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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.

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