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Attracting Attention

Branding is something that seems to stress nonprofit execs year after year after year. Branding? Isn't that more of a product thing?

Well, if you want to stand out from the other nonprofits out there and somehow rise above the other "noise" in the world, you have to work on branding your organization.

That branding thing could, and actually does, provide enough content for several peoples' blogs. This post merely serves to introduce the concept of branding and point at a cool marketing book.

The marketing book is Pop! Create the Perfect Pitch, Title, and Tagline for Anything by Sam Horn. Horn's book contains a bunch of lessons and techniques you could use to market your organization or a specific project or program. "Pop" is an acronym for Purposeful, Original, Pithy. The book is organized around lessons on how to be each of those things. The book wraps up with seven chapters on how to keep peoples' attention once you've got it.

Fundraising is marketing effort too. If you want to create a campaign with a theme, or an event with a theme, you will want to express that theme in a way that gets attention. If you are starting a new organization, you know that establishing a distinct image can be challenging. Yet, you have to do that if you want to get attention. The Purposeful, Original, and Pithy elements have their non-profit applications:

Purposeful - Horn presents a nine-step process for defining your audience, competition, and message. Some of the stuff is common sense if you have any background in marketing at all, but having everything organized and summarized (with a worksheet!) is nice.

Original - This is where the standing out from the crowd part takes over. How do you create a message that's orginal and compelling?

Pithy - How do you make the message short and memorable? The environmental mantra "reduce, reuse, recycle" is an example of the sort of thing you might come up with.

So, if you are having trouble marketing your NGO, your cause, or just a newly-launched program Sam Horn's book would be worth a read. Plenty of other marketing titles out there can help nonprofits too. I'll comments on some of those marketing books in future posts.
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