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Why Marketing Is So Critical To Your Fundraising

Developing a proactive, comprehensive fundraising plan to make sure your organization is fully funded is just one part of a total plan for your organization. There is another plan you need to create – one that is just as important and could make your fundraising goals easier to reach.

The plan I am referring to is a marketing plan.  It is your game plan to communicating with your donors, potential donors, media, public officials and anyone else that matters to your organization.

To effectively market your organization, you must first know a few things about yourself:

Determine what business you are in. Can you boil your mission statement down to something really short and sweet?  For example, Habitat for Humanity is in the business of building decent, affordable homes for families in need.

Determine the key message(s) you want to get out. There are probably one or two things that you really want to say to the public and to your target audience.  Habitat may have a key message of “Everyone should have access to a simple, decent, affordable home.”

Identify your target audience(s). There are probably a few specific groups of people that you want to reach with your key messages.  For Habitat, churches are a target audience because they provide a lot of financial support and volunteers.  You might want to reach out to other groups like political leaders, college students, environmentalists, corporations or even media outlets.

Once you are clear about yourself, your messages and your audience, you can put together a plan for marketing:

Position your organization. What is the thing you hang your hat on that differentiates you from other similar organizations?  Are you the only one providing the service you provide?  Have you been around the longest?  Are you the best?  Once you figure this out, you can use it to position yourself in the minds of your target audience.

Develop and implement a communications plan.  How will you communicate with your target audience? What techniques will you use?  How often will you communicate with them?  These are questions you must wrestle with.  Your newsletter, website, brochure and annual report are all tools you can use for communicating with your target audiences.  Also consider how you will work with the media as part of your communications plan. Think about the target audiences you want to reach and develop a list of appropriate media contacts.  For example, you don’t need every reporter at the Knoxville News Sentinel on your media list.  You may only need the food section editor or the health section editor.

Determine how you will measure success. Are you looking for an increase in donors?  An increase in donations?  Being able to measure success will help you know when your marketing efforts are working.

Marketing isn’t something you can do once and forget about, so be prepared to work on your marketing and communications activities year-round.  And remember that the better job you do with marketing and communications, the easier fundraising will be.

Sandy Rees, CFRE is a free-lance nonprofit management consultant and fundraising expert.  She obtained her Certified Fundraising Executive certification in 2003 and is the author of the blog Get Fully Funded.  You can get a lot more of Sandy’s wisdom when she speaks at our Boot Camps for Nonprofits.

Greg McRay is the founder and CEO of The Foundation Group. He is registered with the IRS as an Enrolled Agent and specializes in 501(c)(3) and other tax exemption issues.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Sandy,

    Thanks for this article. Marketing is so important to the success of any venture, whether for profit or not for profit. We are actually creating VolunteerBIG to make it easy for nonprofits to have more effective marketing campaigns. Let's stay in touch, and please feel free to take a look at what we're doing. We love how everyone is supporting one another's efforts online, and are happy to support yours!

    Ethan

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