By understanding and appreciating the power of marketing, you can help your charity reach its full potential, says Michelle Middleton

Marketing, by its very nature, is often an outward-looking function. This forces charities and other not-for-profit organisations to ask questions about, for example, who their audience is, what segment they fit into, how the charity should speak to prospects and how the cause will resonate with donors.

The list of outward-looking questions goes on and on. Discovering the answers to these is fundamental and imperative; it can be the make or break of successful fundraising or cause marketing campaigns.

However, for any campaign to reach its full potential, even from a reputational or ROI point of view, a number of inward-looking questions have to be answered first. Some organisations will struggle to hear the answers, but it is these very answers that build the foundation on which any marketing campaign can and should be built.

Key questions

Here are four questions I believe all organisations need to have the answers to in order to carry out best marketing practice:

 
1.      What is the organisational vision?

If you try to roll out a campaign without being clear on where it sits within the organisational vision, the overarching purpose of the cause has the potential to get lost among the noise of the other messaging.

It’s also important to consider how the campaign fits with the organisation’s one-year, three-year or five-year strategy. Including organisational visions as straplines within branding is a key way to pull audiences into the world in which your organisation sits. Some powerful examples of this are Alzheimer’s Society’s ‘Leading the fight against dementia’, Whizz-Kidz’s ‘Move a life forward’ and RSPB’s ‘Giving nature a home’. Here at the IoF, we use ‘Excellent fundraising for a better world’.

 
2.      What is the definition of marketing?

The term ‘marketing’ can be confusing and calls on the need for clarification – not just to your marketing team, but to the whole organisation. The term can be taken to mean anything from promotional advertising to segmentation, customer focus, product awareness and digital communications.

When I ran an exercise at the IoF asking colleagues to define the term, I received a number of answers ranging from “how you choose to sell and advertise your products” through to “building relationships with people through your brand”. The debate continues when attempting to define the term ‘marketing’ against the term ‘fundraising’ or ‘communications’.

Rather than get hung up on semantics, create a definition that works for you and your colleagues. Engaging them in this process can be key in ensuring you are on the same page.

3.      Where does the role of marketing sit within the organisation’s decision-making processes?

Being a conduit function, marketing has the potential to be viewed as the post room for other teams’ products. This is understandable but erroneous; and if this philosophy creeps into decision-making processes, it needs to be immediately challenged. If a marketer is not in the room when fundamental decisions are made, there can be a lack of knowledge of key performance indicators, including market place trends and how key messages will be received, and of the very essence of the campaign or product.  

4.      Where can we save money?

This is a tough question to answer, especially for smaller organisations where limited marketing budgets are under a great deal of scrutiny. Such limitations can encourage creativity, of course, but they can also lead to misperceptions as to who the real marketing budget decision-makers are. This creates the potential to cling like monkeys to budget trees! Instead, small organisations should create a culture where the need to bring cost-cutting solutions to the table is always front of mind. At the IoF, for example, we developed strong visual identity guidelines to ensure that our brand is not compromised when using freelance designers, and also built in-house design capacity. Furthermore, we’ve found that working closely with suppliers to test and find innovative solutions can provide successful results.

Of course, there are many more inward-focused questions to answer. But by working through just a few of these unknowns, breaking down barriers and building capacity for the whole organisation to think as marketers, you will ensure marketing reaches its full potential within your organisation – and raises the maximum amount of funds for the cause.

Learn more about how to manage your marketing more effectively at the IoF Academy. Visit http://www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk/Academy for more information.

 Michelle Middleton is head of marketing at the Institute of Fundraising

This article first appeared in The Fundraiser magazine, Issue 32, August 2013