Skip to main content

Thinking Like a Marketer to Sell Social Change

Climate change is back on the front burner thanks to the latest, rather alarming, IPCC report. This blog is about how nonprofits can respond to the latest climate news, to raise money for relevant programs, to design and test new programs, or to promote sustainable behaviors. 

Whether you want to raise money, recruit volunteers, or convince people to recycle more of their stuff, it helps to know how to think about how best to sell your ideas. That much is common sense, to some extent. This post is meant not so much to restate what plenty of people know but to begin to organize that knowledge. With that in mind, consider the basics of effective marketing and how they apply to your project. I'll then have a few things to say about market research, a topic that fewer people are familiar with.

Digital Marketing Basics for Climate Activists

I can't offer a real introduction to marketing in one post. That kind of thing might even be insulting to experienced communications or development people. For now, I want to just offer a few things that all nonprofit marketers should keep in mind:
  • What is your objective with this marketing piece? 
  • Who is the audience? 
  • Where is the best place to share this message? 
  • What information does the audience need?
  • What will the reader get for donating to the organization? 
Are these things always on your mind, when they apply? If not, why not write them down and post them somewhere. There are other Marketing 101 questions for special situations. Here are some examples:
  • Your organization is new - How can people know your organization is both trustworthy and capable?
  • For big fundraising requests - What proves you can make great use of the money?
  • The issue is complex - What can we do to make this as clear as possible?
  • The issue is emotionally charged - What is a sensitive way to approach this? 
  • How can we use narrative empathy and positive emotions to "sell" our idea?
  • The issue is disconnected from readers' lives or values - How can you appeal to values or personal interests?
Unfortunately, climate change is one of those issues that comes across as abstract and off in the future. It can be tough to make a case for doing X and financially supporting Y to keep things from going to heck in a couple of decades. You might have to find something more immediate or concrete to use. 

So, now that you know what questions to ask, the next step is to start doing some research.

Doing Your Market Research

I'll assume you know your audience reasonably well, but need to gather some information. As with Marketing 101, there's only time to introduce a few market research concepts here.

Surveys - Marketers love doing surveys, long surveys with lots of questions, and lots of answer categories. Those long surveys you may have taken on restaurants or mobile phone plans are probably too long for your nonprofit's audience but do learn how to write survey questions and use a survey tool like SurveyMonkey.

Test and Revise - Test your various fundraising and marketing messages. If you rely heavily on Facebook, know how to use the data they provide so you can reach more people more effectively. Do likewise with Google analytics for your blog or Website. Learn how A/B testing works and try it out on email subject lines.

Reading Market Research - If you are planning a content marketing campaign, you'll want to look at existing research on what other organizations have used and benefited from. The Content Marketing Institute, the Direct Marketing Institute, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy sometimes share research on what works in nonprofit fundraising. Go and bookmark their sites. Subscribe to their newsletters.

Start Small but Think Big

Begin thinking like a marketer by taking a couple of easy steps, then build up to something more ambitious, then scale up even more by creating three or four donor funnels or starting a YouTube channel. 

Learn more about content marketing, email marketing, or Facebook marketing, and integrate what you've learned. Again, start small if you like. 

Do some market research. Plan a short survey for your Website visitors or newsletter subscribers. Run a poll on LinkedIn. 

Don't Be Afraid of Marketing

Now, I hope this short introduction provided some motivation and useful information. Read, take notes, brainstorm, discuss the possibilities with your colleagues. 

If you like this piece, please comment and share. And, if you have some time, check out some of my other posts on activism. 




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting Good Social Change Goals: The Problem of Police Brutality

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Technique for Generating Fundraising Ideas

I’ll return to the subject of strategic planning for nonprofits later. For now, I want to introduce another technique for generating ideas, for fundraising, planning, program design, advocacy, and other things. The Filament Technique was created by Edward De Bono, guru of creative thinking, and described in Serious Creativity . The technique is pretty easy to understand so I will just jump into demonstrating it with a nonprofit example. We start by defining a creative focus. In this case I want to focus to securing donations. You could also focus on fundraising generally or on another aspect of fundraising. The process is exactly the same. Having decided on the creative focus of “securing donations” I next need to list some of the normal requirements of securing donations. Here is my list: Potential donors Compelling case for donations Printed materials Objectives Note that those requirements are kept pretty broad. That was done on purpose. The list above is meant to be an illustrati...
Post a Comment
Read more