The general public is not a target audience! Learn how to avoid this pitfall and focus your message to the people who matter most to your cause.
Believers, Agnostics & Atheists from Claxon Marketing on Vimeo.
Category: Marketing 101
3 Simple Steps. 1 Great Plan.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/34927265[/vimeo]
Why plan?
Why create a marketing plan? It takes time, energy and usually isn’t all that fun. Plus, you have your plan in your head so you should be all set, right?
Wrong.
According to Kivi’s 2012 Trends Report, only 24% of organizations have a written plan that has been approved by leadership. And yet, writing down your goals has been proven to up your odds of achieving them.
With no written plan, you are at risk of falling prey to shiny object syndrome. You will hear about a new social media tool that sounds fab and decide everyone else is using it and you must use it, too. Or a board member will suggest you do a big PR push and off you’ll go, in full pursuit of the latest shiny object.
This is the tail wagging the dog. Maybe these are great ideas, maybe they’re not. It depends on your goals. Twitter, Facebook, PR, websites, blogs, newsletters, annual reports—these are all simply a means to an end. Planning makes sure you achieve your goals in the most effective and efficient way possible.
How to plan?
Now that you’re convinced you should have a written marketing plan, the question is how do you develop one given limited time, money and, let’s be honest, enthusiasm for the task at hand?
Enter the 1, 2, 3 Marketing Tree, a tool I developed to make it simple for you—the mission-motivate of the world—to get laser-focused on your marketing goals and how you’ll achieve them.
The 1, 2, 3 Marketing Tree demystifies marketing and reveals the three questions you really have to ask and answer in order to reach your goals.
- WHAT does marketing success look like for your organization?
- WHO do you need to reach in order to be successful?
- HOW will you reach them?
Ready to get started? Download a free version of the Tree or buy the poster-size version (featured in the video above so you can see it ‘live’) and get planning!
Top 3 Resolutions for Mission-Motivated Marketers
Historically, at the end of each year, I set six resolutions: three personal and three professional. This year, I would like to add three more to the mix.
These three are the resolutions I’d love to see all mission-motivated marketers stick to in 2012. Like drinking 8 glasses of water a day or stretching after every run (two of my three personal resolutions), these aren’t fancy, far-flung resolutions. They are the ones that, if you stick to them, will yield Big Results in 2012.
- Do Less: Release yourself from the notion that you have to do it all. Facebook, newsletters, Twitter, annual report, Foursquare, Tumblr, Storify. All can be great tools when it comes to marketing your mission and they all take time and money (as ‘time is money’) to do well. Both of those are scarce resources. Do less and you have time to do it well.
- Keep your on-line presence fresh: A languishing website makes supporters think you’re a languishing organization. Let your awesomeness shine through! At least once a month, go to all your on-line properties and make sure they’re up-to-date. For your website, update at least one page with brand new content. Block the time on your calendar now.
- Post your Top 3 Goals where you can see them: Research shows that writing down your goals and sharing them with someone else ups the chances you’ll achieve them by 33%. I haven’t found research that putting them where you can see them also helps, but have seen first-hand what a different it makes. Write ’em down. Put ’em up.
Those are my top 3 resolutions for mission-motivated marketers. What resolutions do you have for 2012? How do you plan to make them stick?
Don’t mess with my turkey!
Every year, millions of Americans gather on the last Thursday of the month for a somewhat bizarre tradition. After hours (nay days) of prep, family and friends gather around the table and gobble up turkey, cranberries, dressing, gravy, beans, potatoes, rolls, brussel sprouts, and yams until we can hardly move. And then—in an effort to truly outdo ourselves—we come back for pie-a-palooza, whereby we eat pie, pie and more pie.
I truly love this holiday.
Why? Because it’s a combo of tried and true and a twist of new. We all have our fav dishes. (My mum tried NOT serving the green beans one year—bad call. The word ‘mutiny’ comes to mind…) But there’s also room to experiment and try something new. Cumin on yams? BBQing the turkey? Maple syrup and cheddar cheese atop the pumpkin pie? (This last one is much better than it sounds.)
Your donors, fans and supporters want the equivalent of Thanksgiving. There are ways in which you engage with them that they love. Maybe it’s your annual event or your Facebook posts. They don’t want you to mess with those. But they also want some variety. They want some nutmeg whip cream on their pumpkin pie. They want you to dazzle and delight them.
Lest you think dazzle and delight will take too much time, energy or money, here are three easy ideas:
- Create personalized Xtranormal movies. If you can type, you can make a movie. It’s fast, free and fun.
- Send an e-card with a cool service like Kudoboard. Again, fast, free and fun. (Seeing a theme?)
- Jot a quick note and send via snail mail. Compendium has great cards for the mission-minded of the world. Does it take longer than sending an email? Maybe. But the extra minute to put the stamp on is totally worth it!
How do you delight the people who care about your cause?
P.S. Apologies to my Canadian readers. I know Thanksgiving has come and gone. Hope the suggestions, if not the Turkey theme, still resonates!
Moby Dick, Pinkwashing, and Bums in Seats
Not sure if it was the caffeine or the sunshine or some combination thereof, but we had a LIVELY discussion at Claxon’s monthly forum this morning. Here are a few of the highlights:
- Seeing a Little Red about Pink Think: October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Everything from NFL players’ shoes to the chocolate dipped graham crackers are pink right now. Our discussion centered around what this does from a brand perspective. How do we feel about merchants or companies who go pink for a month? Does it make us more loyal to them? The jury was out on this. The question is: what’s the impact of all this pink? In good iSector form, Komen for the Cure and other breast cancer awareness organizations have done an incredible job of raising inspiring innovation and investment, but what’s the impact? (For more on this, here’s a short piece from the Chronicle of Philanthropy and here’s a piece from Stanford School of Medicine wondering about Pink Think in 2007.)
- Newsletters: Technology is making it easier to deliver content that is tailored by participant group (a.k.a. target audience). Take advantage of it! This doesn’t take as long as you’d think. Identify your most important participant group (e.g. individual donors), create content for them, and then tailor for your other groups. Most organizations find that 75-80% of the content stays the same and it’s a matter of fine-tuning the language and the subject line. The extra effort goes a loooooong way! (If you care about kids and math, sign-up for Explorations in Math’s e-news. They have just started tailoring for different groups–and are getting a great response!)
- Detractors (a.k.a. Atheists): Yet again, we realized that we’re preaching to a lot of atheists. STOP IT!!! You can’t convert them. For every minute you spend worrying about what they think, you have one minute less to engage people who can help you advance your mission. Nuff said.
- Bums in Seats: If you’re asking staff, board, volunteers, and other fans to invite people to an event, make it 1) clear who they should invite and 2) easy for them to do so. Give them copy for an email and sample tweets/Facebook posts. Even if they don’t use the short format stuff, it will force you to whittle down your message to 140 characters and, by default, you’ll get to the essence of why someone should come. Clarity of purpose + ease of outreach=more bums in seats.
- White Whales: It’s a learned bunch that shows up for these forums and so, not surprisingly, they throw around some lofty literary references. For instance, white wales. That’s right, all organizations have white wales, just like in Moby Dick. It is that partner, that donor, that project, that funder who you try to engage (hunting sounds like you’re a stalker…not what we’re going for), yet eludes you. Every once in awhile, an opportunity presents itself where a natural connection or alliance can be made. Will you know it when you see it or will it swim passed you? Know who or what your white wales are.
So there you have it. The lively and wending discussion from this morning. We clearly had a lot of thoughts on these topics–what are yours?
Meaningfully engaging with donors, corporations & strategic plans
Last week could’ve been called Meaningful Engagement Week. Early in the week, I facilitated a board and staff retreat that focused on how to meaningfully engage with each other and a new strategic plan.
Thursday, I was at AFP Washington’s Symposium on Major Gifts where Bernard Ross of the UK’s Management Center walked us through how to use psychology, language and humor to meaningfully engage major donors. (That guy is Funny with a capital ‘F’! Whew.)
Then Friday, I found myself hypnotized by Tammy Zonker’s explanation of how she–and her talented team at the United Way of Southeastern Michigan–meaningfully engaged GM in revitalizing Detroit’s “drop out factories’, otherwise known as high schools. (Ouch, right?)
You’d think it’d be different to engage with a major donor, a corporation and a strategic plan. But when you got right down to it, the similarities outweighed the differences by a long shot. It really boiled down to this:
- Be prepared: Know your donor. Understand what motivates the corporation (and the people who work there). Know the intricacies and opportunity costs of each strategic direction.
- Sell impact: What will be different in the world if the donor donates, the corporation invests or the strategic plan works?
- Focus on what you believe: Start with what you believe and then seek out the partners and strategies for bringing it to life. Not the other way around.
Setting the inanimate strategic plan aside and focusing on animate (and sometimes animated) interactions between humans, it’s interesting to reflect on the what makes engagement meaningful. It’s tempting to think it implies that each and every interaction needs to be profound. But that’s not necessarily the case. The impact needs to be meaningful, not necessarily each and every interaction that leads to impact. The interactions leading up to that impact vary dramatically from light touch–think Twitter–to in-depth–think one-on-one conversation. The meaning becomes clear when you look at the impact of all these interactions as a whole.
Whether it’s a donor, a volunteer, an elected official or a strategic plan, are you engaged meaningfully or just meaning to engage?
Benefits, Believers & Poetry
Last week, I had the great, good fortune of spending two days In Twisp, Washington with organizations from Central and Eastern Washington. Talk about inspiring! They were a dedicated group and stuck with me as we covered a whole lotta territory in record time.
One of the many topics we covered (which included, but was not limited to: birthdays, food, dates with babies, rowing and snake eyes) was talking about the benefits of your organization rather than the features.
This is one of those topics that is an eye opener every time it comes up at a training.
Here’s a short list of features and benefits:
tutoring | knowing how to read
family planning | access to choices
education | expanded opportunities and/or connection to heritage
theater | inspiration
Super smart dude Zan McColloch-Lussier over at Mixtape Communications asks the question, “What business are you really in?” For instance, the business of tutoring or of teaching people to read? Most organizations would say, “The teaching to read business!” And yet, when asked what they do, they talk first about tutoring and then about reading.
Tutoring is how you get to your why, i.e. you tutor kids so they can read.
We also had a breakthrough moment around Believers, Agnostics and Atheists. Really, seriously, you can’t convert atheists. (Here’s a short video for those that still think they can.)
This group was also full of poets, musicians and artists. (Happy birthday sounds so much better when there are some singers in the group!). Here is a poem by one of the students on the Inspiration Sector.
When you are at a party and the conversation pauses,
You tell people that you work for causes,
Oh…they say…you work for a non-profit,
You look them straight in the eye…and say stop it!
Solving issues is my nectar,
I work in the Inspiration Sector!
So glad I work in the Inspiration Sector and got to be inspired by this fantastic group of change agents!
Connection and Community in Record Time
I have a friend, Mrs. G, who is an incredibly gifted elementary school teacher. She subs regularly at our kids’ school. This morning, I heard her voice coming from one of the Kindergarten classrooms. It was circle time. I was intrigued to learn how she would navigate this important part of the day when kids transition from home to classroom. The teacher plays a key role in creating a sense of community and smoothing the transition. How do you create that safe space when you don’t know the kids?!
I stopped just outside the door to listen (yes, yes, I eavesdropped).
Sometimes, it’s the small stuff that really matters. Mrs. G did something that was so subtle yet so effective. She said each of their names, made sure she was saying it correctly and then said, “Hello, Jimmy.” One student’s name was Kate on the roster and the student said she preferred Katie. So Mrs. G said, “Thank you for letting me know which you prefer. Hello, Katie.” In 11 words, or 60 characters, she created a connection and welcomed the student to the community.
What’s so great about this? Her goal was to create connection and community in record time. If she had simply called off their names to make sure they were present, she would’ve been able to check something off her to-do list (attendance–check!), but wouldn’t have achieved her goal.
We can do a lot without achieving a lot. Mrs. G did a little and achieved a lot because she was clear on her goal.
Are you clear on your goals?
It happens under the surface
Have you ever noticed someone swimming who is going really, really fast yet makes it look effortless? There isn’t a bunch of splashing or arm flailing. Instead, there’s a wake behind them.
I saw someone like this was in the pool this morning. He was in the Very Fast lane. (Interesting aside: There’s no longer a slow lane. Only medium, fast and very fast. Apparently, none of us are slow swimmers. Good for morale.)
I was in the fast lane, formerly known as medium. At one point, we came into the wall to do a flip turn at the same time so I had the chance to see (in a topsy turvy way) his turn. There were no extraneous movements. There was precision and speed and power. And yet–he made it look so easy.
All the work happened under the surface. Ditto for his strokes and his kicks. There was a lot of work being done, but if you watched from the surface, you saw none of it.
Next time you’re admiring an organization that seems to have it all figured out, don’t confuse output with effort. You are likely seeing the result of a lot of work being done beneath the surface.
You’re a marketer
I’ve run off and on for, oh, 20 years or so. I’ve run a marathon (thanks to Team in Training) and multiple half marathons, including the Mercer Island Half Marathon earlier this year. I get up around 5:30am about three times a week to run anywhere from three to seven miles.
And yet I would never call myself a runner.
Every time I run, I see someone who I consider to be a true runner. Their feet barely hit the pavement, their arms swing effortlessly at their sides, there is a rush of wind as they pass me. Now those people are runners. Clearly.
This is a goofy mentality. It focuses on labels instead of product, effort, impact and achievement. It’s a little bit of a bummer when it comes to me and running. It’s a big, fat bummer when it comes to nonprofits and marketing.
When I do a training or a workshop, I will frequently start by saying, “You are all marketers.” A small, but notable, shudder makes its way across the room. “Me. A marketer? No way. Egads.” People shift in their seats and look visibly uncomfortable.
Most non profit professionals refuse to think of themselves as marketers. Why is this? If marketing is telling a story that inspires people to take action that will make the world a better place AND the way that story gets told is primarily via the actions of the people working for non profit organizations, then every single person who works for a non profit is a marketer.
Twitter, Facebook, e-newsletters, brochures, websites, taglines, elevator speeches. These are all tools we use to tell our story. But they are not the story itself. In and of themselves, they do not inspired action and engagement.
I may not wear Vibrams (the five-fingered, barefoot running shoes), but I’m still a runner. And you may not have ‘marketing’ in your title or your job description, but your enthusiasm for your mission makes you marketer anyway. You inspire people to action every day. Is that so bad?