“How can marketing sync up with what fundraising is doing?” This isn’t a new question among nonprofit organizations I visit, but it most recently came from a social movement instead of a traditional nonprofit. The individual asking shared that marketing and fundraising were not always aligned on the message, the audience, and the call to action.

Let’s break down the situation to include other key strategy decisions needed as you tackle how to get marketing and fundraising in sync.

What we want to accomplish in the moment and near future

In their passion for long-term change, organization leaders sometimes forget the fundamental elements of what they’re trying to accomplish in the moment and the near term. Naturally, those leading marketing and fundraising efforts could state these goals from their own vantage points: how they are working on their area of responsibility’s stake in the movement’s larger goal. However, if the marketing and fundraising teams’ goals are not intentionally aligned from the beginning, movements and organizations find themselves challenged with awareness and fundraising campaigns that don’t support each other. Avoiding such a scenario starts with the leadership team determining how to define and measure success, including setting a critical near-term milestone that requires attention and awareness to lead to an opportunity to raise dollars. Only then can marketing and fundraising clearly and reliably know how they can collaborate toward achieving this (and subsequent) milestones.

Awareness leads to informed donors

Effective marketing campaigns generate awareness among audiences, both new and existing, who have yet to fully grasp an organization’s work. This requires awareness to be a coordinated marathon of building interest over time that generates greater engagement. In designing awareness campaigns, marketing leaders should ensure that they fit within the focus of the upcoming milestone and lead to new types and levels of participation and resources for the cause—which necessarily requires assessing how it sets up fundraisers for successful solicitations. Short-term vanity metrics (impression counts or reach numbers) from the campaign aren’t nearly as valuable as marketing and fundraising campaigns leading to each other—and ultimately supporting a larger strategy of generating awareness, informed constituents, and new donors.

Seamless journey from marketing to fundraising

From the audience’s viewpoint, an organization or movement’s communication efforts should seamlessly build from the target individual acquiring knowledge to donating. The key word here is “seamlessly.” A successful communication journey doesn’t speak about the issue, then extend a call to action with an expectation that’s too high, too soon. Great marketing is building engagement over time with coordinated (fundraising) asks for actions, participation, and donations based on the following:

1. The target individual indicates (as shown by data points such as video completion rates or time on website pages captured by the organization) they are generally consuming content.

2. The moment calls for an action that can produce a meaningful feedback loop about their participation (to be captured by the organization).

3. The information communicated is clear, concise, and consumable by an audience that has yet to fully realize whether your issue is relevant to them.

Following these rules, marketing and fundraising leaders can easily track how individuals move from general interest to being informed to participating and beyond. Consider the following approach for driving education to donation actions on the topic of climate change and heat.

• Awareness: At this stage, the educational content narrows to focus on existing knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the target audience. With climate change, for example, we could look at heat, given the current moment, the real-time effects, and its relevance broadly throughout the summer. In the first phase of awareness-building efforts, marketers should focus on creating “ways in” to draw in the target person to read more information. In this case, we could talk about how to handle a heatwave in your community. Creating a 15-second ad video about concrete steps for handling heat is a great awareness-building, actionable, and memorable first step.

• Information: Once the person is exposed to something they find relevant and informative for the particular moment, we can then tie in deeper knowledge and make connections between heat and the issue of climate change—with follow-up messaging such as “Do you need more information to talk with your family on how to cope with heat?” This simple feedback loop creates an opportunity for the audience to spread new information and internalize what they just learned and became aware of.

• Taking action: Once the person internalizes the easily consumable content and talks with loved ones about ways to deal with heat, you can make an ask that ties in to the direct resources they used and found relevant. A request for a small donation to support the development of more resources like this to help other families is a key component to build into the sequence of awareness, information, and, eventually, donation.

Entities in sync do not communicate to external audiences without both marketing and fundraising leaders knowing the outreach’s intent, outcome, and how it adds value to an organization’s overall goals of knowledge building among its constituency and resource attainment. This alignment on external communication protects against either audience-building or donor-building efforts being sacrificed for the other. Instead, it creates a collaborative push-and-pull system to achieve desired actions and gifts. An entity that works deliberately in silos will not achieve the harmony necessary for the individual on the receiving end of any communication to see themselves on your organization’s path to change.

Derrick Feldmann (@derrickfeldmann) is the founder of the Millennial Impact Project, lead researcher at Cause & Social Influence, and the author of The Corporate Social Mind. See Derrick’s related articles in Philanthropy News Digest, “Nurturing a community for the greatest impact” and “Creating symbiosis between marketing and advocacy.” He also is managing director, Ad Council Research Institute and the Ad Council Edge Strategic Consultancy.