Skip to main content

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Powerful Nonprofit Planning Tool 4

Complexity is the subject of the day. You know your organization operates in a complex social environment. Lots of things are happening with the economy, local government, other nonprofits and other elements of the community. This time around I want to make one more visit to that table showing the seven dimensions of a nonprofits environment. To review, the seven dimensions are cultural, demographic, ecological, economic, legal, political, and technological. Each dimension has an element of complexity, or the number of elements and their interactions. A town with many different religious and ethnic groups mixing has lots of demographic complexity relative to a community that’s mainly white and Christian. That’s information that you might be able to use in planning, both to look for potential problems and potential opportunities. Complexity in each of those seven dimensions should raise some questions about your organization’s future. Some of those questions may lead to unpleasant answe...
Post a Comment
Read more