Loud & Clear - Successfully Marketing your Nonprofit

Editor's Notes

• #5: In other words, nonprofit marketing effects the whole enterprise while keeping focused on the stakeholder’s.
• #6: What really differentiates marketing is the focus on the customer.
• #7: This means success will come to that organization that best determines the perceptions, needs and wants of target markets and satisfies them through the design, communication, pricing and delivery of appropriate and competitively viable offerings.
• #9: I suggest goals should be long term. Don’t see marketing as a quick fix. Well stated goals will lead to positive marketing initiatives. Communications goal might be “Build awareness, increase understanding and motivate
• #10: You should always develop communications goals to support your organizational goals. Why? Communications provides the means to get the message out to your target audiences to promote and support and ensure success at implementing your customer-motivated benefits.
• #11: An important and often overlooked step in creating a strategic marketing plan is evaluating internal, market, and external conditions. Knowing and understanding the environment in which a nonprofit is operating is critical to its success. Internal conditions include such things as values, skills, staff, systems, and structures. Market conditions include the funding climate, a comparative analysis of other organizations, and the organizational niche or distinctive competence. Further, an organization must understand the external conditions in which it is working. External factors include social, cultural, technological, ecological, economic, and political factors.
• #16: A CAS should be supported by resources & skills/capabilities. It should be employed in a market that contains market segments that will value the advantage. It should face up to your competitors. And, it needs to be supported by your organization’s strengths & qualities.
• #17: Market segmentation is done by dividing the whole into definable parts to identify, name, and describe these pieces in a way that makes sense for an organization. Typically, the market is segmented by demographics— by age, gender, and education. It is also useful to segment the market by psychographics—values, attitudes, and lifestyles. One tool for thinking about the market in a more useful way is to ask, “How does the potential audience relate to x?” with “x” being the organization’s cause or issue.
• #18: Market Segmentation identifies and drills down on whom you provide services.
• #19: Example, We held town hall meetings to access and rank the services for a senior services agency that supported centers and meals on wheels in 6 locations. We invited agency partners, e.g., county government & funders. We learned a lot about needs being met & not met. Varied depending on the demographics of each area as well as the behavioral, cultural and psychosocial differences of the clients.
• #20: Be sure and get a mix of clients. If you only go to the best clients your results will be skewed.
• #22: Who are some of the stakeholders or publics for your nonprofit? All audiences are stakeholders (or presumptive stakeholders), but not all stakeholders are audiences. For example, if a charity commissions a public relations agency to create an advertising campaign to raise money to find a cure for a disease, the nonprofit and the people with the disease are stakeholders, but the audience is anyone who is likely to donate money.
• #26: A positioning statement is a tight, focused description of the core target audience to whom a brand, is directed, and it provides a compelling picture of how the nonprofit wants its targeted audiences to view them . A well-constructed positioning statement brings focus and clarity to the development of a marketing strategy and tactics.
• #28: Programs are your most profound way to distinguish yourself in the market. Nonprofit audiences want and need substance behind a promise or message. They look closely at what an organization is doing to determine
• #29: Also known as the Four P’s. Although marketing is many things an impacts all aspects of a nonprofit, it can usually be broken down into the 4 P’s.
• #33: A service is an intangible product involving a deed, performance, or an effort that cannot be physically possessed. Dominant component is intangible. Major differences between goods and services are: Intangibility Inventory--over/under booking restaurant capacity Inseparability--of production and consumption Inconsistency/Consistency