Which Audience Should You Target In Your Community-Based Organization’s Online Content?

Just like businesses, community-based organizations need to identify a specific audience and continually demonstrate, through a wide range of content throughout their online platform, how they can serve that audience’s needs. If you’re creating content for a new website, crafting next month’s social media updates, or writing a public blog post, who should you be talking to? Your recipients, your donors, or your volunteers? Or all three?

Why is “audience” so confusing for a community-based organization?

Figuring out your audience is less straightforward for your CBO than for, say, a small business. Even though you both have similar marketing goals (identifying a problem and demonstrating how your work can solve it), the target of your message is very different.

A small business creates products or delivers services to the same audience that’s paying for them, so it’s easy to profile an “ideal client” and center all marketing language on that specific group of people.

A CBO is dependent on donations and government funding—a completely separate audience than the people you’re serving. The difference between the two can feel like a pretty deep chasm when you’re crafting content.

A typical CBO has to reach at least three audiences—the people receiving services, the donors who financially support those services, and the volunteers who make the services possible—all at the same time. To make things more complicated, within each audience there are sub-audiences: the individual donor, the foundation, and the government agency; independent adults, families, and school groups, for instance, who all receive different types of services; individual volunteers who show up weekly as well as groups who organize a once-yearly group volunteer activity. It’s tricky to figure out what message will speak to all of them at once.

Should you prioritize one audience over another?

It depends on what you’re writing. Perhaps one blog post, featuring the work of one of your employees, is meant to increase individual donations for a particular program. You’d want to use language aimed at the individual donor. 

Perhaps you’re designing a new brochure that partner service agencies can share with potential recipients. That language would be aimed at the people you serve.

If you need volunteers for an upcoming event, you might send out an email just to people who have volunteered with you in the past. That language would, of course, be directed toward your volunteers.

But it gets thornier when you create content for the general public. Who should you speak to on your website’s Home page? 

What audience should you have in mind when you’re creating an Instagram or Facebook post?

What if you need an all-purpose brochure, intended to be an overview of your organization—one that will cost a lot to print and that you’ll use for years to come? Who is the target audience for that important piece of marketing? 

For most CBOs, general content should be addressed to service recipients rather than donors or volunteers. Unless your organization solely exists to raise funds for a cause, talk to the people you serve.

Why should general content address your recipients?

In one phrase: Because people who donate time or money to your work want to be part of something. Addressing recipients calls all would-be participants into the work you’re doing.

A donor doesn’t want to be the center of the story. They want to be part of the story. They want to see what you’re doing, meet the people doing and benefiting from your work, and celebrate the many ways you make life better for people, the community, and the world. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean you never address your donors or volunteers directly. Your website should have a robust Donate or Get Involved page with plenty of donor-centric language and clear calls to volunteer. And you can include plenty of calls-to-action via social media with specific requests for donations and volunteer hours. 

But the overall goal is to call people into your work, not make it sound like asking for their involvement is your work.