5 QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN USING MARKETING TO GROW YOUR NON-PROFIT

March 31, 2014

by Natalie Henry Bennon  — springtalestrategies@gmail.com

Originally published as a guest blog at Poisner Strategic Consulting.

Marketing gets a bad rap. And sometimes it’s deserved. I don’t like being told I need a new thing when really I don’t.

And yet, marketing is key to successful for-profit businesses. Non-profits have finally taken notice. Some are hiring marketing staff. Some have shifted budgets from media relations to marketing and social media. Others are hiring marketing firms under contract.

Whatever your non-profit growth challenge, here are five questions to ask in determining how marketing can help your non-profit grow:

1)    What are your measurable goals?

This could be: We want to attract 1,000 new members in 2014. Your marketing goals could also be recruiting new volunteers or board members; retaining members, volunteers, or board members; or raising awareness and attention to your issue.

2)    Who is your target audience?

Let’s assume you are trying to recruit more members, and you know you want younger and more diverse members. Your target audience might be women and men between the ages of 20 and 35 making $30,000 to $55,000 per year. It may help to give this person a real name and picture and persona. Think about what s/he does for a living and for fun.

For example, let’s say you are creating a marketing plan for The Sierra Club. They want to recruit more members. This might be a useful target audience persona:

Meet Chris. He is 28, works at a company that manufactures solar panels, buys mostly organic food, and has in the past volunteered at his local beach cleanup. He likes to ski, hike and cook.

3)    What is your value proposition?

For this, it’s helpful to actually define the difference between marketing, branding, advertising and sales. For non-profits, Arizona State University’s Lodestar Center for 

Philanthropy defines “marketing” as a process that brings about the voluntary exchange of values (as opposed to goods) between a non-profit organization and its target market. For example, it could be a transfer of a donation in exchange for addressing a social need.

What value is your audience getting? A value proposition helps you articulate this.  It names your target audience, what you want them to do, what benefits they will receive, and why.

Keeping with the Sierra Club example, here is a specific example: When you donate to the Sierra Club, you get peace of mind that your money is going toward proven, effective environmental advocacy that will help provide clean air and water, improve human health, and protect wildlife and wild places.

4)    What is your position in the marketplace?

Now it’s time to consider your competition. Non-profits don’t always like to call it competition, because we don’t actually want other groups doing important work to fail. But you are competing for members and volunteers. So what is your position in the marketplace? How are you different than other non-profits? A positioning map can help with this.

For example, the Sierra Club engages in advocacy, lobbying, and litigation. The club works nationally, but also has local chapters, and even some international programs. Compared to other international environmental non-profits, it positions itself as more reasonable than Greenpeace, which is very confrontational, but more aggressive than The Nature Conservancy, which is less confrontational in its tactics.

A non-profit’s position in the marketplace will help establish trust from different audiences. Moreover, a non-profit’s positioning, combined with it’s value proposition and its target audience, help non-profit managers make a cascade of other strategic decisions including messaging, partnerships and how to get the message to the audience.

5)    How will you reach your audience?

Where do they spend time? What do they like to do? If you are aiming for the 20-35 year olds in my example, I think the things they are doing are trying to build a career, and find a mate. So perhaps the Sierra Club would offer professional networking events, or young and social volunteering and hiking events. The club might also create a community online where young people engage with Sierra Club actions. The club could also become a news and action resource for all the things this age group cares about regarding the environment (this is a kind of content marketing).

My number one advice: don’t just answer these questions in your head. If your non-profit has plans to grow, try drafting a marketing plan that identifies at least one quantifiable growth goal.

Start today.  What is one goal for your non-profit’s growth? Leave a comment below.

Natalie Henry Bennon’s consulting firm Springtale Strategies specializes in non-profit marketing, media relations, and grant writing. You can email her at

springtalestrategies@gmail.com

The new earned media

Earned media is defined less and less by placements in traditional print, radio or TV news, and more and more by direct contact with supporters via social media. Likes, Comments, Shares, Retweets -- these are the new earned media. Yet the more things change, the more they stay the same because both kinds are, at their core, about cultivating relationships.

 The first step toward developing an effective social media presence will feel familiar: set goals. If you are a non-profit, at least one goal might be to raise more money, or increase membership. One of the first steps toward raising more money and increasing membership is to raise awareness. Social media can help with that. It can also help organizations reach a younger audience to build the pipeline of donors -- if one is willing to play the long game.

The next step is to identify strategic audiences, and the platforms that they spend time on. Is it Facebook? Twitter? Tumblr? Pinterest? Do your research and choose one or two to start with.

Objectives are incremental steps to help you reach your overall goals. Your objectives might include posting one or twice a day; achieving an average number of shares for every post; reaching a certain number of followers; increasing click-throughs to your website by 10 percent; etc. To determine if you are meeting your objectives, you must be willing to monitor and measure your efforts. If you want traffic on your website, make sure it is mobile compatible since most people are accessing social media on mobile devices.

Starting a blog can help you have regular content to promote via social media, but only if you have the staff capacity to maintain one. And finally, nobody likes to listen to someone who talks about themselves all the time.

Some experts recommend a 60-30-10 rule: 60 percent of posts should share other content, 30 percent conversations, and 10 your own content/events/campaigns. This may not be the perfect breakdown for every organization, but consider what your ideal breakdown is, then keep tabs to see if it is working. If not, go back and try something else.

 That is the great thing about social media. It is ephemeral. Fleeting. A great place to try new things, measure, and if it's not working, try something else. Be fearless.

Internal Communications

Every organization, no matter how large or how small, usually could stand to devote more attention to internal communications. Okay, if you're a one-person shop, maybe you don't need to. But everyone else, you should think about it. If you consider your clients, investors, and customers all stakeholders, but not your employees, you are ignoring a key audience.

Essentially you can think of internal communications as participatory media with your employees. You need to consider your audience and the media most appropriate for them, you need them to participate, and you need to listen. If you are open and communicative and listen to them, they will be happier, they will contribute more and work harder for the organization, they will be more likely to stick around, and it will be easier to harness their resources during times of organizational change. In fact, when your organization is undergoing any kind of significant change, internal communications can make you or break you.

So it seems logical that companies would devote time and resources to internal communications, right? Yet historically, internal communications has not been valued as much as external communications, such as advertising and marketing.

It is fairly simple to get started, but as with any communications endeavor, it is hard to keep it going without a plan. Sometimes it is also difficult to decide which department in an organization might be responsible for internal communications. Communications? Marketing? Human Resources? As with any communications or marketing effort, it is important to have a plan, determine who is responsible for executing the plan, and... measure your results.

Does your organization have an internal communications plan? Perhaps something as simple as a closed Facebook or Twitter group? What metrics do you use for measuring your internal communications progress?

For 60 years, waiting for the freedom to marry

I ghostwrote the following piece published in Street Roots newspaper on behalf of the Oregon United for Marriage campaign. A few short weeks later, Eugene passed away. May he rest in peace. Theirs is a beautiful love story, and it highlights the inequalities LGBTQ couples face.

by Eugene Woodworth | 26 Dec 2013

For 60 years, waiting for the freedom to marry

 

Click to view larger

Eugene (left) and his partner, Eric, have been together for six decades, waiting for the state of Oregon to allow them to marry.

Photo by Natalie Henry Bennon

Eugene Woodworth passed away Dec. 21. He was 85 years old. Before he died, he wrote this piece for Street Roots about his dream of marriage equality in Oregon.

When I first met Eric, I got cold all over and couldn’t move. It felt like destiny: I’d just met the person I was going to spend the rest of my life with. We both knew we were gay, even though we didn’t have a word for it, and we both knew, deep down, that we were OK with our identities.
That was 60 years ago, and we’ve been a couple ever since. Now in our 80s, we’re still waiting to have the freedom to marry in Oregon, but our time is running short. I have congestive heart failure. In the last four months, my energy has plummeted. My doctor estimates I have 12 months to live.
We’d like to marry before I die, but travelling to Washington is an onerous journey for someone who can barely walk a block. Nobody should be told it is illegal to marry the person they love, and it saddens me that Oregon is the last state on the West Coast that doesn’t allow same-sex couples to marry. I’m doing my best to change that, and I hope you will get involved with Oregon United for Marriage as well.

My relationship with Eric has a long history. That first day we met, we went to a friend’s party, and then went out afterward. The waitress in the restaurant said, “Are you twins?” “Yes,” we said. We used that cover for decades. It was an intuitive thing. In hindsight, it was also an affirmation. Everyone would ask us, “Are you twins?” or “Are you brothers?” It was like they knew there was something deeper between us. They knew we were family. At the time, the safest way to refer to each other in public was as brothers. It protected us, while also affirming our love, commitment and sense of family.

Coming to Portland also felt like destiny. We were riding the train down from Seattle. When we passed Longview and crossed into Oregon, we started feeling at home. Within a few minutes, we were thinking, “we really like this place. And we weren’t even in Portland yet. When we did get off the train, we just felt at home. That was 1955. Portland was much more conservative then, but it was safer than Chicago.

Everybody lives in a closet. And you’ve got to discern what that closet is and get out of it so you can live a full life, rather than one of partial secrecy. We didn’t come out of the closet until 1977. Eric was Catholic. He had even spent several years in a monastery before we met. I converted. And a rogue Franciscan friar married us right here in our living room, with friends looking on. There was even an article in The Oregonian. It felt like an enormous step, to come out, to admit that this man was not my brother but my husband, and to stop leaving him at home the night of the office holiday party. It wasn’t a marriage sanctioned by church or state, but it mattered to us.

In 1993, we were married again. We had both converted to Buddhism, and we were married at the Dharma Rain Center in southeast Portland. Ten years later, we publicly renewed our vows again. And each time we got up in front of our loving friends to publicly state our love and commitment to each other, it mattered. But it also mattered that they were not legally recognized weddings.

Being married says something to others about our aspirations in relation to another human being. Marriage says “family” in a way no other word does. That social recognition is extraordinarily powerful, and marriage would help Eric and me to have the protections and responsibilities we need to take care of each other.

I never get tired of waking up next to Eric, listening to him, watching him or feeling his hand squeeze my shoulder as he passes by. I felt when I met him that it was the first day of the rest of my life. I hope that some day soon, all Oregonians will have the freedom to marry.

To get involved with Oregon United for Marriage, go to www.OregonUnitedForMarriage.org.

My laptop's connection to war

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like now if the Cold War had never happened?

As World War II spurred U.S. military funding for aviation, the Cold War spurred military funding for computers. The military and military contractors developed computer graphics, virtual images, word processing, cutting and pasting, the use of separate windows, hypertext, computer conferencing, and even the mouse -- and, of course, the first Internet. The U.S. military was the first to embrace computers as communication devices rather than simply complex calculators. And that has made all the difference. That alone has completely shaped my and your daily experiences.

No cell phones. No laptops. No sensors in my washing machine to know when to stop adding water. No bluetooth in my car. And if you work in a hospital, imagine all the computerized equipment you would have to do without.

Without the Cold War, I don't think you'd be reading this right now. I love these advances. But the fact that our modern lifestyle is so intrinsically tied to war blows my mind a little. Does it blow yours? What else would we be different now?