Build Your Club · User Guide

Marketing
User Guide

Plan, execute, and measure every marketing channel — campaigns, events, member journey, partnerships, social media, press, board justifications, and a polished annual marketing plan.

Campaigns Events Personas Email Sequences Annual Plan

1. About This Tool

A working marketing operations platform purpose-built for small-staff nonprofits. Most marketing tools assume a dedicated team — this one assumes you're the executive director squeezing marketing in between a board meeting and a grant deadline.

Everything lives in one place: campaigns, events, personas, messaging, email sequences, collateral, social media, press kit, board justifications, event playbooks, and an annual marketing plan generator that pulls it all together.

↑ Back to top

2. Getting Started

Demo: demo@example.org / demo — populated with example campaigns, two personas, sample email sequences, and a marketing calendar.

Where to start

  1. Set up Personas (Library → Personas) — who are you actually trying to reach?
  2. Write your Messaging Pillars — your 3-5 elevator pitches by audience
  3. Create your first Campaign — pick a real upcoming push (annual appeal, gala, awareness month)
  4. Build out the Member Journey — what does a first-time visitor experience over their first 90 days?
↑ Back to top

3. Campaigns, Events & Calendar

Campaigns

The unit of marketing work. Each captures objective, audience, channels, tactics, KPIs, timeline, owner, and budget.

Campaign Detail

Open any campaign to drill into tactics, channel mix, success metrics, asset list, and post-mortem.

Events

Galas, open houses, ribbon cuttings, volunteer days. Each event captures date, venue, expected attendance, marketing plan, run-of-show.

Calendar

A unified marketing calendar showing campaigns + events on one timeline.

↑ Back to top

4. Member Journey & Partnerships

Member Journey

The end-to-end experience your audience has with your organization, from first awareness to long-time supporter. Map out touchpoints by stage (Awareness → Interest → Decision → Action → Retention → Advocacy).

Partnerships

Track every meaningful relationship — corporate sponsors, media partners, peer nonprofits, influencers. Each entry captures partner contact, agreement terms, deliverables, status.

↑ Back to top

5. Org-Wide Libraries

Personas

Detailed profiles of your target audiences. Each persona captures demographics, motivations, channels, pain points, key messages. Drives audience selection in every campaign.

Messaging Pillars

Your 3-5 core messages by audience. Reusable across campaigns and channels.

Email Sequences

Reusable autoresponder flows — welcome series, donor cultivation, lapsed-donor reactivation, event-prep, post-event thank-you.

↑ Back to top

6. Collateral, Social, Press & More

Library views for the supporting marketing assets:

  • Collateral — brochures, one-pagers, presentations, brand kit
  • Social Media — channel inventory, posting cadence, content pillars
  • Press — press kit, media list, recent coverage tracker
  • Board Justifications — pre-built arguments for tough budget conversations ("Why we need to invest in marketing")
  • Event Playbooks — step-by-step run-of-show templates for gala, volunteer day, ribbon cutting, etc.
↑ Back to top

7. Build Annual Marketing Plan

The capstone: a polished annual marketing plan (HTML preview + .docx download) that pulls together campaigns, personas, messaging, calendar, and budget into a single board-ready document.

Best practice: build the plan once a year (Q4 of the prior year), then update quarterly. The Generator does the busywork — you do the strategy.

↑ Back to top

Administrator Access

The sign-in screen has an Administrator Access link below the Sign In button. Use it to sign in as Administrator with just a password — no email needed. This is a per-browser admin role; the password is stored only on the current computer.

  • First time: Click Administrator Access. You'll see a "First-time setup" prompt with two password fields — enter a password (6+ characters) and confirm it. Click Create Admin Password.
  • Subsequent times: Click Administrator Access, enter that same password, and click Enter Admin Panel.
  • Once signed in as Administrator, you'll land on the dashboard with full admin privileges, including the Admin page in the sidebar (visibility into all teams, users, and activity stored in this browser).
  • Click ← Back to regular sign-in at the bottom of the admin panel to return to the normal email/password form.

Note: the admin password is unique to each browser. If you set it up at home and then visit the app on a work computer, you'll see the first-time-setup prompt again. To grant admin access on a new machine, register a regular user account or set up a fresh admin password there.

↑ Back to top

Contact & Support

For questions, feedback, or feature requests, contact the Build Your Club Academy team at support@buildyourclub.org. We update these tools regularly — check back for new features.

↑ Back to top