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

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

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