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Five Common Misunderstandings About
Nonprofit Marketing
Marketing became part of the nonprofit world's lexicon during the
1990's, but many Board of Directors and staff decision-makers admit
they aren't confident that they really know what it means.
This occurs in large nonprofits as well as smaller ones. When the
American Red Cross completed its first year of a "market positioning
project" in the mid-90's, a quick poll of chapter executives
captured an array of definitions of marketing. Many of them will be
familiar to other nonprofit leaders:
- "It's TV, radio, newspapers – letting people know what
we're about."
- "It's fundraising...getting there first."
- "It's selling ourselves."
- "It's letting people know about the services we deliver."
One savvy chapter executive had a broader definition: "It's our
image, publicity, the knowledge the public has about our products
and services. It's asking the public what would be helpful, developing
products in response and delivering them, and then going out and finding
how we're doing."
That layman's definition is better than some academic ones. A careful
reading of it will keep most organizations from these five common
misunderstandings about nonprofit marketing.
- Marketing is today's term for fundraising.
Perhaps your organization gets income from an affinity card and
has a corporate sponsor for your annual conference – as well as
the usual revenue producers such as membership dues, foundation
grants, and publication sales. Does this mean you are marketing?
Not necessarily – though it does mean you are diversifying your
income sources.
Although increased revenue is often a beneficial outcome of successful
nonprofit marketing, it is a mistake to think of marketing simply
as an updated way of talking about fundraising.
- Marketing means publicity, especially in the news media.
Greater public visibility, through news media exposure and other
means, is sometimes an important element of marketing. But it
is only one element. It is important to remember that successful
marketing can occur in the absence of getting the organization's
name in the newspaper.
- Marketing is selling people your programs.
Wrong. Marketing is selling people their programs, the ones that
meet their needs. One reason the marketing orientation is so hard
to inculcate into the nonprofit culture is because it turns on
its head the familiar nonprofit orientation of knowing what someone
needs without ever asking him.
Marketing is based on asking people – some nonprofits say customers
– what they want and delivering it within the confines of organizational
mission and goals. Few nonprofits are oriented that way. Most
were started by visionaries who, acting on perceived but often
unarticulated needs of a population, were able to package a program
to meet those needs. The very packaging helped the population
understand its need and articulate it. However, past the visionary
start-up phase, "knowing what the client needs" is an
unproductive attitude because it blinds an organization to the
necessity of asking what he or she needs.
- Marketing is about messages, not programs and services.
Wrong again. Marketing is not just the message an organization
conveys, it is also the program that it delivers. Any plan that
does not evaluate the relevance of an organization's current crop
of programs and services to its intended clientele is not a marketing
plan. It may be a public relations plan, a fundraising strategy,
a membership drive, or something else – but it is not a marketing
plan.
- We're not having fundraising problems, so we don't need
marketing.
Marketing is a process of linking people with needs and people
who can meet those needs. In the nonprofit world, it may involve
an exchange of money or it may not. A marketing plan can be developed
for recruiting more volunteers or volunteers with different skills.
One can be developed for recruiting more clients to the programs.
One could even be developed for establishing relationships with
government policy-makers.
I use this decidedly non-academic definition of marketing with many
clients because it helps them see the broader applicability of this
discipline: marketing is putting the right information into the hands
of the right people to get them to take the action you want them to
take.
This definition is a working tool for developing a marketing approach.
To use it, start at the end of the sentence and work back to the beginning.
The questions to answer, in order, are these:
- What is our goal? What do we want to have happen? (Action)
- Who can make this happen? Who must take action? (The "right
people" constitute the target audience.)
- What will motivate them to take that action? (The "right
information" is the persuasive message, based on their self-interest.)
- What are the most effective ways to reach them? ("Putting"
the information in the hands of the audience is the delivery system.)
This definition is easy to understand and should be easy to use. It
is often hard to use, however, because boards and executives veer
off from their area of expertise – knowing what the organization's
goal is – and spend their time discussing everything else. In fact,
once organizational leaders define what they want to have happen,
marketing professionals should be brought in to help identify target
audiences, design messages, and select appropriate delivery systems.
However, marketing professionals cannot make the fundamental decision:
what specific action the organization wants to promote. As in so many
areas of nonprofit management, this decision is the essential first
step in developing a marketing strategy.
©Rebecca K. Leet. Adapted from an article in Strategic Governance
for Nonprofit Executives and Boards, July 1995. |
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