July 20, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
When charities talk about marketing, they usually mean efforts to persuade donors to give, but that’s only part of the equation, Dan Elitzer, a consultant in Washington, writes on Full Contact Philanthropy.
“Nonprofits also need marketing on the delivery side,” he writes. “The intended beneficiaries of the nonprofit’s products or programs (i.e., the clients) need to be made aware that they exist and convinced that they should invest the time and effort to take advantage of these offerings.”
According to Mr. Elitzer, when nonprofit marketing employees are courting potential donors, they are usually communicating with people whose cultural and socio-economic backgrounds are similar to their own. He says the challenge for those marketers on the program side, especially for antipoverty groups, is that potential clients may have very different experiences than their own.
“Truly effective marketing is hard to develop under any circumstances, but when the marketing is being designed by people who have never experienced the reality of the people they are trying to reach, the task becomes exponentially more difficult,” writes Mr. Elitzer.
In the past several years, social media has become “a trendy component” of many nonprofit marketing strategies, he says. Mr. Elitzer thinks that the inspiration to create “the client-focused marketing equivalent of social media” will come from program staff, because they are closest to the clients and will best know how to reach them.
“Capturing the inspiration behind those wisps will be difficult, but it must be done,” he writes. “If the nonprofit sector only innovates its ability to market to the people who fund its work but does not find better ways to reach the people it serves, it risks drifting further and further from fulfilling its reason for being.”
Do you agree? Has your organization struggled to reach out to potential clients? Has your group developed creative strategies to reach out to potential clients?
