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

9 Ways Cognitive Bias Undermines Social Change Efforts

This is going to be the first of many posts on how cognitive bias might undermine social change efforts. Yeah, I know. I will do my best to keep this concrete and interesting. A number of quirks in how our brains work might lead to mistaken judgments in many areas relevant to social change: problem analysis, strategy, program design, and advocacy. Maybe fundraising. Taking effective action on a certain problem is what activists want to do, so we'll come back to fundraising later. 1.Confirmation bias may cause us to look for reasons why a certain strategy or tactic is the right one. Supportive evidence gets woven into the narrative, lending support to the need for more education for women or more gun control or whatever the topic might be. Negative information gets tossed out. 2. Bandwagon effect -This may be a real problem when the resources devoted to addressing an issue get all of proportion to the seriousness of an issue. Instead, bandwagon jumping siphons away money and v...
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

A Powerful Tool for Nonprofit Planning 2

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts. Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity. I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy. To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time: CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM CULTURE ECOLOGY ? ECONOMIC ? DEMOGRAPHIC LEGAL POLITICAL ? TECHNOLOGICAL ? Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements. From the polit...
Post a Comment
Read more