How nonprofits can benefit from media monitoring

29 Jun 2020

Industry Insights
Nonprofits are able to grow faster and make a difference more effectively when they make decisions backed by solid data and metrics: Enter media monitoring.

Media monitoring essentially helps these organisations understand their audiences. This is done by displaying discussions surrounding key issues, helping them to measure the public opinion surrounding audience conversations and to record trends in those mentions. 

Utilising media monitoring also enables nonprofit organisations to see which content performs the best, which channels of communication are the most effective and what inspires people to volunteer or donate to their cause. 

Want to know more?

Let’s take a look at the three ways media monitoring can benefit your nonprofit:

1. You can monitor a broader range of issues

When it comes to media monitoring, most brands focus on just tracking mentions of their organisation. This, however, just scratches the surface of the insight you can gain from this service. 

Media monitoring enables your brand to delve deeper into broader issues relating to your cause, as well as your competitors. 

As you are tracking specific keywords, you are given insight into audience conversations surrounding your nonprofit. This allows you to gain insight into any updates or breaking news relating to your cause, to identify any pertinent crises that your organisation can help with and establish goals for upcoming campaigns. 

Nonprofits are also able to gain insight into their competitors though competitor monitoring. This is an additional feature to media monitoring that assesses the performance of their media presence compared to their competitors’.

2. It assists in building customer relations

Media monitoring helps nonprofits to better understand their audience’s needs, allowing them to make more informed decisions when it comes to their services, marketing and campaigns. 

As a charitable organisation, this audience insight can also help you see what attracts consumers to a cause and what inspires them to donate

By using these services, organisations are able to improve their customer service as it identifies consumers that are seeking help — enabling the nonprofit to respond in a timeous manner.

If your nonprofit had to utilise keyword monitoring services, this would enable them to search for specific keywords like your brand/product name, industry specific keywords or the names of campaigns across all types of media. This will help the nonprofit get on top of any complaints or queries. 

Continuing in the vein of customer service, media monitoring services also help nonprofits to easily extract customer feedback.  As customers often discuss products and services in the media (be it on social media or forums) extracting this information can give these organisations suggestions on how they can improve their service. 

3. Monitoring allows you to increase awareness 

Media monitoring helps nonprofits to raise awareness for their cause by:
  • measuring public awareness about your cause
  • dictating what content your audience is most receptive to
  • determining which channels of communication audiences are likely to engage with
  • measuring sentiment around key issues, and
  • tracking trends in brand mentions.
The above insight enables the nonprofit organisations to market their brand effectively to their existing audience and to position itself to attract new consumers — thus increasing brand awareness. 

Nonprofits can use the insight that they gain from media monitoring to increase awareness by centering their marketing and content on key trends and issues. 

Additionally, the information that organisations gather from these services also helps them to identify relevant influencers, donors and business partners that can assist in building their brand. 

Now that you know how media monitoring benefits nonprofits, take a look at why Media monitoring is a necessity, not a luxury.