Mission-Based Marketing

Positioning Your Not-for-Profit in an Increasingly Competitive World

Peter C. Brinckerhoff

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470889862
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

A direct, practical guide revealing how you can lead your not-for-profit to success through mission-based marketing

Now in a Third Edition, Mission-Based Marketing is a direct, practical guide showing how you can lead your not-for-profit to success in a more competitive world. This book provides the knowledge and skills you need to build a market-driven organization that holds onto its core values, does a better job of providing mission, and successfully competes for funding, clients, referral sources, staff, and board members.

• Includes new material on nonprofit websites, social networking and new methods of communication, advances in technology, customer service in today's world, and the effects of marketing on fundraising
• Goes beyond the hows and whys to include lots of hands-on advice and real-world examples
• Other titles by Brinckerhoff: Mission-Based Management: Leading Your Not-for-Profit In the 21st Century, Faith-Based Management: Leading Organizations That Are Based on More than Just Mission, and Social Entrepreneurship: The Art of Mission-Based Venture Development

Filled with new material, this book appraises the trends that have dramatically affected the not-for-profit sector in the past several years, and explains how an organization can shape this shifting landscape to its ultimate benefit.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Chapter Thumbnail

• A Competitive and Always-Online World
• Who This Book Is Written For
• The Benefits of Reading This Book
• Preview of the Book

Overview

Return on investment; social enterprise; social marketing; competitive environment; social networks; market-based pricing; managed care—these terms are now nearly ubiquitous in the literature of the nonprofit world. But what do they mean to your mission, your staff, your board, and the people whom your nonprofit serves? Just as importantly, how does your organization react, respond, innovate, and, yes, prosper in an increasingly competitive and rapid-response environment?

And then there is technology: How do you find the people you need to find (like donors, volunteers, great employees) when some are online, some aren’t, some are avid fans of social networking or texting, and some hardly check their e-mail once a week? If marketing is about meeting wants (and it is), the challenge of meeting technology wants (what I call techspectations) can, in itself, be overwhelming. But, if you aren’t meeting those expectations, you are leaving huge and important age cohorts on the sidelines.

Since the second edition of Mission-Based Marketing was published in 2003, a great deal has changed, and yet the core issues and skills of marketing for a nonprofit have remained the same. There is more acceptance of nonprofit advertising, and of nonprofits using business skills to pursue their mission. There is the increasingly quick advance of technology in all facets of our lives. For certain things, such as printing your own marketing materials, it has reduced costs drastically; in other areas, such as maintaining an appealing and mission-valuable web site, it has increased costs in time, money, and the skill sets you need on staff. And, of course, there is increased competition for everything: good staff, good volunteers, donated dollars and goods, and, most importantly, grants, contracts, and people to serve.

As I write this, the world is (hopefully) starting to come out of the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Thousands of nonprofits in North America have already closed, or are on the cusp of closing. Human services organizations are faced with unprecedented demand while funding from foundations, corporations, individuals, and governments has fallen. Arts organizations, on the other hand, are faced with too much capacity, as demand for tickets, classes, and the like have fallen simultaneously with outside funding. It’s a hard time for all nonprofits—perhaps the worst of times.

On the other hand, legions of younger people have been raised in a volunteering culture, businesses are concerned about social impact in their community, and technology enables us to cobble together groups of supporters from all over the globe in a ridiculously short amount of time. The 2008 U.S. presidential campaign showed us all the incredible potential of large numbers of small donations, and the financial crisis we all face gives us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape our organizations to focus on what we do best. Perhaps it’s the best of times?

So, how should your nonprofit respond and move forward? Of course, you should always start with your mission. It’s the reason your organization exists, and it’s the most valuable asset you have in marketing. You also need to look at your values. While the mission is why your nonprofit exists, your values show you how you go about pursuing that mission. This is true in service provision, internal management, and, of course, marketing.

That’s where we’ll start, but there’s much more in the following pages. I will show you how to react, respond, and reshape your organization into one that prospers using the best practices in today’s nonprofit management. How? By becoming market oriented while remaining mission based; by using the well-established and time-tested methods of marketing to do more mission; by treating everyone who interacts with your organization like valued customers; by developing a team approach to marketing, where customer satisfaction is everyone’s job; by asking all your customers what they want and trying your best to give it to them.

In my writing, lectures, and keynotes, I repeatedly contend that the skill of marketing is the most important business skill you can have to improve your mission capability and output. Many people are uncomfortable with the concept of marketing in a nonprofit because they see marketing as no more than crass sales. Sales (crass or not—your choice) is one part of marketing, but not the whole thing by any means. Here’s the first takeaway of the book: Good marketing in a nonprofit is good stewardship, because good marketing enables more effective mission provision. Read on; I’ll show you how to make this a reality in your organization.

In this initial chapter, we will look at why your world is “going competitive” and what the linkage is between competition and marketing. We’ll look at who I have written this book for (the target market) and what the benefits are of reading the book and of investing your time with me. Finally, I’ll give you a brief preview of each of the remaining chapters of the book so that you will know what the sequence of our time together will be like.

There is little if any rocket science in the following pages. But there are scores of solid, practical ideas on how to bring your organization into a marketing frame of mind that will keep you doing more and better mission for many years to come. In the chapters that follow, you will learn why marketing is so fundamental to your mission and how successful mission-based organizations are simultaneously market driven. You will view a marketing cycle and see how it can be adapted to your organization and your mission. You will learn how to identify and keep close to your customers, and how to identify and keep tabs on your competitors. You will see how technology has made marketing easier, cheaper, and much more challenging all at the same time. We’ll walk through the key elements of incredible customer service and show you applications for your many and varied customers.

Marketing is not a discrete event with a beginning and an end. It is a continuing process, a cycle that becomes a discipline, part of your culture. To develop that culture may take months or even years in your organization, or it may be a very short journey. It will depend on your staff, your board, your funders, and your community, but most importantly on you, the reader. You will be the one who will have the tools to help the others cross the bridge from your current position to being mission based and market driven. It’s a lot of work, but well worth it for your organization, your community, and the people you serve.

A Competitive and Always-Online World

Throughout the nonprofit community, the tide has been changing for the past decade. And, like tides, the changes are barely noticeable at first, and are more evident on some parts of the shoreline than others. But once the tide changes, the momentum is reversed and the outcome is irreversible. The forces at play are too big, too powerful, too global to resist.

In the nonprofit arena, just as in the rest of the world, the tide has changed and the trend is inexorably, irreversibly moving toward two things: more competition and ubiquitous technology. These two facts, both individually and in combination, are reshaping the way nonprofits do their work at every level, and make the need for rethinking your marketing more important than ever. Let’s look at each separately, and then talk about what their combined weight will mean to your future.

Competition

This is not as new as it may seem at first glance. Your nonprofit has always competed—for the best staff, for great board members, for donated dollars. But more and more, you’re also competing for people to serve. This is the result of two things: an increase in the raw number of nonprofits (particularly in the United States) and a change in funders’ philosophy about our sector. Obviously, the more nonprofits there are, the more organizations there are needing boards, non-governing volunteers, funding, and staff. The issue of a change in funders’ philosophy and its implications is a little more complicated.

Governments and foundations have come to the conclusion that competition works in the nonprofit world, and that freeing up this part of the economy produces lower-cost and better services just as in other sectors. And, as with other transitions from a restricted market to a free market, it always produces a market shakeout: Some organizations don’t survive because they cannot adjust and compete.

I need to digress here for a moment. At the same time (1960–1990) that we were spending trillions of dollars fighting and ultimately winning the Cold War to keep the world safe for democracy and capitalism (or was it capitalism and democracy?), we prevented our nonprofit sector from benefiting from the open market. We had one of each kind of human services, or arts, or recreation nonprofit in each...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Marketing: A Key to Better Mission
• Chapter 3: Being Mission Based and Market Driven
• Chapter 4: Being Flexible and Innovating with the Market
• Chapter 5: The Marketing Cycle for a Nonprofit
• Chapter 6: Who Are Your Markets?
• Chapter 7: Who Are Your Competitors?
• Chapter 8: Asking Your Markets What They Want
• Chapter 9: Better Marketing Materials
• Chapter 10: Technology and Marketing
• Chapter 11: Incredible Customer Service
• Chapter 12: A Marketing Planning Process
• Final Words
• Index
• Wiley End User License Agreement