Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

How Do You Say “Marketing” In Nonprofit?

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Marketing.  It sounds so commercial, doesn’t it?  But don’t be put off by the term.  Your nonprofit organization can steal marketing secrets and use them for a good cause.

Handheld translatorMarketing  is business-speak for “communications with a purpose.”  Your purpose may be to improve public health, enhance democracy, end hunger or homelessness, or enhance people’s lives through the arts.  Whatever it is, s long as you tailor your communications to a purpose, you’re doing marketing, and you can look for ways to do it better.

Strategy means keeping your purpose in mind and letting it direct your activities and the way you use your time.  It means knowing how you will approach your goal and not making it all up on the fly.

So what is marketing strategy? For businesses, the term means:

An organization’s strategy that combines all of its marketing goals into one comprehensive plan. A good marketing strategy should be drawn from market research and focus on the right product mix in order to achieve the maximum profit potential and sustain the business.

How do we say that in nonprofit?

  • Market research for nonprofits is however you get to know and love your audience. Depending on your organization. your research could be hiring an outside professional to conduct surveys and focus groups–or going through your files and asking your staff and Board members what they know.
  • Product mix is the services and benefits you offer.  When you know and love your audience, you figure out what they need.
  • Instead of profit, you aim to maximize good outcomes for the people you serve.  You can only do that if they know about your services and use them.
  • But you still need to sustain the business.  And unlike a for-profit business, you can’t count on the people who use your services to pay for them.  So, “sustaining the business” means raising funds from donors, foundations, corporations, and government, or through events or sales, to pay for what you really are “in business” to do: your mission.

Let’s put it all together.  When you develop a marketing strategy, you are making a commitment.  You are promising that everyone inside your organization will know whom you are trying to serve, what will help them, how you are providing that help, and what difference it makes.  The people who use your services and the people and institutions that pay for them will know that too.  All your communications will help you convey that message, and your programs will help you make it reality.

Make that commitment and keep to it.  That’s how you say “marketing” in nonprofit.

Nonprofits, Start with the Experts Who Speak Your Language

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So you’ve decided your nonprofit organization needs to improve its communications.  You go online looking for advice.  What do you find?  Most of what’s written about communications (outside of this blog!) is aimed at for-profit businesses.  And there’s a lot of it.  How do you sort through the advice available to find what you can use right away?

Here’s the secret: start with the experts who speak your language.

Speak the same language

Speak the same language

You’ll find there are three kinds of articles about marketing and communications:

  1. Some are written for businesses but could equally well apply to nonprofits, with just a little translation.
  2. Some articles assume that you’re in business to make money and that all your decisions (including what you do and whom you serve) will change as the market changes.  Reading these articles is like looking at yourself in a distorting mirror.  It will take time and effort to make a picture you can recognize, let alone gain advice you can use.
  3. Some articles are entirely concerned with for-profit business problems and solutions.

Discard the #3’s.  File the #2’s for later.  Start with the #1’s.

What does it sound like when a communications pro speaks your language?  For example, take a look at Ken Mueller’s article “The Importance of Telling and Retelling Your Story.”  It makes its point in straightforward English, without a lot of jargon: you need to make sure the image people have of your organization is the image you’d like them to have.

This is why it’s important for a business to tell its story online. And to keep telling it. Not only does it tell people who you are, but it also corrects misinformation and tells them who you aren’t. In fact, every blog post, every status update, every photo, and so on, is a part of telling your story.

Just insert “nonprofit” for “business,” and you’ll hear advice that applies to you.  Look for more advice like that.  It will save you time and grief.

TY Thursday: Actions Thank Louder than Words

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Action speaks louderAre you trying to come up with more and better ways to thank your donors? Sometimes, what you need is not a new and improved thank-you letter, video, gift, or donor appreciation event.

Sometimes you just have to give the donors what they want.

What do the donors want?

Tom Ahern, the dean of donor communications, says the content donors want is the answers to the questions, “What did you do with the money I gave you? What difference did it make?” And they want the joy of feeling they have helped make the world a better place.

Take Tom’s advice and you’ll know what to put in your newsletter (and on your website, and on your social media)–and what to leave out. Put in stories about real people whose lives are better “because you helped.”

Everything else–the grant you got, the award your Executive Director won, the amount of money you have to raise before your fiscal year end–is what you should leave out. Unless you can find a way to present it so that your donors feel great about themselves! Then, include it. But check with some actual donors first!

Kivi Leroux Miller, who’s always both practical and inspiring, says donors want giving to be easy–and after they give, they want you to know who they are.

Take Kivi’s advice. Giving can be easy if your website has a good landing page and if once they give, you immediately acknowledge the gift (so they know “it worked!”)

Knowing who your donors are is so vital, and yet so neglected! “It’s amazing how little many nonprofits can tell you about their donors beyond their giving history, and that makes good marketing and fundraising tough,” Kivi says. If you know what your donors care about–including interests that don’t seem at first to touch on your mission–you can send communications that make them feel “This was written just for me.”

Joe Garecht, The Fundraising Authority, says donors want non-reciprocated value. In other words, be generous to them, too! Don’t just trade return address labels for a donation.

Take Joe’s advice. Find ways to be helpful to your donors, without expecting anything in return, “such as when you come across two donors who might find value in working together in their businesses, and offer to set up and attend a lunch meeting to introduce them.”

Customer service is the best thank you.

People in business know that their customers’ experience with them is reason those customers come back–or don’t. No amount of advertising can overcome a customer’s interaction with an employee who is rude, inattentive, poorly informed, or just plain unhelpful.

For nonprofit organizations, donors are our customers. Yes, they are “buying” services for other people–our clients! But customer service is still the key to seeing those donors again. Let’s put it in terms that fit the nonprofit sector:

The best way to thank your donors: think about what matters to the donor--and give it to them. Share on X

What have you done for your donors that they will remember with a smile?

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