How Is Marketing For Nonprofits Different Than For-Profit Marketing?

The Difference

Since starting here at MANY a couple of months ago as their new Manager of Digital Communications, I've been asked by a lot of people whether marketing for a nonprofit is different than marketing for a for-profit organization. Short answer: It's not all that different. Recently, I've been reading through the "The Brand IDEA: Managing Nonprofit Brands with Integrity, Democracy, and Affinity" by Nathalie Laidler-Kylander and Julia Shepard Stenzel (which is an excellent resource that you can buy here). One of the fundamental points of the book is that, contrary to popular thought, nonprofits are competing for the same dollars (at the consumer level, not from grants) that for-profit organizations are competing for [1] . The choice between making a donation to an NPO or buying a new Eagles jersey are, the book argues, not mutually exclusive -- in fact, they are in competition with one another. Some nonprofits have recognized this and have partnered with large organizations like the NFL and NBA for brand awareness and positioning purposes, making the process of purchasing from a business and donating to an NPO one and the same [2] [3] . Because NPOs are in competition with for-profits for consumer funds, nonprofits must compete on a similar level with their marketing and branding. For a nonprofit with limited resources to spend on marketing, this challenge may seem like a task that is much too tall to tackle -- but it doesn't have to be. While nice visuals and a fancy logo certainly help, you and your organization can still tell a powerful story without it. Why? Because, at the end of the day, your beautiful visuals and fancy logo still need a powerful story behind them to give them weight. Only one question matters in regards to branding and marketing: 1) what aspects of my organization and my cause create a positive emotional reaction in the population it serves?  

How To Make People Care

In my first week at MANY, a colleague swung by my desk and showed me the slide above that we use in one of our mentoring trainings and asked me the question: What are some positives you can think of about the person in this slide based off of the information you have about them? (Ed. Note: This story in the slide is true, however, Bennie is a pseudonym. We never use personally identifying information in any circumstance.) Visually, it's nothing special - it's just a PowerPoint slide. But as I thought through it, a real story of a real person was created inside of my head: a story of someone who was independent, powerful, and brave enough to leave home at the age of 14; not a lost cause, but a well-spring of potential. The words in the slide are powerful because they are someone's story, and the power of that story inevitably causes the populations we serve to take action, whether it be to volunteer, to donate money, or to be an advocate. Telling the real story of the work that you're doing and the truth of it is the best way to get someone to care about your work and take action, which in turn fulfills your mission. Just the other day, I saw an excellent example of this from Amachi Pittsburgh in an email they sent out to their subscribers:

Once you start asking the right questions that get to the heart of your organization's story, every decision about your marketing and communications strategy becomes much easier, which in turn helps to fulfill and further your organization's mission. Again, while it helps for your nonprofit organization to have a visually appealing logo and a nice website, the stories that you tell must be powerful to cause people to act. What are the stories your organization can tell to tug at people's heartstrings and spur them to action? Check out the marketing template below that will help you find the answer.  

Here's A Marketing Template That Will Help You Answer That Question For Your Nonprofit

In 2014, Bernadette Jiwa published this amazing book called Difference: The One Page Method For Reimagining Your Business & Reinventing Your Marketing. In the book, she has lots of great and helpful examples of people who are doing work that matters and how those people are getting others to care about what it is that they're doing. I've included a template/worksheet below from Bernadette that she uses to find the answer to the question: "How do I make people care about my work?"  

To download the template, click the button below:

The One Page Method For Reimagining Your Business & Reinventing Your Marketing Template

P.S. Got a question you'd like to see me answer? Feel free to shoot me an email here or comment below. I'll be answering questions like these on a bi-weekly basis and would love to hear from you.  

Footnotes [1]. Of course, this is dependent upon how an NPO is funded -- they may be funded more by grants than donations. [2]. Business Insider wrote in 2013 that only 8.01 percent of money from NFL Breast Cancer Awareness merchandise goes to research efforts, which suggests that the purpose of the partnership is to raise awareness for the NPO and to generate goodwill for the business than to raise funds for the NPO. It is important to note that not every NPO partnership with a business is solely for awareness purposes. [3]. A 2011 study by Aradna Krishna, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, found that people gave less money in direct donations to charities when they made cause-marketing purchases.