10 Free & Affordable Marketing Tools for Nonprofits

Home repair nonprofits utilize marketing strategies to raise awareness about their mission, recruit volunteers, connect with donors, and collect home repair applications. Since many organizations have limited time and money for marketing, it’s important to put together effective marketing materials quickly and inexpensively.

Successful marketing campaigns utilize highly engaging visuals. Social media posts with pictures and videos are shared up to 230% more than those without. When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of it three days later. However, if the information includes a relevant image, people retained 65%.

Here are ten free and affordable tools that can help home repair nonprofits with marketing: 

• Canva offers its premium version free to nonprofits. It is a one-stop graphic design shop for non-graphic designers. Its drag-and-drop features and professional layouts enable users to easily design infographics, ebooks, Facebook ads, email headers and more. 

• Discover.ly is a free Chrome extension that connects social media info (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) to email contacts in Gmail.

• Pablo by Buffer enables social media managers to easily create inspirational quote and powerful stat images perfectly sized for social media. They offer a free plan. 

• Piktochart is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop infographic design tool with hundreds of simple graphics; it allows high-resolution image and PDF exports. Their nonprofit plan is $40/year. 

• Fiverr is the world's largest online marketplace for digital freelance services, beginning at $5 per job completed.

• Creation Swap is a tool for churches and faith-based organizations. Nonprofits can easily search and sort videos, photos, graphics, and audio. New users can download three images per month on the free account. 

• PhotoPin is a search engine for images on Flickr that are marked under the Creative Commons license, which allows for free use and modification as long as attribution is credited to the creator. 

• TextMagic allows organizations to craft personalized text messages, schedule and send out alerts. Check out the stories of their nonprofit customers in their case studies. Pay per outbound text only. 

• Klout is a free tool that measures influence on social media with a score. To check the influence of a Facebook Page (instead of a personal profile), connect to the organization's Twitter account first.

• Bloomerang is a free app from Instagram that allows nonprofits to easily make and share fun one-second animations. 

Now, test out some of these fun tools for our logo design contest; details below!

Conference Logo Design Contest 

This year, we are inviting ReFrame members to create our conference logo. Try your hand by using one of the tools mention in our blog! The winner will receive ReFrame swag and recognition at the conference. 

The 8th annual national conference for home repair nonprofits will be held November 8 & 9 in Kingsport, Tennessee. The conference theme is "Building for Success: Best Practices in Action." 

Submit your logo design(s) to info@reframeassociation.org by 12pm (noon) EDT on Tuesday, April 3rd. The design must include the text of the theme, and it should look good when scaled to a small size for letterhead. See our past conference logos on Facebook here and here.