, which signals a deepening relationship.
• Monthly-Donor Conversion Rate: This shows how many one-time givers become recurring. This is predictable revenue a board can plan around.
• Pipeline Movement: This is the number of major and legacy gifts progressing toward a commitment. It’s the nonprofit version of a sales pipeline, and it shows the board what’s coming, not just what landed.

Real results make these concrete. When Big Sea worked with Champions for Children, the partnership produced a 145% increase in unique donors and a 115% increase in revenue. Those are numbers a board hears as mission delivered, not just activity logged.

The pattern holds across organizations. Volunteers of America Southeast saw a 112% increase in online giving and a 48% increase in first-time donors after moving to a connected marketing system. For nonprofits that earn revenue through services or memberships, the story extends into the pipeline: the National Policing Institute grew qualified deal creation by 111% and consulting sales meetings grew 2,400% in a single quarter of 2026.

Whichever metrics you choose, the point holds. Report what changed for the mission, and make acquiring and keeping donors the through line.

The Board Won’t Trust Numbers Your Data Can’t Back Up

A metric is only as credible as the system that produced it. If your marketing figures don’t reconcile with what the finance team reports, a board will discount all of them, and rightly so. Most reporting problems are really data problems: from tools that don’t talk to each other and dashboards no one interprets, most nonprofits are either undercollecting donor data or underutilizing what data they have.

Before your numbers are ready for a board, run this basic check on the data underneath them:

• Deduplicate contact records so one donor is one record, not three.
• Establish a single source of truth instead of totals scattered across separate tools.
• Define lifecycle stages so everyone counts a “donor” or a “lead” the same way.
• Set a consistent attribution window so credit is assigned the same way every month.
• Reconcile marketing’s totals against the finance report every month, not once a year.

This is foundational work, and it pays off. For the National Policing Institute, Big Sea rebuilt their HubSpot CRM from the ground up, deduplicating records, restructuring lifecycle stages, and improving data quality, which finally gave the team a database they could report from with confidence. Choosing the right CRM is step one. Getting your team to adopt it properly and run reliable automated workflows is what makes the reporting trustworthy.

Design Decides Whether Your Report Gets Read at All

We’re marketers, so we understand the importance of good user experience. Don’t forget that when you’re communicating with your board. You don’t want your strongest results to get lost on the page in a packet that’s dense, cramped, and hard to skim. Directors give you minutes. Good design is how you make those minutes count.

A few choices do most of the work:

• Put a one-page summary at the front so the headline lands before anyone turns a page.
• Use charts instead of tables when you want a trend to register at a glance.
• Annotate the takeaway next to every chart so no one has to guess at what the numbers mean.
• Keep formatting consistent from meeting to meeting so directors learn to read it fast.
• Make it readable as a PDF on a phone, since that is where much of your board will open it.

The same clarity that moves a donor moves a director. When Big Sea redesigned the website for Metropolitan Ministries and put a monthly gift two clicks from the homepage, online fundraising grew 250%, and the work earned a Silver ADDY for design. Good design made giving obvious, and the results followed. The same thinking applies to how you show impact, from visual-first storytelling on social to the content in your board deck.

7 Steps to Create a Board Report Your Directors Will Read

Everything above comes together in the report itself. Here’s a sequence you can follow for your next meeting:

1. Lead with one headline number tied to the mission. Open the report with a single figure a director can absorb in five seconds, like “$142K raised and 380 new donors this quarter.”
2. Report against a marketing goal and the prior period. A number in isolation means nothing. Show target versus actual, and this quarter versus last, so the board sees direction and context.
3. Translate every marketing metric into dollars or donors. Don’t make the board do the conversion. An open rate becomes gifts, a landing page becomes new monthly donors.
4. Cap the report at five metrics. Choose the five metrics that map to money and mission. Everything else can go in an appendix for the directors who want to dig.
5. Attach a story to each key number. A single quote, photo, or short anecdote turns a statistic into something a board member will repeat.
6. Use the same one-page format every time. Consistency lets directors read the report at a glance instead of relearning it each quarter.
7. End with one clear ask. Name the decision or the budget you need. A report that closes with a specific request gives the board something to do.

Run this quarterly and the effect compounds. By the third or fourth meeting, your board reads marketing as a driver of the mission, and the budget conversation stops starting from zero.

Start with Your Next Board Meeting

If your board still treats marketing as a cost center, the fix starts with how you report. Messaging built on outcomes, backed by clean data, carried by a story, and designed to be read will go a long way.

Building those habits is far easier with an ongoing strategic partner like Big Sea. We’re a certified B Corporation that works with mission-driven organizations: from nonprofits, higher ed, and museums, to healthcare providers and purpose-driven B2B companies. If you need help turning your marketing efforts into dependable results, our flexible Vision + Velocity model can assist you with everything from senior-level marketing strategy to on-the-ground execution.

FAQs

What Marketing Metrics Should a Nonprofit Report to Its Board?

Report outcome metrics the board can tie to money and mission: revenue and donations influenced, new and retained donors, cost to raise a dollar, and conversion rates on your giving pages. Keep channel-level vanity metrics like impressions and follower counts out of the board packet unless one directly supports an outcome.

How Often Should Marketing Report to the Board?

Give a short written update at every board meeting, with a look back at results and a look forward at what is planned, rather than saving marketing for budget season. Regular updates mean a funding request is never a surprise.

How Do We Prove Marketing ROI Without a Big Analytics Budget?

Start with clean CRM data and a small set of tracked outcomes instead of expensive tools. A well-structured HubSpot setup with defined lifecycle stages and consistent tracking is enough to connect marketing activity to donations and pipeline.

How Do We Handle a Board Focused on the Overhead Ratio?

Reframe marketing spend as an investment with a return by showing your cost to raise a dollar next to the donors and revenue that the spend generated. When a board sees that a dollar of marketing brought in several dollars of giving, the conversation moves from overhead to impact.

The post How to Prove the Value of Marketing to Your Nonprofit Board appeared first on Big Sea.

What’s missing? Visuals. Powerful visuals are key for digital storytelling and engagement, but creating them can be a challenge.

Strong visuals carry digital storytelling, and most nonprofit teams don’t have a designer on staff to make them. Canva for Nonprofits closes that gap. It’s a free program that gives eligible organizations Canva’s full premium toolkit, so anyone on your team can produce professional-looking graphics, presentations, and social content without design training.

This guide covers what the program includes in 2026, who qualifies, how to apply, and how to get real marketing value out of it once you’re in.

What is Canva for Nonprofits?

Canva for Nonprofits gives registered nonprofit organizations free access to Canva’s premium design features for a team of up to 50 people, for as long as the organization stays eligible. It’s the same platform millions of marketers use, with the paid tier’s templates, brand tools, and AI features included at no cost.

If your team outgrows 50 seats, Canva offers additional seats at 50% off its Enterprise pricing.

What do you get with Canva for Nonprofits?

The program unlocks everything in Canva’s paid plans, including:

• 100M+ premium stock photos, videos, graphics, and audio tracks
• Millions of customizable templates for social posts, presentations, flyers, reports, and more
• A Brand Kit that stores your logos, colors, and fonts so every design stays on-brand
• Magic Studio, Canva’s suite of AI tools for generating copy, images, and design variations
• Magic Resize, which converts one design into every format you need in a click
• 1TB of cloud storage and unlimited folders
• Real-time collaboration for up to 50 team members

For comparison, Canva Pro runs about $120 per person per year. For a 10-person nonprofit team, that’s $1,200 a year back in the budget. Free design software pairs well with other no-cost resources; see our roundup of marketing grants for nonprofits if you’re stretching every dollar.

Who is eligible for Canva for Nonprofits?

Eligibility requires your organization to be a registered nonprofit or charity, independent from government, and operating on a not-for-profit basis. In the US, that means holding valid charitable status, such as a 501(c)(3).

Canva partners with Goodstack to verify applications, so have your registration documents ready. Government agencies, political organizations, most other 501(c) types, and for-profit companies don’t qualify. Check Canva’s country eligibility list if you operate outside the US.

How your nonprofit can use Canva for Nonprofits

Develop consistent branding

Build a brand guide in Canva that locks in your logo usage, color palette, and fonts, then apply it across everything from social posts to website banners. The Brand Kit enforces consistency automatically, which matters when volunteers and part-time staff are making graphics too.

Promote events and campaigns

Create posters, flyers, social graphics, invitations, and banners for fundraising pushes and community outreach. The template library gives you a head start so you can spend your time on the message instead of the layout.

Boost your social media engagement

Canva’s social templates come pre-sized for each platform, and you can produce graphics, short videos, and animated posts without leaving the editor. If you’re building out a bigger channel strategy, our guide to social media marketing for nonprofits covers where design fits in.

Use Magic Studio’s AI tools

This is the biggest change since we first published this guide. Magic Studio now sits inside the editor with more than 25 AI tools. Magic Write drafts captions, headlines, and email copy. Dream Lab generates production-quality images from a text prompt. Magic Eraser removes unwanted objects from photos, and the background remover cleans up headshots and event photography in seconds. For a small team, these tools replace hours of manual editing.

Build presentations, infographics, and annual reports

Canva’s report and presentation templates turn text-heavy documents into visual stories. Annual reports, impact one-pagers, and board decks all live in one place, and your whole team can edit them.

Enhance your website’s visual appeal

Design banners, hero images, and page graphics that match your brand. Consistent visuals make a site feel maintained, which builds donor trust before anyone reads a word.

Amplify your email marketing

Design email headers, graphics, and appeal visuals that lift engagement with your donor base. If HubSpot is your email platform, our guide to HubSpot for nonprofits shows how to pair strong creative with segmentation, and HubSpot workflows for nonprofits covers automating the sends. Not on a CRM yet? Start with our comparison of the best CRMs for nonprofits.

Create inspirational videos

Canva’s video editor combines footage, text, images, and licensed music into short videos for fundraising campaigns and storytelling. No separate editing software required.

Collaborate across your team

Invite staff, volunteers, and partner organizations into shared folders. Everyone works from the same templates, comments land in real time, and approvals stop living in email threads.

How do you apply for Canva for Nonprofits?

Applying is free and takes about ten minutes:

1. Go to canva.com/nonprofits and click the sign-up button.
2. Complete the application with your organization’s details and upload your registration documentation. Goodstack handles verification.
3. Watch for a decision by email, typically within 72 hours. International applications can take longer.
4. Once approved, invite your team (up to 50 people) and set up your Brand Kit first.
5. Start designing. The template library and in-app tutorials cover most of the learning curve.

Tips for getting the most out of Canva for Nonprofits

• Set up your Brand Kit before anyone creates a design. Consistency is easier to enforce from day one than to retrofit.
• Prioritize clarity over decoration. One message per graphic.
• Tailor designs to each platform using the pre-set dimensions instead of stretching one graphic everywhere.
• Use the collaboration features for review and approval so feedback stays attached to the design.
• Watch Canva’s release notes. The AI toolset has grown fast and new features land regularly.

Canva for Nonprofits FAQs

What is the difference between Canva Pro and Canva for Nonprofits?

Canva for Nonprofits includes the same premium features as Canva’s paid plans but costs nothing and covers up to 50 users on one team. Canva Pro is the paid individual subscription, priced around $120 per year. If your organization qualifies, there’s no reason to pay for Pro.

How does Canva for Nonprofits compare to other design tools?

Canva wins on ease of use and price for most nonprofit teams. Adobe Creative Cloud offers deeper design control but carries a real cost and a steeper learning curve. Free alternatives like GIMP demand technical skill your volunteers probably don’t have. Established organizations with a dedicated designer may want professional software; everyone else is well served here.

Is Canva for Nonprofits secure?

Canva uses industry-standard security measures to protect user data. Standard precautions still apply: use strong passwords, enable two-factor authentication, and keep sensitive donor data out of your designs. Canva’s privacy policy covers its data practices in detail.

How long does Canva for Nonprofits last?

Access continues as long as your organization remains eligible. There’s no annual renewal fee, though Canva may re-verify your status periodically.

Let Big Sea help with your nonprofit’s Canva design needs

Ready to put better visuals behind your mission? Big Sea helps nonprofits build brand systems, design templates their teams can actually use, and connect creative to the platforms that send it, from social to email to your CRM. If you’re setting up your marketing stack alongside Canva, our HubSpot onboarding for nonprofits guide is a good next read. Contact us today.

The post How to Start Using Canva for Nonprofits appeared first on Big Sea.

More patients need community health centers, but fewer dollars are available to reach them. And the patients that health centers need most—insured patients, whose reimbursable visits fund the margin that makes sliding-fee care possible for everyone else—largely don’t know they’re welcome.

Here are four healthcare marketing strategies to help you bring in more insured patients.

Strategy 1: Structure your content so patients find you before they choose someone else.

Today, 68% of searches now end without a click, up from 60% in 2024, with AI Overviews as the main driver. Patients are getting answers without ever reaching your website. Ranking on page one still matters for search engine optimization, but getting cited in the AI answer matters just as much. For community health centers competing against larger health systems for insured patients, this can present a real visibility gap.

The fix is less about publishing more content and more about structuring what you already have so AI systems can extract a direct answer from it. Your digital marketing strategy needs to account for how content gets read now, which is often not by humans first.

What This Looks Like in Practice

• Answer the patient’s question in the first 100 words of the page. Not after your mission statement, and not after your accreditation history—in the first 100 words. 
• Write headers based on the exact questions patients type into a search bar, because AI systems use those headers to figure out what a page is actually about. 
• Add structured data (a.k.a. schema markup) so search engines and AI can match your content to specific queries. 
• Keep your Google Business Profile, Google Reviews, and Yelp listings up to date, as AI models draw directly from online reviews when assessing a source’s credibility and brand identity. Reputation management and patient reviews are always key!
• Backlinks matter too. Targeted placements in state primary care association directories, NACHC resources, and local community benefit reports can do a lot for your local search engine optimization (SEO) and for AI citation signals.

There’s also a housekeeping issue worth noting. In one of our client case studies, we did a health network audit that surfaced 2,700 duplicate pages on a single website, almost all of them event listings that never got cleaned up, which is a pattern we see consistently across health center websites. That clutter dilutes the authority your best pages have worked to build. A content marketing strategy and a technical cleanup can help you find issues like these and address them quickly.

Strategy 2: Build a dedicated path for new insured patients.

Most insured patients assume a community health center is not for them because most health center websites never tell them otherwise. A “see all our services” button and a general scheduling flow are not messages to an insured patient, but messages to everyone.

That’s why you should build a distinct path for insurance patients.

What This Looks Like in Practice

• Create a landing page, separate from your general scheduling flow, that leads with exactly what an insured person wants to know: which plans you accept, how quickly they can be seen, who their provider will be, and what the patient experience looks like from the first call onward. 
• Pair that page with paid search campaigns and pay-per-click (PPC) ads that speak directly to insured patients searching for a primary care provider in your area. Google Ads targeting someone searching “new patient primary care near me” reach people at a very different moment than a general brand awareness campaign. 
• Segment email sequences by insurance status if your data allows it. Let the messaging match the audience.
• The patient journey for a first-time insured visitor includes multiple touchpoints before they book. Your social media marketing, your healthcare advertising, your paid search ads, your website, and even what your front desk staff says when someone calls: they all need to tell the same story.

Don’t forget to brief your front desk and patient navigation staff on the same language your marketing uses. An insured patient who saw a great ad but got transferred three times when they called won’t come back.

Strategy 3: Fix your tracking before spending more.

Most health center marketing stacks can’t trace a booked, insured visit back to the channel that drove it. Scheduling tools, CRMs, and ad platforms usually don’t talk to each other by default. When they don’t, budget decisions are made based on whatever numbers are available, which are usually the wrong ones.

For one of our health and wellness clients, their appointment data and CRM data told two completely different stories. Reported source coverage came in at 64%, which was high enough to feel usable, but it wasn’t. The real, reconciled rate was 25% because one of their integrations had been silently dropping data for months. We had to rebuild that data pipeline before rebuilding any campaigns because every campaign decision we made before fixing it was based on an incorrect number.

Before adding more spend to your healthcare advertising or patient acquisition campaigns, check the foundation. 

What This Looks Like in Practice

• Reconcile your scheduling system against your CRM to find your actual source coverage rate. 
• Put a form in front of every new-patient scheduling path so you can see where each lead actually came from. 
• Audit for duplicate and orphaned pages from event calendars and provider directories. 
• Review your data analytics monthly, not quarterly. Search and AI platforms move faster than a quarterly reporting cycle can keep up with, and a campaign that was performing well in January may look completely different by March.

The user experience of navigating your website matters here, too. If a patient lands on a page that takes too long to load or sends them through a confusing scheduling flow, they leave. That is a conversion problem your marketing budget can’t outspend.

Strategy 4: Winning back lapsed patients costs less than finding new ones.

An insured patient who lapses takes a reimbursable visit with them. Winning them back costs less than finding someone new, but most health centers lack a structured program for doing that. The math is straightforward enough that it’s worth building the system once.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A lapsed-patient strategy has four components:

1. Build a lapsed-patient list from your scheduling data and verify it against your CRM before you trust the numbers. 
2. Automate outreach at the 30-, 60-, and 90-day marks since a patient’s last visit. 
3. Give front-line staff a simple way to flag patients who haven’t rebooked. 
4. Track your win-back rate separately from new patient acquisition to see whether the program is working.

Email marketing is the right primary channel for this outreach. It’s direct, low-cost, and trackable in a way that social media marketing and paid search are not. Also: timing matters as much as the message. A re-engagement email at 30 days reaches someone who probably just got busy and forgot to reschedule. An email at 120 days is working against a much stronger drift. The 30-day window is where most of the wins are.

Patient engagement through a structured win-back program is one of the highest-return investments in community health center marketing because the relationship already exists.

Ready to Attract More Insured Patients?

Big Sea has spent two years working directly inside health center marketing. We’ve built and continue to run the SEO and content strategy program for FACHC’s statewide network of 54 health centers across Florida. We manage Google Ad Grants accounts for community health centers through the appeal process that healthcare organizations almost always run into, and we work closely in HubSpot, Acuity, and with scheduling data every week so we can see which marketing efforts yield booked, paying visits.

If you’re working on acquiring insured patients, we’d love to discuss how to promote your community health center.

FAQs

How Can Healthcare Providers Effectively Measure the Success of Their Marketing Strategies?

Start with the metric closest to the outcome that matters: booked, insured visits attributed to a specific channel. From there, work backward through the funnel: form submissions, landing page conversion rates, paid search performance, and organic search visibility. The mistake most health centers make is to track activity rather than outcomes. A report showing 10,000 impressions on a paid LinkedIn campaign feels great, but it isn’t very useful if it can’t tell you how many of those impressions became appointments. Reconcile your scheduling data against your CRM first. Everything else in your data analytics dashboard depends on that number being right.

Why Is Email Marketing Important In the Healthcare Sector?

Email gives health centers a direct, owned channel to reach patients without depending on search algorithm changes or rising ad costs. It’s the most cost-effective tool available for lapsed-patient outreach, appointment reminders, and health education content, keeping your center top of mind between visits. As for acquiring new insured patients, email sequences segmented by insurance status let you put relevant information in front of the right person at the right moment in their patient journey. Unlike PPC or social media marketing, email doesn’t require ongoing spend to maintain reach with people who have already opted in.

Should Community Health Centers Do Backlink Building?

Yes! Backlinks from trusted healthcare directories, nonprofit resource lists, and community health advocacy organizations do two things: they improve your organic search rankings over time, and they signal your credibility to AI systems that pull from established sources when generating answers. The most useful placements for community health centers are state primary care association directories, NACHC resources, local nonprofit coalitions, and community benefit reports that reference your center by name.

The post 4 Healthcare Marketing Strategies to Attract More Insured Patients appeared first on Big Sea.

On July 7, 2026, Google Search Console announced “platform properties,” a new Search Console property type that lets your team track how your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Discover, with no website required. If you’re managing a social media account, this is a great new tool for your arsenal. 

Below we cover what platform properties are, what each of the three reports shows, how to set one up, how this differs from Search profiles, and what to do with the data once you’re connected.

What Platform Properties Are (and What They Don’t Track)

A platform property is a property you can add to Google Search Console that lets you track which search terms lead people to your Instagram, YouTube, X, and TikTok content on Search. Instead of verifying ownership of a domain or URL prefix, you authorize Google to connect to your account on a supported social or video platform. Once connected, Search Console reports on your social and video content the same way it has always reported on websites.

Before this update, Search Console was a website-only tool. Its existing Search Console features, such as the URL inspection tool, links report, Core Web Vitals data, and organic traffic analysis, were all tied to a domain you controlled. Googlebot has long been crawling social content and displaying it in Google Search. Now, if your brand is on TikTok or YouTube, you can use Search Console to track your social performance.

Keep in mind that platform properties only show how your content performs in Google Search. Native platform data (e.g., TikTok views, Instagram likes, and YouTube watch time from the home feed) is not there. This is organic search data, not a replacement for your native analytics or your Google Ads performance reports.

The feature builds on an experiment Google ran in December 2025, which automatically pulled social channels into Search Console Insights. However, the version launched in July 2026 is meaningfully different. It’s a property type you add and verify yourself, it covers accounts where you don’t own the domain, and it feeds three dedicated reports.

*Note: neither Facebook or LinkedIn is supported at launch. Plan your measurement around the four supported platforms for now.

The Three Reports: What Each One Shows

Each platform property includes three reports. They answer different questions and are most useful at different points in a workflow.

1. Performance Report

The Performance report is the most analytically useful of the three. It shows:

• Total clicks
• Impressions
• Average CTR
• Average position

All of these are filterable by individual posts and by search query. The Performance report uses the same data structure Search Console uses for website properties, now applied to your social content.

The Queries tab shows which search terms drove organic search traffic to your posts. The data is exportable, which is useful for anyone building cross-channel reports or presenting search visibility numbers to a client or internal leadership team.

2. Insights Report

The Insights report provides a high-level view of recent traffic trends, your top-performing posts, and how people discover your account on Google. It’s the report for a quick weekly check-in, not a deep dive. It shows direction without requiring you to sort through post-level data every time you open it.

3. Achievements

Achievements tracks “click milestones” over rolling 28-day periods. It’s the lightest of the three reports and functions more as a progress marker than an analytics tool. This is useful for tracking growth directionally, but less useful for informing day-to-day content decisions.

How to Set Up a Platform Property

Setup runs through the same property selector you already use for website properties in Google Search Console.

1. Go to Google Search Console.
2. Open the property selector dropdown in the left sidebar and click Add property.
3. Select one of the four available platforms: Instagram, TikTok, X, or YouTube.
4. Follow the onscreen steps to authorize the connection.

If you manage multiple accounts or profiles on a single platform, repeat the process for each. An Instagram account and a TikTok account are separate properties, and each needs its own setup.

Google periodically re-checks ownership. If an external login expires and the connection is lost, access pauses until you re-verify. Once you do, you get immediate access to the same reports, with no waiting period for new data to accumulate.

*Note: Before you start, remember that the rollout is gradual. Google confirmed the feature will become available in the coming weeks, so if the platform options don’t appear in your account yet, wait and check again rather than assuming something went wrong with your setup.

Platform Properties vs. Search Profiles

Google released two creator-focused features in 2026, but coverage has blurred the lines between them.

• Search profiles, introduced in June 2026, are public-facing pages that consolidate a creator’s content for their followers. A Search profile is something your audience sees. 
• Platform properties are private analytics that only the account owner accesses. A platform property is a reporting tool for your team.

If you’ve seen both terms and wondered which one matters for your workflow, the answer is probably both, but for different reasons at different times. Don’t let the coverage conflate them, and don’t mistake setting up one for having done the other.

What to Do Once You’re Connected

Start in the Performance report and go straight to the Queries tab. That list shows you what people searched for on Google when your content appeared. Look for clusters and repeated themes, not one-off terms. Most teams find search terms they never deliberately targeted, along with confirmation that topics they’ve been leaning into are already generating organic search interest. (I can tell you, this is one of the most fun and interesting experiences when you’re monitoring your SEO performance. You’ll find new angles into your content you never would have thought of before.)

Cross-reference those findings with your website’s organic traffic data in Search Console. If a social post is generating impressions for a query your website isn’t ranking for, that’s a gap worth addressing. You can build supporting website content around the topic, such as a blog post with strong meta descriptions, good internal links, and depth on the subject, or produce more social content around the same theme to deepen the search visibility you’re already getting.

When a TikTok video or Instagram Reel is pulling meaningful impressions for a high-intent query, treat that signal seriously. The organic search demand is real and documented. Use the social post as a proof of concept and expand it into a longer SEO asset to convert that organic traffic more deliberately.

Set this up now, even if the reports won’t get your attention for a few weeks. In a search environment that keeps shifting with AI search and AI Overviews pushing more content into results pages, knowing what’s actually reaching people matters. 

FAQs

What Is the New Google Search Console Feature Announced in July 2026?

Google added platform properties: a new Google Search Console property type that lets creators track how their Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube posts perform in Google Search and Discover. No website is required to use it.

Is Google Search Console Still Relevant for Brands That Focus On Social?

Google Search Console is now more relevant than ever. Search Console required a verified website until this update, which made it, by definition, a website-only tool. Platform properties change that. A brand whose entire presence lives on TikTok or YouTube can now see organic search performance data that wasn’t visible before.

The post Google Search Console Now Tracks Your TikTok and Instagram Performance appeared first on Big Sea.

In this blog, we’re going to focus on AEO vs. GEO. What do they stand for? How are they distinct? How do they differ from the time-honored practices of search engine optimization (SEO)? Most of all, how does this quickly shifting AI search landscape change what you need to do to stay visible on the internet?

AEO vs. GEO

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are strategies for appearing in AI citations that evolved from traditional SEO. The terms are very new and very closely related, so they sometimes get used interchangeably. That said, there’s a rough difference between them that’s beginning to emerge:

• AEO focuses on structuring your content to provide concise, direct answers that get pulled into AI search features like Google’s AI Overviews.
• GEO is about optimizing your organization’s overall digital footprint to help you get cited as a source in an answer that a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Claude writes from scratch. 

Comparing AEO, GEO, and SEO at a Glance

The line between AEO and GEO is contested. This table reflects how the field is beginning to use the terms and how they compare with traditional SEO.

The distinction that holds up under scrutiny is narrow. SEO optimizes for a ranked position. AEO optimizes for answering a distinct query. GEO optimizes for getting cited as an authority on the question. Most of the underlying work overlaps, which the next section gets into.

Looking Past the Hype: How Different Are AEO and GEO Really?

The AEO and GEO labels are very new, and the field doesn’t fully agree on them. Google reportedly doesn’t treat AEO and GEO as separate practices at all—it sees them as third-party labels for the same advice about doing well in AI search optimization (which, to add to the confusion, gets its own label, AIO, to refer to the umbrella term).

The overlap is good news for your budget, though. The consistent, structured, credible content that earns a featured snippet is largely the same content a language model reaches for when it builds an answer. Clear writing, a sensible structure, real expertise, and machine-readable markup serve both AEO and GEO at once. You don’t need to treat every new acronym as a reason to start over.

How AEO and GEO Differ From “Traditional” SEO

For two decades, the scoreboard felt relatively simple. If you came up on the front page of Google, you were doing well. Your page ranked, people clicked, and traffic showed up in your analytics. AI search changes what the scoreboard measures.

A top ranking no longer guarantees clicks. As Google’s AI Overviews (those AI-generated summaries at the top of your search results page) become more comprehensive and more people turn to ChatGPT or Claude to find answers they would have sought on Google three years ago, it’s getting harder and harder to get people to visit your page for information. Ahrefs found that AI Overviews cut click-through rates for the top-ranking pages by more than half. Now, you might own the number one spot on Google and still lose the visit.

The traffic that remains also changes shape. Visits coming straight from AI tools are a small slice of the total right now, but that slice tends to convert at several times the rate of traditional organic search results, since those users often arrive further along in their decision. Your value shifts from how many people land on your page toward how ready they are when they do.

Technical surprises can catch teams off guard. Most major AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, fetch your raw HTML and stop. They don’t run JavaScript. Content that only appears after a script runs can be invisible to them even when it ranks fine in Google. Put your important content in the initial HTML, and check your robots.txt while you’re at it, since blocking those crawlers opts you out of AI visibility completely.

What Gets Your Content Cited on AI-powered Search Engines

The Formats AI Tools Pull From Most

AI systems lift specific passages out of a page and drop them into an answer, often without the sentences that surround them. Write so a passage can stand on its own. Use clear headers, answer real questions directly beneath them, and keep an FAQ page for the questions that don’t fit neatly into a longer piece.

Comparative content does unusually well here. One analysis attributed roughly 30% of AI citations to listicles and “best of” style pieces. You don’t need to turn every page into a numbered list, but a well-built comparison page is worth more than it used to be.

Structured data is the layer most teams skip. Schema markup tells an engine what a page is, which part is a question, which part is the answer, who wrote it, and when. It makes your content far easier for a machine to read. 

The Signals That Make AI Trust You

AI answer engines and language models both try to gauge whether a source is credible before they lean on it. This is where E-E-A-T comes in, the shorthand Google uses for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Real author bios with real credentials, named experts, and content that shows firsthand knowledge all raise your odds of being treated as a primary source. Princeton research on GEO found that adding expert quotes and statistics measurably increased the frequency with which content appeared in AI answers.

The authority you’ve built for SEO carries straight over. Backlinks from respected websites and a real thought-leadership presence still signal trust, and language models lean on those same signals when deciding whom to cite.

Optimize for AEO and GEO with one coordinated effort, not two. Publish crawlable content in clean HTML. Structure it around the real questions your audience asks, with self-contained answers under clear headers. Add schema markup so machines can parse it. Strengthen your authorship and organizational credibility so engines trust the source. Then watch whether you’re being cited and adjust. The same checklist serves as a featured snippet and a ChatGPT citation, so you build it once.

How to Measure AEO and GEO

This is where the new model gets uncomfortable. Measurement is the biggest open problem in the field right now. AI platforms don’t share how often a given prompt gets asked, and they rarely explain why they cited one source over another. Anyone promising guaranteed placement or perfect attribution is selling something.

What you can measure is still worth the effort. A handful of metrics give you a real read:

• AI visibility rate, sometimes called share of model, tracks how often you appear in AI answers across a set of questions.
• Citation frequency counts how often a tool names or links to you specifically.
• AI share of voice compares your appearance rate against competitors for the same questions.
• Prompt and query coverage shows how much of your audience’s real question set you turn up for.
• Sentiment tells you whether a mention frames you well, badly, or somewhere in between.
• AI referral traffic in GA4 captures the visits that do come through.

Pick the 30 to 50 questions your audience would type into an AI tool. Run them across the platforms that matter to you on a regular cadence. Record where you show up and where you’re cited, and note the questions you’re missing entirely. Cited sources can swing 40% to 60% month to month, so the trend over time tells you far more than any single check.

For tooling, you’ve got a few categories to choose from: SEO suites with added AI tracking, like SEMRush; dedicated visibility platforms like Profound, Conductor, and Otterly; and GA4 and Search Console for the traffic side. We also analyzed HubSpot’s new AEO Grader in a recent blog to see if it’s worth the investment for our nonprofit clients.

Where to Start If You’re Trying to Stay Visible in AI Search

The fastest way to fall behind is to try to do everything at once. You don’t need a separate AEO team, a GEO team, and a content calendar three times the size.

Start with a baseline first. Run your top questions through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google and see where you already appear. Fix what’s hiding you next, which usually means the technical and structural problems that keep crawlers from reading your pages. Then improve the handful of pages tied to your highest-intent questions—the ones your best-fit buyers and donors are asking. Refreshing strong pages you already have often beats publishing more from scratch, and it works faster. 

Build content that any search engine, traditional or generative, wants to put in front of the people you’re trying to reach, and keep it clear and credible enough to be worth citing.

If you’d rather not sort the signal from the hype on your own, that’s the work we do every day. Let’s talk about how to make sure your organization is showing up where it needs to be in AI-generated answers.

FAQs About AEO vs. GEO

How Is AEO Different From SEO?

SEO works to earn a ranked position in a list of links. AEO works to get your content pulled into the direct answer shown above (or instead of) those links, so it optimizes for being the answer rather than for placement near it.

What Are the Benefits of Focusing on AEO Over GEO for My Website?

In practice, you rarely choose one over the other because the same structured, credible content that wins direct answers is what generative engines cite in their responses. The more useful question is which platforms your audience uses, and then concentrating your measurement and effort on those platforms.

How Do AEO and GEO Impact Website Traffic Differently?

Both can lower raw click volume, since users often get their answer without visiting your website. The traffic that does arrive from AI sources tends to convert at a higher rate than traditional search, so the value shows up in lead quality and citations more than in session counts.

How Can I Optimize My Website for Both AEO and GEO?

Publish crawlable, well-structured content that answers specific questions in self-contained passages, add schema markup, strengthen author and organizational credibility, and keep your key facts in raw HTML that AI crawlers can read. Then track whether you’re being cited and adjust from there.

The post AEO vs. GEO: How to Keep Your Content Visible in AI Search appeared first on Big Sea.

Sound familiar?

Over 4,000 nonprofit organizations worldwide, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Food Bank of New York City, and The Nature Conservancy, use HubSpot for donor management, program management, reporting, and forecasting. The platform is genuinely powerful! But it’s also genuinely unforgiving when you skip the setup work.

The number one reason CRM implementations fail is user adoption (or lack thereof). When the system is cumbersome and the training is thin, people stop using it and go back to spreadsheets. Structured HubSpot onboarding is what keeps that from happening.

This guide covers the full HubSpot onboarding process in five phases, from technical account setup through reporting and data governance, with specific guidance for the fundraising, development, and communications realities that nonprofits actually navigate.

The Difference Between Onboarding and Implementation

When most people say “onboarding,” they mean setting up their email domain, importing a contact list, and watching a few tutorial videos. That’s a start, but it’s not enough.

Real HubSpot onboarding means configuring the platform around how your organization raises money, manages relationships, and measures mission impact. Turning on the features is the easy part, but making the system reflect how your development team works takes intention.

A focused implementation for a nonprofit moving from spreadsheets or a simple donor database typically takes six to nine months, including discovery, configuration, testing, and the first 90 days post-launch. The decisions made during the HubSpot onboarding process have consequences that extend well past the first login.

HubSpot offers two paths for the customer onboarding journey: their own guided process for Pro-tier plans, and partner-led onboarding through a HubSpot Solutions Partner. (Hey! Big Sea is one of those!) Both are valid depending on your organization’s internal capacity and data complexity.

The phases below follow a specific build order. Get the technical foundation right before configuring your data structure. Then get the data structure right before building automation. Every time a nonprofit skips ahead, it creates rework, and rework eats up staff hours the CRM was supposed to free up in the first place.

Phase 1: Technical Foundation and Account Configuration

This first phase is necessary. Your domain connection, tracking code, user permissions, and account defaults all need to be right before anything else gets configured. Errors here show up later in places where they’re much harder to fix.

1. Connect Your Domain and Email Sending Domains

Connecting your domain ensures your email marketing, landing pages, and forms carry your organization’s brand rather than a generic HubSpot subdomain. That matters for deliverability and donor trust in ways that aren’t obvious right away… until the day you see a campaign get routed to junk mail.

Connecting and authenticating your domain—via SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)—is the critical step that determines whether your emails land in inboxes:

• SPF authorizes HubSpot to send on your behalf
• DKIM digitally signs your emails to prove they weren’t tampered with
• DMARC instructs receiving servers on how to handle emails that fail these checks

Publish these records in your DNS settings before sending a single donor communication.

2. Install the HubSpot Tracking Code on Your Website

The tracking code is what connects your website to your HubSpot CRM. Without it, HubSpot can’t attribute web activity to constituent records, and your reporting will end up missing the data that connects marketing efforts to actual donor behavior. Without that, campaign attribution is essentially useless.

3. Configure User Permissions and Team Structures

Role-based permissions determine what each staff member can see, edit, and export. Set them wrong early and you’ll either have security gaps or staff members who can’t access what they need. Most nonprofits need at minimum three distinct permission profiles:

• Admin for the CRM owner
• Marketing-level users for communications staff
• Read-only view for leadership and board members

4. Establish Time Zone, Currency, and Account-Level Defaults

Everyone skips this step because it looks like admin overhead, but it only takes five minutes. It controls how dates, times, and currency appear across the entire platform, and getting it wrong means correcting errors in hundreds of records later. It’s one of the lowest-effort, highest-payoff HubSpot hacks in the whole account setup sequence.

Phase 2: Data Architecture and CRM Customization

This is the strategic core of HubSpot onboarding. Constituent journey mapping, custom properties, lifecycle stages, data cleansing, and data migration all live here.

1. Your Constituent Journey Belongs in Your CRM Architecture

Before you configure a single property in HubSpot, map how a person moves through your organization’s relationship: from first web visit to event registrant to newsletter subscriber to first-time donor to recurring donor to major gift prospect. That journey becomes the blueprint for your lifecycle stages, your pipeline structure, and your automation logic.

Most out-of-the-box CRM configurations are designed for sales cycles. Donor development cycles are different. The custom configuration work described here in Phase 2 makes HubSpot a smart CRM for mission-driven work rather than just a B2B sales tool with your logo on it.

2. Cleanse and Prepare Your Legacy Data for Import

Data migration is the most time-consuming part of HubSpot onboarding, and the quality of what you bring in determines the quality of everything you build on top of it. Here’s a useful rule: Import contacts and deals with activity in the last two to three years, archive the rest, and clean what you do migrate. Better data gives you a CRM you can trust from day one.

Before you import contacts, deduplicate your list, standardize field formats (e.g., phone numbers, state abbreviations, salutations), and remove records with no email address and no recent engagement. Every bad record you bring over is a record someone will eventually have to reconcile.

3. Build Custom Properties for Fundraising and Constituent Tracking

HubSpot’s default contact properties were designed for B2B sales. They don’t account for cumulative giving total, last gift date, giving frequency, major gift prospect status, volunteer history, or program participation. Most nonprofits need to build these custom properties themselves.

A word of caution: it’s easy to create 16 custom properties in your first week. Instead, map each one to a clear use case before you build it. A property no one will filter, segment, or report on is noise that makes your HubSpot CRM harder to navigate over time. If you can’t name the decision it will inform, don’t create it yet.

Grant tracking is one place where custom properties and deal pipeline configuration work directly together. Grant applications, funder relationships, deadline tracking, and award status belong in a structured deal object, not buried in contact notes where no one will find them when it matters.

4. Define Lifecycle Stages Specific to Your Mission

HubSpot’s default lifecycle stages—Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist—make sense for a SaaS company. But they don’t map cleanly to donor development. Most nonprofits configure stages like:

• First-Time Visitor
• Newsletter Subscriber
• Event Attendee
• First-Time Donor
• Recurring Donor
• Lapsed Donor
• Major Gift Prospect
• Major Donor

Get the marketing and development teams to agree on these definitions before configuration begins, because lifecycle stages drive automation logic, segmentation, and reporting. A disagreement about what counts as a “qualified” prospect creates problems that ripple through every workflow you build.

5. Execute Your First Data Import

Import contacts in batches organized by constituent type: donors, volunteers, program participants, newsletter subscribers. Batching keeps errors contained and makes them easier to trace.

After importing data, run a deduplication pass and validate that the key custom properties populated correctly before you turn on any workflows. Turning on automation before validating the import is how you end up sending a lapsed-donor re-engagement sequence to someone who gave last week.

Phase 3: Marketing Hub Setup and Communication Infrastructure

Marketing Hub is where email, forms, segmentation, and automation come together. The decisions made here determine whether your constituent communications feel coordinated and relevant, or like they came from an organization that doesn’t quite know who it’s talking to.

1. Build Brand-Aligned Email Templates Before You Send Anything

The email templates configured during onboarding become the foundation for every donor communication, newsletter, and campaign your team produces.

At minimum, nonprofits need a newsletter layout, a transactional receipt template for gift acknowledgments, and a plain-text outreach template for development staff handling high-touch donor conversations. Each serves a different communication mode, and having all three ready before your first campaign goes out is worth the setup time.

2. Build Lead Capture Forms Aligned to Your Constituent Journey

Every form on your website that collects constituent information—newsletter signups, volunteer applications, event registrations, and donation follow-up—should route directly into HubSpot with field mapping that matches the custom properties built in Phase 2.

Form design should reflect where someone is in their relationship with your organization. A first-time newsletter subscriber form should ask for very little. A major donor cultivation form can ask for more. Only ask for what you’ll use, and map what you collect to properties that drive action.

3. Segment Your Database into Strategic Lists

Segmentation in HubSpot runs through active and static lists. Active lists update automatically based on properties and behaviors. Static lists are fixed snapshots. Most nonprofit communications should use active lists so your segmentation stays current without someone manually maintaining it every week.

Core segments for most nonprofits include active donors (last gift within 12 months), lapsed donors (no gift in 12-plus months), recurring givers, event attendees, volunteers, and major gift prospects. Each segment drives different cadences and different content.

Lead nurturing sequences built on these segments are what turn a newsletter subscriber into a first-time donor and pull a lapsed donor back into active giving.

4. Build Your First Automation Workflows

Automation setup should follow segmentation, not precede it. Building workflows on top of poorly defined lists produces automated communications that reach the wrong people with the wrong message, which erodes the constituent trust that makes fundraising work.

Marketing automation software like HubSpot saves teams an average of six or more hours per week on routine outreach and follow-up tasks. That number only holds when the underlying workflows are built on clean data and logical trigger conditions. Set up the list structure first, then build the automation on top of it.

Beyond standard email sequences, the broader set of HubSpot tools within Marketing Hub is worth exploring during onboarding: the chatbot and live chat tools for real-time website engagement, landing page builders for campaign-specific lead capture, and ad management integrations for connecting paid traffic directly to your CRM.

5. Connect Social Media Channels and Advertising Integrations

HubSpot’s social media tools let nonprofits schedule, publish, and track social content directly within the platform. This keeps social activity connected to the same constituent records driving your email and CRM data, which matters when you’re trying to understand which channels are actually moving people.

Social integrations work best after list segmentation is complete. At that point, you can use HubSpot audiences to target paid social and Google Ads campaigns against the same constituent segments driving your email strategy.

Phase 4: Sales Hub for Fundraising and Partnership Management

Nonprofit development teams sometimes resist the Sales Hub framing. The language of “closing deals” probably doesn’t match how you think about what you do. But major gift cultivation has stages, timelines, and required actions, just like a sales cycle. The pipeline structure HubSpot uses for B2B sales happens to work very well for moves management when you configure it correctly.

1. Configure Deal Pipelines for Major Gifts and Grant Tracking

HubSpot’s Sales Hub deal pipeline can become a moves management system when configured for nonprofit development. Each deal represents a donor relationship or grant opportunity moving through defined stages from prospect identification through stewardship.

Grant pipelines and major gift pipelines should live separately, with distinct stage definitions, required fields, and probability settings. A grant application has a deadline and a review committee. A major gift cultivation has lunch, a site visit, and a multi-year relationship. Conflating them in a single pipeline produces reporting that misleads leadership about where things actually stand.

Lead scoring, configured through contact properties and engagement behaviors, lets development staff prioritize outreach based on signals the CRM already tracks, such as email opens, event attendance, website visits. It’s more reliable than gut instinct and more current than a spreadsheet updated quarterly.

2. Automate Donor Acknowledgment Sequences

Donor thank-you communications are legally required above certain gift thresholds and strategically critical for retention at every giving level. Automating them through HubSpot means acknowledgment happens consistently, promptly, and with personalization that reflects the actual gift rather than a form letter.

The acknowledgment for a lapsed donor coming back after two years should sound different from the one going to a first-time $50 giver. One of those people needs a warm welcome, while the other needs to feel remembered. Automation sequences for both situations should have distinct logic and distinct content, because treating them identically signals that your organization isn’t paying attention. That’s something your donors will notice.

3. Implement Meeting Scheduling Links for Development Staff

HubSpot’s meetings tool integrates with calendar availability and lets donors and prospects book time with development staff without the email back-and-forth. In major gift cultivation, a slow response to expressed interest can mean a missed conversation. Removing that friction makes a difference.

Meeting links embedded in donor outreach emails, event follow-up sequences, and grant acknowledgment communications give recipients a clear, low-effort next step.

Nonprofits managing high volumes of constituent inquiries, volunteer support requests, or program questions may benefit from configuring a ticket pipeline within Service Hub. This keeps constituent support organized and trackable rather than scattered across staff inboxes.

Phase 5: Reporting, Analytics, and Board-Ready Accountability

Nobody loves the board reporting process—pulling numbers from five platforms the night before a meeting, hoping the totals line up, and trying to explain why the email open rate doesn’t match what the development director told the executive director two weeks ago. HubSpot can fix most of this, but only if the reporting is configured during onboarding rather than treated as something to get to later.

1. Build a Centralized Dashboard That Connects Activity to Mission

A well-configured HubSpot reporting dashboard replaces that monthly data-pulling ritual with a live view of the metrics that actually matter to organizational leadership.

Core nonprofit dashboard components include total active donors, new donors this month, lapsed donors at risk, recurring gift count and total, pipeline value across major gifts and grants, email engagement rates by segment, and website traffic by source. Dashboards should be designed for specific audiences. A development team dashboard tracks day-to-day pipeline activity, and a board-facing dashboard focuses on fundraising outcomes and marketing ROI.

2. Track Campaign Attribution to Connect Marketing Efforts to Revenue

Campaign attribution links specific marketing activities, such as an email campaign, a social post, or a Google Ads click, to the contacts who responded and the donations that followed. That’s the data that lets leadership evaluate where marketing investment is producing returns rather than guessing.

Most nonprofits configure basic attribution during onboarding and refine it over the first six months.

3. Establish Automated Monthly Reporting

Scheduled report emails sent from HubSpot directly to leadership, board members, and development staff eliminate the manual reporting burden and the human error that comes with it. Monthly automated reports should be configured before onboarding is considered complete. They’re the accountability mechanism that tells you whether the setup is working.

When to Bring in a HubSpot Solutions Partner

The DIY onboarding path through HubSpot’s guided process is genuinely fine for organizations with internal technical capacity, clean data, and a single Hub to configure. For nonprofits migrating from a legacy CRM, connecting multiple integrations, or building custom objects for fundraising workflows, the complexity typically exceeds what the guided process is designed to handle.

A certified HubSpot Solutions Partner brings both technical and strategic guidance to the implementation. The result is a setup that reflects how your organization works rather than a generic template. Big Sea is a HubSpot Solutions Partner with specific experience configuring the platform for nonprofits, and our HubSpot onboarding services are built around the fundraising and development realities covered in this guide.

If your team is ready to get HubSpot set up correctly from the start, or if you’ve already started and the current setup isn’t working the way it should, that’s the conversation we’re built for.

FAQs about HubSpot Onboarding

How Long Does HubSpot Onboarding Take?

For nonprofits doing a basic HubSpot setup with one or two marketplace integrations, the timeline from account creation to active use is two to four weeks. Organizations migrating from a legacy CRM or configuring multiple Hubs with custom integrations should plan for six to nine months. Data quality is the largest variable. Clean, well-organized data moves faster than a legacy database that requires significant work before it can be imported.

What Is HubSpot Sales Hub and How Do Nonprofits Use It?

Sales Hub is HubSpot’s pipeline management and outreach toolset. Nonprofits use it to manage major gift cultivation, track grant applications, automate donor acknowledgment sequences, and schedule meetings with major donors and foundation contacts. It functions as a moves management system when configured specifically for development team workflows rather than traditional sales pipelines.

What Are the Key Benefits of Professional HubSpot Onboarding Services?

A well-structured HubSpot onboarding process accelerates time-to-value, increases team adoption, and produces a platform configuration built around your organization’s actual goals rather than generic defaults. For nonprofits specifically, professional HubSpot onboarding services ensure that the CRM reflects constituent relationship management rather than sales pipeline management. That distinction requires deliberate configuration that the self-guided process rarely produces on its own.

The post HubSpot Onboarding for Nonprofits: The Step-by-Step Setup Guide for Mission-Driven Teams appeared first on Big Sea.

In 2025, 34% of museum directors reported losing federal funding and grants. That’s a real gap to fill, and development teams across the country are filling it by diversifying and ideating in ways they never have before. Museums have expanded corporate sponsorships and are developing new models of support. Membership programs are getting overhauled. Earned income, crowdfunding, and legacy giving are getting serious investment for the first time at many institutions.

The museums figuring it out are actively building something more durable. If you’re looking for museum fundraising ideas to strengthen your revenue mix, these 13 strategies are drawn from what cultural institutions are doing right now.

1. Host Themed Events

Museum-at-night special events like torch-lit tours, mystery games, silent discos, or “last-chance” exhibit-closing parties attract new visitors and make a splash on social media. Galas are worth the investment for institutions with mid-level to major donors in their networks: a formal dinner with live auction elements and curated entertainment creates a fundraising environment that a casual ticketed event can’t match. Golf tournaments reach a different audience entirely, bringing in business-community donors through board networks and corporate sponsorships.

Themed events related to the museum’s permanent collection or a specific exhibit can attract a wider audience, incorporating lectures, performances, or special behind-the-scenes tours alongside fundraising and member-driven activities.

Think about what makes your institution’s exhibits, collections, and research unique. Drive your fundraising by developing a themed event around something core to your museum’s identity. This approach produces a memorable event and an opportunity for community members to connect. These events also generate content worth using afterward, such as photos, donor spotlights, and highlights that extend the fundraising moment beyond the evening itself.

2. Revamp Your Membership Program

Another strategy for boosting your fundraising is to review your membership options. Are you catering to different budgets and interests? You might include a basic level with free admission, a mid-tier with discounts and exclusive events, and a top-tier with VIP perks and special access.

You can also create memberships focused on specific interests, such as a “Young Patrons” tier for families or an “Archaeology Enthusiast” level that includes behind-the-scenes tours of relevant exhibits. Patron programs deserve particular attention. Long-tenured patrons are your most reliable pipeline for major gifts and legacy giving, and the access and recognition built into a patron tier are what keep those relationships in place over years and decades.

You can deepen members’ connections to your institution by focusing on community building. Organize member meetups, volunteer opportunities, or special social events to foster a sense of belonging. According to AAM’s 2025 National Snapshot, 46% of museums overhauled their membership programs last year. If yours hasn’t been revisited in a while, now is a good time.

3. Organize a Crowdfunding Campaign

Your museum has likely already become “very online.” There’s no way (and no reason) to avoid the siren song of social media and digital advertising. If you’ve built a robust following on social media, the time could be ripe for a crowdfunding campaign.

Crowdfunding campaigns generally work best when centered on a very specific, time-bound goal, such as funding an exhibit or raising enough money to acquire or preserve a special piece. Some museums, like Japan’s National Museum of Science and Nature, have had incredible success crowdfunding for operational costs as well, so brainstorm what makes the most sense for you and your community.

Platforms like Kickstarter and GoFundMe open access to audiences well beyond your existing donor base. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing model creates urgency. GoFundMe is more flexible and works well for preservation campaigns or community-facing asks. Peer-to-peer fundraising takes this a step further, with supporters creating their own campaign pages, sharing with their networks, and generating donations from people your institution might never have reached directly. For museums with engaged members and advocates, peer-to-peer fundraising can multiply results without requiring additional staff.

4. Install Donation Kiosks and Add Text-to-Give

By installing donation kiosks, you create a convenient and accessible donation experience for museum visitors. Kiosks allow visitors to make impulsive donations on-site, inspired by their museum experience. This captures donations they might forget to make later online or through traditional methods.

Make sure to strategically place your kiosks in high-traffic areas, such as exits, gift shops, or near popular exhibits. Modern kiosks accept credit cards, Apple Pay, and tap-to-pay without requiring additional hardware.

Text-to-give adds another layer of convenience. With a keyword-to-number setup, visitors can donate from their phones in under a minute, with no staff required. Both tools perform best when tied to a message about something specific that the visitor just experienced.

5. Plan an Online Auction

Online auctions marry the fundraising opportunities of a traditional silent auction with the ease of collecting online donations. Because online auctions transcend geographical limitations, your auction can reach a wider audience, including a younger demographic. You can use social media to amplify your auction’s reach and attract new museum supporters.

Live auctions create competitive energy and work well when paired with high-value items and an experienced auctioneer. Art auctions are a natural fit for institutions with access to donated works or artist relationships. Museums can offer a wider range of auction items beyond physical artifacts, including experiences like exclusive curator-led museum tours, behind-the-scenes access to conservation labs, or “dinner with the director” packages, which often generate higher bids than physical items. Charity auctions also allow museums to showcase the stories behind auction items and how the proceeds support their missions, fostering a deeper connection with donors.

6. Curate Subscription Boxes.

Curated subscription boxes are an engaging earned income strategy for museums to raise funds and connect with audiences. As with lots of fundraising ideas, it pays to begin by thinking about what makes your institution special. Is there an interactive or immersive exhibit you want to highlight? Is there a theme that would particularly resonate with your community right now?

You could focus on a specific exhibit, historical period, or other area of your museum’s collection to create a theme. For example, an art museum could offer a “Modern Art Explorer” box, while a natural history museum might create a “Dino Discovery” box. Each subscription box could include a curated selection of items, such as replicas of artifacts, educational materials, high-quality art prints, and DIY craft kits related to the theme. Collaborate with local artists, artisans, or educational organizations to create unique items that add value and support the local community.

*Hot Tip: Include a “mystery item” in each box to generate excitement and keep subscribers engaged. And if a monthly subscription box would require more resources than your team has, consider a seasonal option.

7. Allow Patrons to “Adopt an Artifact”

The “Adopt an Artifact” idea is a creative way for museums to raise funds for artifact conservation, preservation, and acquisition. In this kind of fundraiser, patrons symbolically “adopt” a specific artifact from the museum’s collection for a defined period, usually a year. Different adoption levels often come with varying donation amounts and benefits.

“Adopt an Artifact” programs foster a deeper connection between patrons and the museum’s collection. Make sure to choose a diverse range of artifacts with interesting stories, historical significance, or visual appeal to drive engagement. Showcase the program on your social media channels, with photos and context for each artifact, to attract new donors who want to be part of the program.

8. Offer Paid Educational Workshops, School Programs, and Behind-the-Scenes Tours

Museums can generate revenue through paid educational workshops and programs while fulfilling their educational mission. Offer a range of workshops catering to different interests and skill levels, from art workshops and history lectures to science experiments. School programs are particularly valuable: educational fundraising that centers on children’s enrichment is compelling to donors who can see exactly where their money goes. Invite donors to observe a school program, and the case for continued giving makes itself.

Behind-the-scenes tours with curators give participants something no general admission ticket provides. Access to conservation labs, storage areas, and collection archives creates a sense of insider connection that keeps patrons engaged at a higher level. Incorporate hands-on activities, discussions, and opportunities for participants to engage with the material in every program you offer.

9. Sell Museum Merchandise for a Cause

Museums can turn their gift shops into fundraising assets by strategically selling merchandise that connects with their cause. Tie products back to the museum’s collection or exhibits, and link sales to a specific fundraising goal, such as acquiring new artifacts or supporting educational programs.

Make merchandise unique by partnering with local artists or designers, and consider creating limited-edition merchandise to make the campaign feel more special. Online merchandise extends reach to supporters who live outside your market and can’t visit in person.

10. Build Cause-related Marketing Partnerships

Cause-related marketing partnerships are a win-win for museums and businesses. Museums gain financial support and wider exposure, while businesses enhance their brand image and connect with a targeted audience. More than 55% of museums have expanded corporate sponsorship efforts in 2025, which means competition for those dollars is growing. The institutions securing the best partnerships are offering more than a logo on a brochure.

Look for companies whose mission or values align with your museum’s focus. An environmental science museum could partner with an eco-friendly brand. A history museum and a heritage travel company have natural programming overlap. Consider co-branded events, product lines inspired by museum exhibits, or educational programs that give the corporate partner a reason to promote the relationship to their own audience.

11. Explore Planned Giving, Bequests, Trusts, and Foundations

Most museums treat planned giving as a pleasant surprise rather than a strategy. Total bequest dollars rose 13% to over $2 billion in 2025, with the average bequest worth over $50,000. Institutions actively cultivating these gifts are sitting on a significant revenue opportunity.

Bequests, left through a donor’s will or trust, account for roughly 90% of planned gifts. They are among the simplest gifts to arrange and can be unrestricted, giving museums flexibility to direct funds toward their most pressing needs. Donor-advised funds are the fastest-growing charitable giving vehicle in the U.S. and are increasingly the preferred vehicle for legacy-minded donors to structure their giving.

Collaboration with corporations, foundations, and other cultural institutions can also open doors to new donor networks and funding opportunities aligned with shared goals. Trusts and foundations with missions aligned to education, cultural preservation, or community access are natural partners. Foundation grants provide multi-year funding that individual campaigns rarely match, and those relationships compound over time.

Endowments funded through bequests and major gifts provide permanent income that stabilizes a museum’s budget year over year. In an environment where federal funding is unpredictable and attendance revenue is uneven, a healthy endowment changes the institution’s risk profile.

12. Plan a Capital Campaign

When a museum needs to fund a major expansion, renovation, or long-term endowment, a capital campaign provides the structure. Mid-size regional museums are running combined capital and endowment campaigns in the $40–80 million range. Larger encyclopedic institutions often target nine figures.

Capital campaigns work in phases. The quiet phase secures lead gifts from major donors before any public announcement. The public phase builds momentum and brings in broader support. The discipline of a campaign, with specific goals, clear timelines, and donor recognition structures, creates fundraising urgency that annual giving programs rarely generate on their own. Naming opportunities for galleries, endowed curator positions, and dedicated spaces give major donors a lasting reason to commit at the highest levels.

13. Cultivate Major Donors

Major donors carry more of the fundraising load than in years past, and museums with active major gift programs are in a substantially different position from those without.

Major gift cultivation is relationship work. It starts with identifying the right prospects through wealth screening and giving history, and it unfolds through personal engagement: visits, behind-the-scenes access, curator introductions, and recognition that connects a donor to the institution’s mission over time.

Patron programs are the most reliable path to major gifts. Long-tenured patrons who receive meaningful access and recognition over the years are far more likely to make a transformational gift or include the museum in their estate plan. The development staff who build these relationships tend to produce the highest return of anyone on a museum’s team.

Tips for Successful Museum Fundraising

Before you dive into one of the fundraising ideas above, make sure you’ve got the basics covered, including:

• A compelling website with an easy-to-use virtual donation page
• Fantastic content that uses storytelling strategies to demonstrate your institution’s areas of expertise and contributions to the community
• A robust email marketing strategy for staying in touch with members and donors
• Well-crafted direct mail campaigns (Response rates to direct mail are nearly five times higher than to email or digital ads.)

Keeping your digital strategy strong will go a long way towards the success of any new fundraising project you choose this year.

Need Help Fundraising for Your Museum?

Navigating the challenges of museum fundraising today requires a robust and creative marketing strategy. Partnering with an agency that speaks museum will help your institution reach its fundraising goals.

Museum Fundraising FAQs

Why Is Museum Fundraising So Important?

Museum fundraising is critical to sustaining museums’ core mission, including preserving collections, supporting educational programs, and developing new exhibits. Fundraising can also cover operational costs such as staff salaries, building upkeep, utilities, and more. With 34% of museum directors reporting lost federal grants in 2025 and a court-ordered settlement in April 2026 only partially restoring that stability, nonprofit fundraising has become the primary way most cultural institutions keep their doors open and their missions intact.

What Is the Most Profitable Museum Fundraising Event?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to the most profitable museum fundraising events. What works best will be based on your museum’s areas of expertise and donor base. That said, galas and charity auctions are among the highest-grossing events for institutions with strong donor networks. 

Silent auctions offer flexibility for attendees and can be less intimidating than live auctions. They also require fewer staff on the day of the event. Art auctions work particularly well for institutions with access to donated works or artist connections. Night at the museum formats generate strong attendance and social content alongside donation revenue. The key is to curate attractive items or experiences that will generate excitement and competitive bidding.

How Can Museums Identify Potential Donors?

Museums can identify potential donors by cultivating existing supporters (such as email subscribers or one-time visitors) and using data analysis and prospect research to find new donors. Museums can leverage donor databases and wealth-screening tools to identify individuals with a history of charitable giving and an affinity for causes aligned with the museum’s mission.

In addition, museums can use social media to target specific demographics with relevant content and fundraising campaigns. Online surveys, SEO-rich content, and lead capture forms can help identify potential donors interested in specific exhibits or programs.

By implementing these strategies, museums can build a pipeline of potential donors who are passionate about their mission and more likely to contribute over the long term.

What Are the Biggest Challenges Facing Museum Fundraising?

One of the biggest challenges for museums is donor acquisition and retention. Attracting new donors and keeping existing ones engaged is crucial, yet competition for charitable dollars is high. Museums need to find ways to stand out and demonstrate their value.

In addition, public funding for museums has been declining for decades, placing greater pressure on private donations and earned income. This is further strained by rising operational costs and the potential for lower attendance than pre-pandemic levels.

Despite the inherent challenges of fundraising, museums can marry online content marketing with compelling visitor attractions and, in doing so, serve the institution’s mission while also driving membership and fundraising.

The post 13 Best Museum Fundraising Ideas for 2026 appeared first on Big Sea.

This guide covers seven marketing grants worth pursuing in 2026, plus the free and discounted tools that stretch whatever budget you have. Every program below was checked and current as of July 2026. If you want context on where to spend grant dollars once you win them, start with the latest nonprofit marketing trends.

1. Wavemaker Grant

Big Sea’s Wavemaker Grant awards $30,000 in donated marketing services to one purpose-driven organization each year. Applications open in the fall. The 2026 cycle has closed, and you can sign up on the grant page to be notified when 2027 applications open.

The grant works like a full nonprofit marketing agency engagement. Depending on what your organization needs most, that can mean brand and messaging work, website design, fundraising campaigns, donor email automation, or setup and optimization of your Google Ad Grant. Big Sea scopes the work with your team and treats it like any other agency client project.

The Wavemaker Grant fits organizations with a dedicated marketing person who can collaborate with an agency team. The current cycle prioritizes missions that reduce harm and strengthen support for vulnerable populations. Past recipients include Ibis Reproductive Health’s Free the Pill campaign, the Space Foundation, Champions for Children, and Conner Prairie Museum.

2. Google Ad Grants

Google Ad Grants gives eligible 501(c)(3) nonprofits $10,000 per month in free Google Search advertising, up to $120,000 per year. There is no application deadline. The program runs year-round and renews monthly as long as your account stays compliant.

This is the largest ongoing advertising grant available to nonprofits, and for most organizations it should be the first application you file. Your ads appear when people search for topics tied to your mission, which makes it a strong channel for recruiting volunteers, promoting programs, and reaching new donors.

To qualify, you need current 501(c)(3) status, verification through Google for Nonprofits, and a secure website with substantial content about your mission. Staying funded takes ongoing work. Google requires a 5% click-through rate and enforces keyword quality rules, and accounts that slip out of compliance get paused.

Our guide to getting the Google Ad Grant walks through the application step by step. If you already have the grant and it sits underused, which is where most accounts end up, Big Sea offers Google Ad Grant management to keep the full $10,000 working every month.

3. AWS IMAGINE Grant Program

The AWS IMAGINE Grant Program, funded by Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers two prestigious grant opportunities for nonprofit organizations that utilize cloud technologies to positively impact society: the Go Further, Faster award and the Momentum to Modernize award. Each award provides nonprofit organizations with valuable resources and support to enhance their IT capabilities and advance their missions.

The Pathfinder Award

Newer in the AWS grant program is the Pathfinder award, which provides support for groundbreaking, mission-critical projects at the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) encompassing a wide range of applications, such as generative AI, agentic AI, and autonomous systems. Recipients of the award have access to up to $200,000 of unrestricted financial support, up to $100,000 in AWS promotional credit, project implementation support from the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, access to AWS training and support, and an opportunity for AWS marketing promotion.

Go Further, Faster

For eligible nonprofits that need help with specific cloud-based projects, the Go Further, Faster award offers up to $150,000 in unrestricted funding, $100,000 in AWS promotional credit, technical support, AWS training, and opportunities for marketing promotion. Eligible projects must have the potential to advance big, repeatable solutions in your industry and use or integrate with advanced cloud services, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-performance computing, or the Internet of Things.

Momentum to Modernize

If you don’t have a specific project in mind but want to enhance your tech capabilities or streamline operations, you can apply for the Momentum to Modernize award. Recipients of this award have access to $50,000 in unrestricted funds, $20,000 in AWS promotional credit, implementation guidance, training and support, and marketing opportunities. Eligible projects can include database migration, net-new application development, application migration and optimization, or infrastructure expansion.

4. The Knight Foundation Marketing Grants

The Knight Foundation funds nonprofits working in journalism, arts and culture, and community development, focused on the 26 US communities where the Knight brothers once published newspapers. Its relaunched Knight Cities Challenge is awarding $10 million in grants of up to $200,000 each.

The 2026 Knight Cities Challenge funds community-centered projects that strengthen local news, open paths to economic opportunity, or bring people together through arts and public spaces. The first application round ran April 1 through 30, 2026, and the foundation plans a second cohort as part of a three-year rollout.

If your organization operates in a Knight community, subscribe to the foundation’s updates. Open calls appear throughout the year, and localized grants are often distributed through your community foundation.

5. AWS Nonprofit Credit Program

The AWS Nonprofit Credit Program gives nonprofits with annual operating budgets under $10 million between $1,000 and $5,000 in AWS promotional credits each year, distributed through TechSoup. Smaller organizations receive $1,000, mid-sized organizations $2,000, and larger organizations $5,000.

Credits are valid for 12 months and apply to on-demand cloud services like website hosting, storage, and databases. That makes this less a marketing grant than a way to cover the infrastructure your marketing runs on. A faster, more reliable website helps every campaign you fund elsewhere. Organizations can request one credit grant per fiscal year through TechSoup.

6. NBCUniversal Local Impact Grants

NBCUniversal Local Impact Grants award $2.5 million in unrestricted funding to small nonprofits in the 11 markets with NBC and Telemundo owned stations. The 2026 application window ran March 24 through April 24, and the program has returned every year since 2018.

Eligibility is specific: you must be a 501(c)(3) with total annual expenses between $100,000 and $1 million, and your EIN must be more than a year old. Grants fund work in youth education and empowerment, next generation storytellers, and community engagement. The storytelling category is a natural fit for video and campaign work.

The funds are unrestricted, so winners can put them toward marketing. If you missed the 2026 window, watch localimpactgrants.com early next spring.

7. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Community Grants

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds nonprofits through requests for proposals posted on its website, with focus areas that include US economic mobility and education. It does not offer a standalone marketing grant, but outreach and communications costs can be part of a funded project.

Check the foundation’s open RFP list for opportunities that match your mission, and build audience engagement goals and communications costs into your proposal budget from the start.

Countless grantees have used grants from the Melinda Gates Foundation to enhance their nonprofit marketing and deepen their connections with the communities they serve.

Microsoft ended its nonprofit ad grant in December 2025

Microsoft Advertising shut down its Ads for Social Impact program, which gave nonprofits up to $3,000 per month in ad credits, effective December 2025. It is not accepting new applicants. If you see this program on other grant lists, skip it. Google Ad Grants remains the only major ongoing search advertising grant for nonprofits.

Free Marketing and Discount Programs for Nonprofits

Grants are competitive and most have narrow windows. Discount programs have no deadline, and stacking a few of them can free up thousands of dollars a year for the campaigns themselves. These five are worth setting up now.

1. Google for Nonprofits and the YouTube Nonprofit Program

Google for Nonprofits is free and unlocks the YouTube Nonprofit Program along with Workspace discounts and the Ad Grant application itself. On YouTube, verified nonprofits get donate buttons, fundraiser tools, and Link Anywhere cards that send viewers straight to your donation page.

2. HubSpot for Nonprofits

HubSpot for Nonprofits gives registered nonprofits in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand 40% off Professional and Enterprise products. The discount applies to new customers on annual contracts. HubSpot combines your CRM, email, and marketing automation in one place, which matters when a small team runs it all. Our HubSpot for Nonprofits guide covers the discount and how organizations like yours use the platform.

3. Canva for Nonprofits

Canva for Nonprofits gives eligible 501(c)(3) organizations Canva’s full premium plan free for up to 50 users, including brand kits and AI design tools. Verification runs through TechSoup and usually takes one to three weeks for first-time applicants.

4. Mailchimp Nonprofit Discount

Mailchimp offers verified nonprofits 15% off its base plan. In the US, you apply by adding your EIN to your account, and the discount starts with your second billing cycle. If email is central to your fundraising, compare this against HubSpot before committing. Our guide to email marketing for nonprofits can help you decide.

5. LinkedIn for Nonprofits

LinkedIn for Nonprofits offers up to 50% off hiring, learning, and fundraising products. LinkedIn does not discount its advertising, so budget full price for any paid campaigns there.

Where Can I Find More Information About Marketing Grants for Nonprofits?

Grant databases are the fastest way to find programs specific to your cause and region. GrantWatch, GrantStation, and Candid’s Foundation Directory all let you filter by focus area, and Grants.gov covers federal opportunities.

Winning the grant is step one. Spending it well is where results come from, and that takes a plan built around your audience and your fundraising goals. Big Sea has spent more than 20 years as a nonprofit marketing agency, from Ad Grant management to full campaigns. Get in touch and we’ll help you put grant dollars to work.

Marketing Grants for Nonprofits FAQs

What is a marketing grant?

A marketing grant is funding, advertising credit, or donated services that a foundation, corporation, or agency gives a nonprofit to promote its mission. Marketing grants pay for things like paid advertising, websites, branding, email programs, and campaign creative that would otherwise come out of program budgets.

What are the best marketing grants for nonprofits to apply for?

Start with Google Ad Grants. It offers $10,000 per month, has no deadline, and most 501(c)(3) organizations qualify. From there, apply for grants that match your situation: the Wavemaker Grant for $30,000 in agency services, the AWS IMAGINE Grant for technology-driven projects, and NBCUniversal Local Impact Grants if you are a small nonprofit in one of its 11 markets.

How do I write a winning marketing grant proposal?

Match the funder’s priorities before you write a word, then build the proposal around a specific, measurable outcome. Strong proposals share a few traits:

• Clear objectives. Name the goal and how you will measure it.
• A concrete budget. Show exactly where grant funds go.
• Evidence. Use data and past results to back your plan.
• Compliance. Follow the funder’s format and deadline exactly.
• A second reader. Have someone outside the project review it before you submit.

Tailor every proposal to the specific grant. Funders can spot a recycled application.

What are common mistakes to avoid when applying for marketing grants?

The most common mistake is applying for grants that don’t match your mission, which wastes your time and signals to funders that you didn’t research them. Other frequent errors include missing deadlines, vague narratives without supporting data, typos, and sending the same generic proposal to every funder.

Can a nonprofit apply for multiple marketing grants at once?

Yes. Nonprofits can hold multiple grants at the same time as long as they meet each program’s eligibility rules. Make sure your team can handle the reporting requirements for every grant you accept before you apply.

Are there marketing grants for arts nonprofits?

Yes. Arts organizations can pursue the Knight Foundation’s arts program, state and local arts council grants, and community foundation funding, many of which allow marketing and audience development costs. Databases like GrantWatch and Grants.gov list current arts opportunities by state.

The post 7 Best Marketing Grants for Nonprofits [2026] appeared first on Big Sea.

It’s tempting to assume technology is the problem. The CRM is the most visible and most expensive thing in the room, so it gets the blame. But organizations that aren’t seeing the results they expected from their new donor database are rarely running bad software. They’re running adequate software that was never set up to do what they need it to do, surrounded by processes nobody defined, data nobody fully owns, or a reporting framework built for questions leadership stopped asking two years ago.

In short, the tools get purchased before the system gets built. The CRM, the email platform, and the donation forms all sit on top of layers most nonprofits skip when they’re shopping: clear positioning, defined processes with named owners, data standards everyone follows, and a measurement framework tied to outcomes that matter. When those layers are missing, the software runs in circles regardless of which platform you’re paying for.

This blog will examine what systems you need to have in place to get the most out of your tech stack.

Key Takeaways

• A struggling CRM is usually a sign of a missing system, not proof you bought the wrong software.
• About a third of nonprofit CRM buyers don’t see a full return inside their contract cycle, but that gap comes from strategy and adoption, not the platform.
• A working marketing system has four layers that sit under any tool: positioning, process and ownership, data, and measurement.
• A new CRM carries your current gaps into a more expensive platform, so build the system first.

A New CRM Won’t Fix Your Fundraising

Picture the usual path. You want to get better results from your nonprofit CRM so you start shopping for a replacement. You find a new one with good-looking demos and a feature list that’s longer than what you have, so you decide to switch. The team migrates, retrains, and waits for the fundraising numbers to move. Six months later you’re reading the same flat numbers in a nicer interface.

What happened? Often it turns out that the CRM wasn’t the variable. The absence of a defined system around it was, and moving to a new platform didn’t build one.

The data backs this up. G2 found that around 30% of nonprofit CRM buyers don’t get a full return within their contract cycle, and that buyers who went in without a defined strategy read their ROI very differently from the ones who had a plan. The platform wasn’t the variable. The strategy and adoption around it were.

A CRM is good at one job: it stores and organizes information. But it can’t decide who’s responsible for keeping your data clean or up to date. It can’t define what a qualified donor looks like for your organization, or set the rule that turns a gift into a follow-up call. Those are decisions you need to make and processes you need to put into place. Once you’ve done so, the platform will act upon them, but the value of those actions comes from the strength of those decisions.

Software Sits on Top of Four Layers You Have to Build

When marketing works at a nonprofit, four layers are doing the work underneath whatever tools you’ve bought. Call it the Marketing System Stack.

1. Positioning and Messaging – A clear sense of who you serve and why a donor should pick your nonprofit over another organization.
2. Process and Ownership – The repeatable steps for getting work done, each with one named person accountable, but available for anyone at your organization to follow when they perform that task.
3. Data – The standards for what goes into your systems, who keeps them up to date, and when and how information is transferred from what part of the system to another.
4. Measurement – A clear definition of success, set before you configure the software.

The layers hold each other up. Clean data depends on having entry standards and someone who owns them. You can’t get useful reporting until you’ve decided what you’re measuring. Your CRM is the platform these four layers run on, and AI works across all of them. Neither one builds the layers for you, which is the part the demos skip.

You Can Spot a System Problem by Its Symptoms

System problems don’t announce themselves. They show up as friction you’ve learned to work around. A few you’ll recognize:

• Donor data nobody trusts, so every report comes with a caveat.
• Reports that need outside help. If pulling last month’s giving by campaign means emailing a consultant, the system isn’t doing its job.
• A team that keeps its own spreadsheets, because the official system is harder than the workaround.
• Storytelling that depends on whoever has time that week.

That last one catches more nonprofits than they expect. Donor and program stories feed your appeals and your annual report, but gathering them tends to run on one person’s memory and goodwill. The week that person is buried, the content pipeline stalls. Story-gathering is a system, the same as your data or your reporting, and it needs a defined way to collect and reuse what you find.

AI Speeds Up Whatever System You Already Have

AI is the obvious next move for a lean team, and a good one when the foundation is there. Think of it as an amplifier sitting on top of the stack. When your data is clean and your lifecycle stages are defined, it drafts donor segments and follow-up copy that save your team hours. But run it against the disorganized version of your CRM and you get the same disorganization, generated faster and at higher volume. The dividing line is the system underneath.

Switching CRMs Usually Moves the Problem

At some point you may be tempted to start shopping. Most of the advice you’ll find online about whether to switch CRMs is published by vendors. They win when you switch, so their framing is rarely neutral.

Most CRM migrations fail on staff adoption, not on missing features. A switch moves your undefined process and your messy data into a more expensive tool, then asks an already-stretched team to learn it.

Replace the platform only after you’ve defined the system and confirmed your current tool can’t support it. In most cases it can, and the missing piece is the system.

Run This Five-Minute System Check

You can find your weakest layer without hiring anyone. Run through these:

• Pull last month’s giving by campaign. If you can’t do it yourself, your measurement layer needs work.
• Name the person or people responsible for data-entry standards. If no one comes to mind, that’s a process and ownership gap.
• Think back through your last ten gifts and trace what came before each one. Was it an email? An event? A personal ask? If you can’t reconstruct that sequence, your data layer isn’t capturing what’s actually moving people to give.
• Explain your organization to a first-time donor in two sentences. If it takes a paragraph and a meeting, start with positioning.

Whichever one stumps you points at the layer to fix first.

Build the System Before You Buy the Next Tool

Spend your next marketing dollar developing the system your platforms are supposed to run on. Define the four layers, and the CRM you already pay for starts doing the job you bought it for.

That’s the work of a Vision & Velocity engagement. We build your positioning, process, data standards, and measurement first, then make the technology you already own do its job. If your CRM has been a letdown, that’s the place to start.

FAQs

Why Isn’t Our Nonprofit CRM Helping Us Raise More Money?

A CRM stores and organizes donor information, but it can’t define your process or decide what a qualified donor looks like. When those decisions are missing, the software has nothing to act on, and the numbers stay flat.

We Invested in a CRM and Nothing Changed. Why?

Roughly a third of nonprofit CRM buyers don’t see a full return within their contract cycle, and the gap usually comes from gaps in strategy and adoption rather than the platform. The tool pays off once the system around it is built.

Should We Switch Nonprofit CRMs?

Usually not first. Most switches fail on staff adoption rather than features, so a migration tends to carry the same gaps into a more expensive platform. Define the system, then decide whether your current tool can support it.

Why Is Our Donor Data Such a Mess?

Messy data is a governance gap more than a software flaw. Without agreed upon entry standards and one clear owner, every user records things differently and the database degrades over time. Your donor data needs to be thorough and consistent over time in order to get the most out of CRM automation.

Why Can’t We Pull the Reports We Need Without Outside Help?

If routine reporting needs a consultant, the system was never set up to answer the questions you ask most. That’s a configuration and definition problem you can fix without replacing the tool.

Why Won’t Our Team Use the CRM?

Adoption breaks when the CRM isn’t wired to how your team works, with no clear process or accountability behind it. People route around tools that make their jobs harder.

Is HubSpot Worth It for a Nonprofit?

We think so! It’s worth it when you build the lifecycle stages and reporting around it, and HubSpot’s nonprofit discount lowers the cost of entry. It gives you capability. Building the system is still your job. See our full guide to HubSpot for nonprofits for the details.

The post Nonprofit Marketing Doesn’t Have a Technology Problem. It Has a System Problem. appeared first on Big Sea.