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Is Your Marketing Effective?

A plan for reaching supporters, and staying in touch with them, has to be part of any nonprofit's strategic plan. That fact shouldn't be news to anyone in the nonprofit world. You probably know of plenty of ways that you could reach people. But, do you know how well your efforts are working? that is, do you know how much you are getting out of your efforts? If you do know, or can find out, then you can also figure out which communication tactics to keep, drop, or start using.

That's what this post is about...

How much are your current marketing efforts costing in time and money? Take a minute to write down everything you do to communicate with people. Make one line for each thing. Now record how much time and money has been invested in each. You can just use a monthly estimate, or estimate the investment for a one-time event.

Next, try to estimate the benefits. How much money was raised? How many names did you add to your mailing list? How much equipment, food, et cetera was donated? As you think about the answers to those questions you will get a better idea of what is working and what is not. I hope so anyway.

Do the same for each marketing effort that you've seriously thought about. How much time and labor would each effort require. Calculate the value of staff time and the number of labor hours needed. Volunteer labor hours need to be counted, because you could be using those volunteers for something else.

Sometimes you need to step away from an activity that seems to make sense but is really just costing too much time and money. Pretty much any fundraising or communication project needs to be thought about in that light.
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