Creating a Simple Marketing Plan

A poster at a bus shelter advertising your services for homeless youth. A Facebook post celebrating a client’s high school graduation. A tweet thanking volunteers for helping out. A YouTube video of your board members and clients singing karaoke at your last fundraising event.

No matter what you are communicating, or how, anything that goes into print, the airwaves, or the Internet about your organization is marketing. When done effectively, marketing enables potential clients, donors, volunteers, and the community to immediately recognize, value, and trust your organization and the work you do.

But what goes into effective marketing? You may design a beautiful website, diligently update your organization’s Twitter feed daily, and talk up the cause nearest and dearest to you at community events. While you’re busy getting your message out, is it really being taken in by the people you want to reach? Do you know who you really want to reach?

Taking the time to create a simple marketing plan will help you think through these questions. It will also help you clarify your marketing goals, direct your every day efforts, and maximize your resources so you’ll make the biggest impact.

To formulate a basic marketing plan, or for smaller, more discrete projects, Kivi Leroux Miller, President of Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com, says nonprofit organizations need to consider a few key questions.

1. What’s our goal?
   
   Think about your organization’s mission and your marketing goals. Are you promoting the organization itself or a specific program? How will achieving your marketing goals contribute to the organization’s goals?
    
2. Who are we trying to reach, and what do we want them to do?
   
   Be precise about who you’re targeting. That means, don’t even think of the general public as a potential audience. That leads to “spraying and praying,” Leroux Miller says, an ill-defined, inefficient, and expensive approach to marketing. ‘The general public doesn’t really exist,” she says. Think about specific categories of people you want to reach, like teen parents or families with kids in middle school, for example.
   
   Then, be very specific about what you want folks to do. Some organizations say they want to raise awareness about their cause, but raising awareness is not really a specific enough goal, says Leroux Miller. Neither is name recognition for your organization. Think about what you want people to do after they’re aware of your cause and your program. Do you want them to volunteer, register for an event, or talk to their kids about a particular issue?
    
3. How do we define our message?
   
   There are a lot of ways to get a message across. Once you’ve defined your target audience, Leroux Miller says, put yourself in their shoes and think, “If I were them, why would I care?” In other words, why would this group of people want to do this thing we’re asking them to do? How would they benefit? Figuring out “what’s in it for them” will help you craft your message. People are bombarded with so much information every day. You can set yourself apart by looking through the eyes of your target audience and helping them to see the advantage of being connected to or involved with your organization.
   
   A local chamber of commerce, for example, might pay closer attention if you emphasize how your program prepares youth to be better employees. A community member might be more interested in getting involved if you focus on how your program reduces neighborhood crime.
    
4. How do we deliver the message?
   
   One of the biggest mistakes many nonprofit organizations make is jumping to this question first. Folks debate whether an organization should do a newsletter or start Facebook page or host an event. But answers to the question about how to deliver a message, Leroux Miller says, should really come from who you’re trying to reach and what you want them to do.
   
   Having a presence on Facebook or some other online social networking site, for example, might work well if you’re trying to get young people to your website but perhaps not so much if you want to attract private donors to a fundraising event. Focusing on the first two questions above should inform your decisions about how to deliver your message—whether it’s direct mail, online, or even in person at fundraising or community events.

A more comprehensive, two-year marketing plan template can be downloaded from Getting Attention, a nonprofit marketing blog by Nancy Schwartz. Schwartz says drafting an effective plan takes about 5 to 10 hours. 

Getting Press for Your Organization

Last November, Patty Fisher bought a purple sweater and black leggings for a teenage girl she’ll never meet. Fisher was participating in a program that matches good Samaritans with foster youth in need of holiday presents, and she enjoyed the experience so much she says she’ll do it again next year.

Fisher isn’t just any do-gooder. She writes a regular column for the San Jose Mercury News, a California paper. A day after her article about the Bill Wilson Center’s Adopt-a-Family program ran, more than 120 people had called the organization wanting to donate.

That was good news for the center. Fisher wrote the story after she got a pitch from the director, with whom she’d worked before. The holiday program, she learned, needed 520 more sponsors to be able to provide gifts for the 1,000 children who needed them. Three days after the article appeared, Adopt-a-Family had met its goal.

The success of Fisher’s piece illustrates two things: One, that landing in the news can be fruitful for youth-serving agencies and the people they serve. And two, that the best way to get the press to cover your organization is to get to know them and the kinds of stories they’re looking for.

‘All About Relationships’

“Getting press is all about relationships,” says Thom Mozloom, a communication consultant in Miami. “Find out who the assignment manager is, find out who the reporter is who covers your type of story, if you’re in a smaller market, find out who the news director is.”

Then get to know them. Ask them out for coffee. Invite them to visit your organization. Attend a charitable event at which they are appearing and introduce yourself. “Not to pitch yourself,” Mozloom says, “but just to say hi.”

Angela Hagen, communications and public relations manager for Our Family Services, a social services agency in Tucson, AZ, follows journalists on Facebook, and encourages them to subscribe to her newsletter.

The ultimate goal Mozloom and Hagen say, is to establish yourself as a credible, reliable, professional source of information.

Hagen has seen her newsletter articles quoted in newspaper stories, and members of the press who subscribe will contact her out of the blue. “They read about us often enough that they have a better clue about what we do,” she says. “So they’ll call me if they need someone to talk about homeless youth, because they know we deal with that.”

Nose for News

Staff of youth-serving organizations also need to have a sense of what’s “news” and what isn’t—and what will make a story stand out.

“Every agency wants some kind of publicity,” Fisher says. “There just aren’t enough reporters to cover those stories. So you need to have a really compelling and local and personal story in order to get it covered.”

Fisher says readers respond to stories about real people. “A parent who has children of his or her own can be moved by a story about a child who doesn’t have a parent or is abused or neglected or is out on the streets,” she says.

Stories also need to be unique. Book fairs and car washes aren’t news, Mozloom says. “It has to be something that not everybody else is doing.” And practical advice about what the media’s audience can do to help (as in Fisher’s story) is good, too. “What’s in it for the viewer or reader?” he says. “That’s the big filter. If you can’t answer that question, that’s not going to work.”

Another way to get coverage is to capitalize on the news.  “If there is some kind of a law that’s being carried by the local legislator that affects teens or youth,” Fisher says, “call the reporter and say this is how this would affect our community and I can get you statistics about what the impact on youth would be if this bill passes.” New research, reports by well-known organizations and national events make good news hooks, too. Fisher recently wrote a story about a Menlo Park, CA, homeless shelter when its staff made her aware of a new national study on homelessness.

Most importantly, focus on your day-to-day mission. “Do great work and you’ll get press,” Mozloom says.  

A Media Emergency Plan Can Help You Survive a Crisis

It was shortly after midnight in August 2009 when a teenage girl walked in to Family Youth Interventions’ basic center program in northeast Detroit. She was a runaway, and felt physically threatened at home, so FYI invited her in. And though Michigan law allows basic centers to house runaway youth for up to 24 hours, a miscommunication occurred with local law enforcement, and soon the sheriff’s office deployed their full resources—dogs, the dive team, and helicopters—in search of the young woman they believed had gone missing. By early morning, the media had literally arrived at FYI’s doorstep, and they wanted a statement.

When disaster strikes and the media arrives, a little disorientation is inevitable; no organization can foresee every emergency that might come its way, so very often program employees spend their first few hours of a crisis trying to understand just what’s going on. But by establishing some form of media crisis contingency plan, your program can withstand a public incident without sacrificing your reputation or your youths’ safety.

Assess First

As for Family Youth Interventions, they had to improvise, and the most obvious priority guided their efforts: “First and foremost, we were concerned about the safety and confidentiality of our youth,” says Program Director Jolyne Baarck.

The Sheriff’s office had already made their public statements, and the reporters outside weren’t going away. It was clear that some kind of official statement was going to have to come from FYI. So Baarck went to the center’s porch and said something off the cuff: “I told the reporters something like, ‘We’ll provide a statement later in the day, but right now you’re violating the right to confidentiality of the other youth in this program.’ In retrospect, I maybe should have written a prepared statement, but we needed something immediately.”

Baarck’s retrospective regret is a good lesson, according to Barbara Bolsen, Vice President of Programs for The Night Ministry in Chicago. Bolsen says that any organization in crisis should take a “management huddle, to figure out what’s appropriate to release” in a statement.

Stay Consistent

The Night Ministry operates multiple program centers, so establishing a centralized response to a crisis can be a challenge. But according to Bolsen, this is an essential step for any organization who finds itself forced into the spotlight. “You have to be consistent,” she says. “Preferably, your president would be the person to make the first statement. Make sure it’s a highly-placed person, but whoever it is, you want to maintain a consistent voice by letting them speak for the organization every time it’s necessary.”

Baarck concurs. In the wake of her initial statement, “every phone call came through our executive director,” she says. “He became the voice of FYI for anyone who wanted to know our take on things.”

Whoever’s put in charge of delivering your public message, it should also be communicated with your board prior to any public explanation. For one, board members might be contacted by the media themselves. But more fundamentally, they have a stake in the program and shouldn’t learn about potentially damaging incidents from the news.

In addition, Baarck and Bolsen agree that scrupulous documentation is essential to a consistent crisis response. Even more than during normal times, it’s important that every phone call, every intake or visitation, every media request should be recorded in some way, to prevent anyone from misconstruing how your organization responded to the crisis. “Our rule was ‘If it’s not on paper, it doesn’t exist,’” says Baarck.

Form Alliances

One thing that saved Family Youth Interventions from greater public misunderstanding was their long-established relationship with local media, specifically the Detroit Free Press. In a situation like theirs—which quickly escalated into a public disagreement with the Sheriff about the proper response to runaway youth—it helped to have reporters who knew how seriously the FYI staff took their work and their youths’ safety. “There’s a reporter there who knows to contact us when writing about the area’s runaway population,” claims Baarck, and that trust carried over to the coverage of this delicate situation.

Moreover, your program can approach an unexpected media crisis as an opportunity to publicly share the work you do. Baarck, acknowledging that most nonprofit agencies lack a means of mass communication, says that “any time the media wants to talk with you, it can be a good thing. We took the opportunity to tell our local media and police what exactly we do. And we got quite a bit of support from the community. People came out of nowhere, saying, ‘We had no idea that you were doing that kind of work.’”

Few programs would choose to be thrust into the media spotlight during a moment of such turmoil, but with preparation, you can spring into action with a plan—and maybe even turn a moment of crisis into a moment to shine. By showcasing your organization’s competence and core mission, you can publicly assert your program’s strength and commitment to helping local youth.