Telling Your Nonprofit's Story

One could argue that the key to fundraising is presenting a story that is relatable while also telling potential donors what they can do about the particular situation.

So what's your nonprofit's story?

In his book “Winning The Story Wars,” Jonah Sacks suggests the use of what he calls core story elements, the components that will become part of the story strategy. Seeing members of the target audience as heroes in the making and recognizing the organization’s need and ability to mobilize them with a compelling story and inspiring message makes donors feel as though they can make a big difference.

The core story elements are:

• Brand Hero. This is the embodiment of the primary audience the organization seeks to reach.
• Brand Mentor. This is the embodiment of the brand.
• Brand Gift. This is the creative wild card that makes the brand special and makes the brand hero believe higher-level values can be pursued through a relationship with the brand.
• Moral of the Story. This is the core message that underlies, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, every story the organization tells.
• Brand Boon. This is the contribution to the world that the brand hero will ultimately make.

The Benefits Of Limiting Choice

The concept of “choice” might seem like an odd one in the nonprofit sector, especially when it refers to consumers rather than prospective donors. After all, many nonprofits are established to help people who have little in the way of choice.

In the updated edition of his book “Managing a Nonprofit Organization” Thomas Wolf discusses choice, especially as it pertains to marketing and branding. Choice is not just about donors, but also about constituents and name recognition.

In an age when people have an unprecedented array of customized choices they can make with the flick of an index finger, nonprofits must be aware of personalized consumer demands. On the other hand, Wolf warned, research shows consumers opting out altogether when offered too many choices. He offers these considerations about choices:

• In most cases, the greater the opportunity for consumers to choose the features of what they purchase, the better they will like it. For example, symphony organizers have learned that despite numerous subscription offerings, a “select your own” series is often most popular;
• Despite the desire to customize, it is important to limit offerings to a small number so that consumers will not be overwhelmed and thus discouraged from acting; and,
• Consumers often flock to “experts” and becoming familiar with them and gaining entry to their preferred lists can be extremely beneficial.

4 Ways To Integrate Fundraising With Marketing

Fundraising and marketing: Are they the same thing or are they worlds apart? The answer you get to this question varies depending on who you ask, but one thing's for sure: The two work really well together if they are integrated properly.

During a recent Bridge Conference in National Harbor, Md., Dave Perrett of Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts and Kerri Kerr of Avalon Consulting Group held the opinion that fundraising and marketing are separate entities, but can be combined to heap benefits upon nonprofits.

Using Wolf Trap as a case study, they laid out a four-step process on the path to integration:

• Meet with your marketing department. It sounds simple, but this type of meeting almost never occurs. Membership and marketing are often siloed departments, but it doesn't have to be that way.
• Create an integrated schedule to take advantage of key dates.
• Test to determine the best strategy. Tests can include performance photo on carrier vs. plain envelope, timing (for performing arts, post-performance excitement or pre-performance anticipation), types of ticket buyers, telemarketing, email, Website and (for performing arts) box office sales.
• Meet with the marketing department to discuss results. The numbers might speak for themselves, but it’s important to schedule a meeting and discuss the results so everyone can see and understand the impact of integration.

6 Steps To A Brand Identity

What do you think of when someone utters the words "only you can prevent forest fires?" Smokey the Bear, right? This little exercise is a great example of the power of brand identity.

Every nonprofit and business dreams of creating an identity that is so powerful that people can't help but associate their brand with it. Yet, as Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee wrote in their book “Marketing in the Public Sector,” organizations need to dial down their ambition when beginning the branding process. The two marketing experts instead urged organizations to follow some key steps to create your brand’s identity:

• Establish Brand Purpose: Make sure the marketing objectives of your brand are related to influencing people to support your organization, participate in your programs, utilize your services, and/or comply with guidelines and laws.
• Identify Target Audiences for the Brand: Although many people in the general public will be exposed to your brand, it should be designed with specific groups of people in mind.
• Articulate Your Desired Brand Identity: This is your chance to envision how you hope target audiences will respond. Try filling in the following sentence to help determine your answer: “I want my target audience to see my brand as ______.”
• Craft the Brand Promise: Focus on benefits for your target audience, not your agency, ones they are likely to experience if they engage in the desired behavior.
• Determine the Brand’s Position Relative to the Competition: Challenge yourself to first identify competition, direct as well as indirect.
• Select Brand Elements: What name, slogan, logo, and colors will be associated with the brand?

5 Ways To Improve Your AdWords

There's a lot that goes into improving traffic to your nonprofit's website. One of the techniques that is most effective is the use of Google Grants AdWords, a program that allows you to purchase cost-per-click (CPC) advertising that will appear based on popular keywords.

According to Kristie Ferketich, Google Grants senior strategist, there are ways to optimize your AdWords to get the most out of them. Speaking at Nonprofit Technology Network's (NTEN) recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, she explained that organizations should keep the following things in mind when working with AdWords:

• Think like a user. See what ads catch your attention the next time you do a Google search.
• Use variations and common misspellings. Google will usually correct someone – but the AdWord will show for the search anyway.
• Include negative keywords. This eliminates your ads from popping up for certain searches, cutting down on unwanted impressions.
• Look at the stats. Analyze the cost and impressions for each AdWord you use. Are you hitting your goals? Is it costing too much to run some words?
• Optimize keyword-matching options. Certain punctuation around search terms will bring up different options. For example, your search results for [animal adoption] would bring up results only for that exact term. A search with “animal adoption” would bring up for that phrase, even if other terms were included in the search. Learn how the search punctuation can help, or hinder, your goals.
• Test, test, test. And for good measure -- test again. Search terms for your AdWords may work one month and sag the next.

Marketing: 3 Promotional Mistakes

The word "promotion" has a negative connotation these days. Product placements in movies makes audiences' eyes roll, and people don't hesitate to press that "skip ad" button on YouTube when an advertisement plays before a video. Yes, marketing can be quite a challenge today.

While it's true that most people would rather not have to see promotions, marketing your brand or a specific product does not have to be a negative. By avoiding some common promotional mistakes, your campaigns will be more successful and, as an added bonus, people will be less annoyed with your organization.

In his book "Managing a Nonprofit Organization," Thomas Wolf listed three mistakes that some nonprofits make during promotions. Avoiding these are key to ensuring a successful campaign:

• Don’t assume that saying more in a promotional device is better. Short, carefully selected messaging is always more effective.
• Don’t miss easy opportunities to acquire names, addresses, and other pertinent information. Incentivizing people to provide email addresses and other information will be valuable in later sales and fundraising solicitation.
• Don’t oversell your product or service. If customers or constituents have specific expectations about what you are selling and these expectations are not met, they will be disappointed. Promotion based on exaggerated claims will generally lead to unfulfilled expectations.

Brand Promises Are Worth Keeping

A brand has many elements that contribute to its success. One of the most important of these is what is known as the brand promise.

A brand promise is a short yet inspiring statement that will provide the focus an organization needs to make use of its distinctive resources to make a difference. There are many examples of promises, the most famous probably being Smokey the Bear's "Only you can prevent forest fires" tagline.

It's definitely critical for these statements to be catchy but, according to David McNally and Karl D. Speak in "Be Your Own Brand," the most important thing that they reflect is what an organization is and how it wants to engage with others.

McNally and Speak offered the following tips on making a brand promise effective:

• Make it short -- five to eight words.
• Give it a voice that is direct and action-oriented, even exciting and inspirational.
• Orient people directly or indirectly to how the brand pays off for them.
• Base it on the organization’s brand ethos.
• Reflect how the brand provides value to others.
• Fine-tune it through many iterations. Don’t be reluctant to tinker and revise.
• Eventually, get it to be extremely strong. Don’t settle too soon. Go for a great personal brand promise that will keep everyone motivated and focused on the organization’s brand strengths.
• Test it with close friends or family – if their eyes light up and they immediately sense how the promise can help connect with others, it passes the test.

6 Ways To Win At Communications

They say a picture is worth a thousand words; but what do those words actually say? In the world of communications, the answer to this question is crucial to the success of a campaign.

The words you choose in your marketing campaigns can be the difference between success and failure.In his book "The Power of Communication," Helio Fred Garcia, president of the crisis management firm Logos Consulting Group, wrote about a way to improve your chances of choosing the right words: Strategic thinking.

What is strategic thinking? Garcia wrote that it's all about "ordered thinking." For example, a communicator should never start with the question “What do we want to say?” because it skips the essential questions that establish goals, identify audiences and attitudes, and lay out a course of action to influence those attitudes.

In order to get on the path towards strategic thinking, Garcia recommended asking the following questions:

• What do we have? What is the challenge or opportunity we are hoping to address?
• What do we want? What’s our goal? Communication is merely the continuation of business by other means. We shouldn’t communicate unless we know what we’re trying to accomplish.
• What stakeholders matter to us? What do we know about them?
• What do we need them to think, feel, know, or do in order to accomplish our goal?
• What do they need to see us do, hear us say, or hear others say about us to think, feel, know, and do what we want them to accomplish?
• How do we make that happen?

Once you answer these questions, you should be well on your way towards becoming a more effective communicator when it comes to your nonprofit's marketing activities.

5 Marketing Campaign Goals

Every plan must have an end game if it is to be successful. This is especially true for marketing campaigns.

It seems like every nonprofit wants to market something. Whether it's an upcoming fundraising event or a new program, most organizations need to make use of marketing campaigns to spread the word. The only problem is that most of them don't always take a step back and ask why they need to invest in marketing. It's only when they start thinking about these goals that it becomes clear they are quite hard to define.

Jennie Winton and Zach Hochstadt, two partners at Mission Minded, listed five areas of need for marketing in the book "Nonprofit Management 101," and possible goals to consider for them:

• Revenue: Are your marketing efforts focused on raising more money for the organization? Exactly how much do you need to raise, by when, and for what exactly?
• Volunteers: Are you asking people to commit time to your cause? How many people do you need, and where do you need them?
• Tickets: How many tickets do you need to sell to break even for a special event? Can you afford to just break even, or do you actually need to make a profit?
• Advocacy: Are you trying to pass a law or change a policy? Why? Who are you lobbying?
• Behavioral: Are you trying to change a behavior, such as getting people to stop littering in a public park? Has this been tried before?

Retro Article Of The Week: Hard-Hitting Ad Campaigns

Tomorrow we will be releasing the newest edition of The NonProfit Times, so today we will be looking at an article that also came out in one of our September 15th issues.  The year was 2008, and the article was about a controversial ad campaign by The United Way of Greater Milwaukee (UWGM).  The campaign was for statutory rape awareness, and the proposed ads contained imagery that caused a frenzy: The faces of adolescent girls were superimposed onto the bodies of full-figured, adult bodies.  This particular campaign was eventually scrapped when it was leaked on the internet.

Although this particular campign was scrapped, UWGM moved onto other campaigns, including one that showed images of pregnant teenage boys to shed light on teenage pregnancy.  Here's an excerpt from the article:

A poster featuring a busty, D-cup model will turn heads. Couple it with a precocious, pig-tailed face of a little girl and it will stir an Internet frenzy.


That's what happened to The United Way of Greater Milwaukee's (UWGM) statutory rape awareness campaign when the faces of adolescent girls were imposed on full-figured, adult female bodies. But before the campaign could launch, the ad images leaked on the Internet and the campaign was tossed, even though the ads tested well in focus groups.


"It was obvious that the ads were being misconstrued," said Nicole Angresano, the community impact associate director for UWGM. Angresano said that changes were made to the images and text and the leaked versions represented earlier design prototypes.


"If we were to move forward, those were not the versions they would have seen," said Angresano, who explained that the ads were created to discourage adult men from having sex with under-aged girls.


Some 71 percent of babies born to teen girls in Wisconsin are fathered by adult males older than 20. In 20 percent of those cases, the fathers are at least six years older than the mothers, according to the Wisconsin Subcommittee on Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention study. The UWGM assumes that the statistics have stayed relatively the same since 1998, through case studies and anecdotal evidence from law enforcement, said Angresano. A new study is under way but results have not yet been released.

Whether you disagree with this form of advertising or not, there's one thing that's can't be argued: It generates a lot of publicity.  To read the full article, head on over to our website.

Management Tip: Cause Marketing And Individual Giving

At first glance, cause marketing and individual giving don't seem like they have anything in common.  How would it ever be possible to combine them?  In the latest management tip from The NonProfit Times, Lynn Croneberger (VP of development at Reading Is Fundamental) and Laura Goodman (director of partnership at Share Our Strength) explain how these seemingly polar opposite functions can work together:

*Ask for it. Consumer data is a leveraged asset that a corporate partner might be able to provide.


*Ask for it. Make sure to ask for email addresses when building consumer/participation forms. An e-appeal might not be as effective as direct mail, but it’s a lot cheaper.


*Try it, Test, segment and test again. Design appeals that can be tested – control group, call to action and links.


*Personalize. Tailor to the individual, recognize their support, cultivate and connect.

You can read the full piece over at The NonProfit Times.  If you liked this, you can read more cause marketing advice on our Management Tips page.

June 15th Issue of NPT Released

The June 15th Issue of The NonProfit Times was released this week.  If you have already subscribed, you probably have received your copy in the mail (or will be soon).  In the meantime, here is an excerpt from one of the articles in the issue:

Marketing to Hispanics Is More Than Language

By Samuel J. Fanburg

The March of Dimes (MoD) began a direct response campaign to Hispanic donor prospects in 2006 after recognizing that not only was this a population with formidable purchasing power, but that the organization provided services used by people in the demographic group.


A year later the White Plains, N.Y.-based MoD generated $122,305 by mailing donor acquisition packages to 602,000 Hispanic households and $54,184 by mailing 148,771 renewal packages. After reigning in efforts during the recent recession, Kim Haywood, vice president of direct response fundraising, said the organization has begun discussing implementation of new direct mail packages into the market segment.


Based on 2010 data from the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau, more than half of the growth of the United States population between 2000-2010 was due to an increase in the Hispanic community. The Hispanic population grew 43 percent to 47.7 million people. By 2050, estimates have Hispanics representing 24 percent of the U.S. population and are expected to hit 102.5 million, making roughly one of every four Americans having Hispanic ethnicity.


Purchasing power is expected to triple to $1.5 trillion by 2016, and 33.9 percent of the Hispanic population is younger than age of 18.


MoD began its Hispanic direct mail campaign by first renting lists from popular magazines, such as People en Espanol and Latino Magazine. Starting with a Spanish only website, www.nacersano.org, meaning “born healthy,” MoD tried to cater to the cultural values of Hispanics, according to MoD's Director of Latino Outreach, Lilliam Acosta-Sanchez.


“Using our Spanish language website to specifically reach out to Spanish Latinas, the March of Dimes has really been able build a brand. Hispanics are able to use a site that is not only culturally relevant, but linguistically as well. The content and imagery is also different, in order to meet the needs of women and family,” said Acosta-Sanchez.

To read the rest of this article, as well as some of the others in this issue, head on over to http://www.thenonprofittimes.com/.  And if you haven't already, subscribe today!

NPTtv Summary: Nonprofit Targets Ronald McDonald

Note: This is a summary/reaction to a story from the latest webcast of The NonProfit Times.

If one nonprofit gets its way, the clown with the big red shoes won't be around much longer.

Corporate Accountability International is turning its sights on Ronald McDonald, the famed mascot of the fast food chain McDonald’s. In an open letter to the company’s CEO, Jim Skinner, the nonprofit expresses concern that the use of the clown mascot in McDonald’s marketing campaigns is helping to promote unhealthy eating among children. Below is an excerpt from that letter:

“We ask that you heed our concern and retire your marketing promotions for food high in salt, fat, sugar, and calories to children, whatever form they take, from Ronald McDonald to toy giveaways. Our children and health care system will benefit from your leadership on this issue.”

Judging from the response from McDonald's, however, it seems that Corporate Accountability will not get their wish:

“We are committed to responsible advertising and take our communications to children very seriously. Ronald is an ambassador for good and delivers important messages to kids on safety, literacy, and balanced, active lifestyles.”

So at least for now, it doesn't appear Ronald McDonald will be leaving TV anytime soon.