8 must-have FREE resources for nonprofits
“Nonprofit” is a great way to describe how most nonprofits allocate their marketing budget: With little or no money.
While there’s a whole theory about why nonprofits absolutely should have a 20% marketing budget like for-profit organizations, we get it. You need to pinch pennies where you can.
Thankfully, there are plenty of free resources to help your nonprofit advertise, design, post, and otherwise promote your organization without paying a dime. Below are eight must-have free resources for nonprofits, start-ups, and any organization on a tight marketing budget.
Check out the bonuses at the end of each section to see how you can get a bigger bang by investing a few bucks!
Creative Market
Creative Market is a forward-thinking marketplace for designers, photographers, and, well…. Creatives. No need to post your query on Upwork or Fiverr, and no need to be concerned about how the freelancer is paying their bills for $5 per project.
At Creative Market, you’re buying directly from creatives, and the work is high-quality.
BUYING?! I thought you said free?
I did :)
Every month, Creative Market offers “The Drop,” where they pull together over $1,000 worth of content for subscribers, ranging from $19.95 - $99.95 a month.
BUT HERE’S THE KICKER.
Even if you don’t pay for a subscription, as long as you have an account, you can download four items from “The Drop” every week.
Assets range from fun fonts and photo effects to Canva templates for social media and presentations.
You literally have nothing to lose, and 16 assets a month to gain. Even if you don’t like or need the assets each week, it’s worth saving them. You never know when you’ll need them.
Basic Cost: Free!
Invest a lil: Starting at $19.95 a month, you get access to $1,000 worth of content each month, plus 1,995 credits to use on anything else you like on the site, PLUS 10% off.
Adobe Express
If we’re connected on LinkedIn, you’ve already heard me gush about this awesome platform.
It’s like Canva, but connects seamlessly with your other Adobe programs.
Not an Adobe subscriber? No problem! Adobe Express is available to everyone. All you need is to sign up for an account with Adobe to start creating and scheduling everything you could possibly need.
Right now, Adobe Express is in Beta, so you can access certain features without a subscription, like:
Defining your brand with logos, colors, and fonts that you can easily apply to any graphic with the tap of a button
Editable digital templates for social media posts, Instagram stories and reels, TikTok videos, YouTube thumbnails, and so much more
Editable print templates for posters, flyers, infographics, resumes, and worksheets.
My absolute favorite part is the scheduler! It’s similar to Meta Business Suite in that you can create, schedule, and publish posts at your leisure, but it expands to include Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn in addition to Facebook and Instagram.
Basic Cost: Free! With some features going away once no longer in Beta.
Invest a lil: If you subscribe to Adobe, Adobe Express will always be “free” for you. If you just want to subscribe to Adobe Express, it will be $9.99 a month.
Unsplash
Stock photos can be a pain to source, and sometimes the results are downright goofy.
Literally, who would ever need this? Thank you for your service, dog-frog.
With Unsplash, there’s millions of high-quality photos that you can use without attribution (but if you can subtly attribute, go for it).
This is a service I personally use when working with nonprofits to help keep the cost of services down. You can see it in action on the Homeless Care Council of Northwest Alabama Strategic Plan from my portfolio.
Being able to provide genuine, powerful, high-quality design is super reliant on visuals, of course, so having high-quality photos to match is a game-changer.
Basic Cost: Free!
Invest a lil: Unsplash+ is updated with exclusive photos each month, and starts at $12 a month ($7 a month if you pay for a year at a time).
Hemingway Editor
Copywriting is not everyone’s forte. It’s challenging to ensure things are written in a way that everyone in your audience can understand, especially when you’re already wearing several hats.
With Hemingway Editor, you can type your write-up (whether that’s a press release, social media captions, or meeting notes) directly in the website, then click over to Edit to watch the colors populate over your writing.
Hemingway Editor helps:
Remove adverbs, which are often used excessively (yeah, that’s an adverb);
Correct passive voice so that the content feels actionable to the reader;
Highlight simpler alternatives to certain words;
Let you know what sentences are hard and very hard to read so that you can revise; and
Tells you the readability by grade level.
You can also format your text within the app so it looks exactly how you want it to before you copy/paste.
Basic Cost: Free!
Invest a lil: You can pay $19.99 to download their desktop app, which doesn’t require Internet and can export directly to Wordpress and Medium, as well as providing HTML based on your formatting.
Grammarly
If Hemingway Editor is a bit basic for you and you feel like you need enough editing to your work that you don’t want to open the website all the time (or pay for the Desktop app), Grammarly is a fantastic option.
Download the software, and Grammarly will automatically correct your emails, Slack messages, documents in Google and Microsoft, and even social media.
It’s like having an editor over your shoulder 24/7 without the heavy breathing!
Grammarly will also send you mini-reports weekly or monthly to let you know how much you’re using the app, which is great for justifying your needs if you’re leaning towards investing in additional features.
Basic Cost: Free!
Invest a lil: You can invest $12-15 a month to get a ton more features, including clarity, engagement, delivery, and brand tones.
Vector and icon resources
Little icons and vectors are so cute, but the ones you use on Canva are starting to all look the same – and you’ve seen them on other people’s posts! Resources like Freepik, Vecteezy, and The Noun Project are cool, but you have to attribute!
It would be nice to have a free icon resource like the free photo resource you mentioned earlier….
There are! You just have to puzzle piece items together a little bit.
Here’s a list of a couple totally free, no attribution required sites for icons, people, and other vectors for your marketing:
unDraw – An open source platform created by artist Katerina Limpitsouni, there are hundreds of illustrations for you to use. Plus, if you click on the colored square at the top of the browse page, you can change the colors of all graphics to match your graphic standards.
IconStore – Another open source option, though the icon sets are a bit limited.
DrawKit – A lot of the items on this site require a “Pro” subscription, but you can find some nice vector graphics and even animations.
Basic Cost: Free!
Invest a lil: On this list, DrawKit is the only one where you can pay for a subscription; however, most vector and graphics websites like those mentioned in the initial paragraph of this section offer subscriptions starting at $7 a month.
What’s next?
If you’re trying to figure out what you do and don't need for your nonprofit or start-up organization, this is a great place to start. You can test out the features of the free versions, and if you find something works for you, you can invest in it.
Don’t have the money to invest but could benefit from the platforms? Reach out to me and I can either offer consultation or some of these services myself.
Important: You don’t have to sacrifice quality because you’re a nonprofit. And I’m here to make sure of that!
