Skip to main content

Questions to Guide Nonprofit Communication and Marketing

This is another post on how to improve communication, fundraising, and marketing. Questions are the focus today. Questions about communication, fundraising, and marketing are the beginning of good planning. This observation ties in with what I wrote about analytical thinking yesterday. To improve your efforts, or just get started with a plan you need to ask some questions. I'll just suggest some to use before you start something, or to evaluate ideas, or to make a decision about how to change course. When working on a new or revised communication plan, you'll want to be able to answer these questions: How have people been finding out about your organization? How does your audience prefer to get information about the organization? How much traffic does your Web site get? (Ditto for blog, Facebook, and so forth) You can easily set up an on-line poll using a survey tool like SurveyMonkey. I'll say more about online survey tools in a future post or posts. For now, it is enough to point out that on-line survey tools that integrate with email and Web sites do exist and might be helpful. In making or remaking a simple marketing plan, you'll want the answers to the above questions. You might also want to answer the following questions: What is the objective of this marketing effort? Who is the audience for this marketing effort? Which marketing channels (word-of-mouth, email, et cetera) are likely to give us the best return on our investment? You don't necessarily need professional market research or a big data collection effort here. Just do what's needed to have confidence in the answers; they will be the basis for some serious decisions about how to use the organization's resources. The post may seem like common sense to you experienced NGO people and volunteers. But did you know about the on-line survey tools? Do you have answers to all of those questions written down somewhere? If not, you now have something else to work on. In future posts, where I write about developing creative ways to solicit donations, generate earned income and stretch your resources the questions raised in this post will come up again. The habit of asking Who? What? Where? When? Why/ and How? will be referenced again and again as well. Get used to seeing more questions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using SWOT Analysis to Rev Up Your Fundraising

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy.  The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT.  Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts.  SWOT - A Quick Review This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps: Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social medi...
Post a Comment
Read more