4-Step Strategy to Address Key Nonprofit Marketing Challenges Head On

Keep batting your head against the same walls, you’ll be in for a lot of headaches

Rather than building this year’s marketing plan off of last year’s template, how about taking a deep breath, sitting back, and planning to devote some dedicated time to thinking things through.  You see, your plan should be based on the greatest marketing communications challenges facing you in the coming year. Not last year or five years ago. And not five years ahead.

You see, we’re living in some pretty interesting times. It’s a veritable firehose of change.

So, you really must take stock.

What worked yesterday may not work today.

4-Step Marketing Planning Strategy

This year, how about using your head in the best way possible — for thinking, not banging?

1. Begin by writing down your marketing objectives for the year ahead.

These don’t have to be perfect. This is not your final draft. It’s your first draft.  So, think expansively. You can cross things out later when you start getting down to reality.

Here are some objectives I’ve heard from some of the nonprofits with whom I work:

• To raise visibility generally
• To increase brand recognition and become a household name
• To get a better grasp on who our best audiences are
• To better prioritize tasks that give the biggest bang for our buck
• To generate greater online engagement to build stronger relationships
• To create a group of online influencers who will share our content with their networks
• To get a better grasp on social media and what we should be doing
• To be consistent with posting content on a regular schedule
• To leverage content across multiple channels, online and offline
• To automate some of what we do so we work more efficiently
• To personalize our communications better
• To build an online newsletter or blog
• To build a better website
• To get a better email provider
• To integrate marketing and fundraising more seamlessly

You may share some of these aims, or you may have different ones.

2. Sort your objectives in descending order of priority.

This is often the most difficult part. Because it requires you to think carefully about the goals each objective supports. In other words, how is the “why” related to the “how?”

For each objective, ask yourself:

• Why do we want to do this?
• If we do this, what will success look like?

For example, if you list “raising visibility” as your purpose, what will this get you? There could be any number of answers, including multiple answers.

• “This will get us more clients!” This could be good or bad, depending on your capacity to serve them and/or the revenue they will (or won’t) generate.

• “This will get us more volunteers!” This could also be good or bad, depending on your capacity to develop opportunities to engage them and staffing to coordinate and steward them.

• “This will get us more donors!” This is likely good, but requires understanding the different types of donors you may acquire and how you will plan to cultivate and steward them to ensure their lifetime value merits the investment.

What you absolutely don’t want to do is seek visibility simply to please your board member who wants to see an article in the local paper.

So, be honest with yourself. There are no wrong answers. At this point you’re endeavoring to do a preliminary sorting by (1) what’s critical; (2) what’s important, and (3) what’s nice.

You want to end up with a list of no more objectives than you can reasonably handle.

If you find this challenging, it’s okay. Don’t stress about editing yourself too much. You can do that later. Just begin by making your list. Then you can take stock of available resources.This may cause a few objectives to just naturally drop off.

3. Take a moment to reflect on last year’s biggest challenges.

What really got in your way? What kept you up at night?  What just turned out to be a big old failure?

Here are some marketing challenges I’ve recently heard from folks:

• Insufficient budget
• Insufficient and/or untrained staff (especially to manage digital marketing)
• Organizational structure (e.g. siloes)
• Finding new systems to coordinate with existing ones (e.g., email, fundraising database, CRM, monthly giving, P2P fundraising pages, analytics, etc.)
• Finding good vendors to whom to outsource
• Figuring out what social channels in which to engage
• Changing search algorithms to improve organic reach
• Getting people engaged (both staff and constituents)
• Finding enough content
• Not letting go of sacred cows (e.g., low-yielding, resource-intensive events or publications that are beloved by someone at the top, a few wealthy donors or a group of vocal volunteers, etc.)

4. Which challenges will need to be addressed to reach this year’s objectives?

Take inventory. Compare your key objectives with your key challenges. How are the latter preventing you from achieving the former?

If you keep batting your head against the same walls, you’re going to be in for a whole lot of headaches.  Now is the time to be honest.

Here are some of the types of outcomes you may come up with:

• If we don’t increase our marketing budget, we won’t be able to…
• If we don’t add new skills to our staff, we won’t be able to…
• If we don’t integrate marketing and fundraising, we’ll miss opportunities to…
• If we don’t get a new database/CRM/email server, we won’t be able to effectively track or communicate with…
• If we don’t hire someone to manage social, we’ll fail to reach…
• If we don’t develop content algorythms favor today, we’ll fail to engage…
• If we don’t outsource (whatever it is), we won’t be able to cost-effectively…
• If we don’t figure out which social channels our supporters engage in, we won’t…
• If we don’t identify and engage social ambassadors, we won’t reach…
• If we don’t get clarity on our best online communication styles, we’ll fail to engage…
• If we don’t rethink our newsletter, and keep publishing our hard copy newsletter quarterly, we won’t have resources to…
• If we don’t let go of (sacred cow) we won’t have bandwidth to do something with a higher yield
• If we don’t create a culture of philanthropy, we’ll miss opportunities to tell our compelling stories.

Summary

Take a beat, now, and consider what you may want to do differently.

1. Write down your marketing communications objectives, keeping in mind how they’ll help you achieve your revenue generation goals.

2. Sort your objectives by priority, endeavoring to develop a manageable list.

3. Identify challenges that may get in the way of success.

4. Compare your top objectives with your top challenges.

5. Take stock of challenges that absolutely must be addressed if you’re to get where you’re going.

Because you know what they say about the definition of insanity, right?