Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog

As I posted yesterday, this week I attended the Conexion Colombia nonprofit conference in Bogota.  A highlight was a panel of marketing experts from Oglivy (Coca-Cola’s agency here), Microsoft and Renault, who shared their marketing strategies - and their advice to nonprofits seeking partnerships with companies like theirs.  It was a goldmine of information.  Their advice spans borders - so I want to share it here.  Here are the key points, nonprofit marketing friends:

1. Great companies inspire - often more effectively than we do.

In listening to each presentation on these companies’ marketing strategies, I was struck by how skillful they were at spinning a marketing strategy that turns their products into intangibles like a better world, a life aspiration or a route to self-actualization.  Renault said, “We’re not here to sell cars, we’re here to build better lives and a greener planet.”  Their tagline: “Drive the change.”  Microsoft talked not about software but about “helping people develop to their maximum potential.”  Their Windows 7 strategy - which has been well-advertised—turned customers into evangelists by having many claim they helped create the product that makes them more productive.  Coke talked about instilling hope and optimism in people - a glass half-full ideal that is part of every single marketing message.

So, to summarize: A car company is about the environment we want for ourselves, a software company is about human potential and a soft drink company is about hope. 

Surely, folks, we can do better on the same fronts!  But we so often don’t.  We talk about our work in ways that are far less eloquent.  These companies make ads that bring tears to our eyes - and the average nonprofit appeal does not.  Let’s do better - and we do it through the next point…

2. Great marketing focuses on the person more than the product.

Each marketing strategy discussed dwelt almost exclusively on what it meant to the consumer - with little to no emphasis on the product itself.  Here’s where we go wrong - we too often talk about statistics and approaches and our organization rather than about human stories that convey our impact.  That’s like Renault talking about powertrains or Coke focusing on bubbles.  We must show what do we do for PEOPLE (or animals or trees), and for the donor.  Which brings me to the next point…

3. To break through, build a relationship with an audience around emotion.

That’s what all of these companies do well.  They don’t think of the transaction of buying their product.  They highlight the emotional benefits of the experience.  Nonprofit marketing folks: the lesson here is don’t think of the transaction of a donor giving you money.  Highlight the emotional impact and the lives changed. 

4.  To work with corporations, show you understand their needs and meet them.

The companies then discussed how and why and when they do cause-related marketing.  They gave VERY good advice to the nonprofits.  Just as they focus on understanding their marketplace and meeting its needs, nonprofits approaching them need to understand their marketplace - and the needs of the company.  Companies exist why?  To make a profit.  Nonprofits need to recognize this will never change - but it doesn’t mean that a company and nonprofit can’t work together.  If a company has a goal that is complementary to the nonprofit’s aims - and achieving that goal enhances their brand while making the world a better place—partnerships can be successful.  But you have to make that case to a company to get support. 

As Oglivy put it: “Link with our business agenda.  Don’t just ask for funds; Offer a program that provides mutual benefits.”

Here is their advice:

1. Make sure your mission is compatible with the company’s brand and aims.  This is essential.

2. Make sure you have a program that is sustainable.  A company may not be able to support it forever - but they want the social impact and good stories to last.

3. Frame what you do in a way that would be interesting to the company’s customers.

4. Show how your work matches the company’s brand, audience and business aims.

5. Propose a program that has real goals and steps - it shows you know your stuff and can have real impact.

6. As you work together, keep reinforcing the good results to maintain momentum in the partnership.

The last point is critical, because we’re in lean times.  The people in a company who support you must keep making an internal case as to why precious resources should go your way.  Help them keep the support going by continually reinforcing the mutual benefits.  If you have them, you have a better chance of keeping your funding. 

Left: Director of Marketing Catalina Mejía and Right: Executive Director Ángela Escallón Emiliani of Conexion Colombia.

I’m at the Conexion Colombia nonprofit conference in Bogota, where I spoke on Robin Hood Marketing and online outreach - and where I got to hear from a Colombian marketing guru as well as a panel of corporate marketing executives.  I want to share some of what I learned in one post today, another tomorrow.  What was most clear was this: Good marketing principles are the same, anywhere in the world.

Gabriel Perez, professor of marketing at the University of Los Andes, and someone who has marketed everything from Chiclets to cars, had these universal insights to offer:

1. Old school.  Perez said marketing used to work like this:  A company would think it had an offering that was so important, people would come looking for it - and buy it.  Unfortunately, this is how I think much of nonprofit marketing still operates - we have a great cause, so we expect people to know about it - and give.

2. Modern marketing.  For-profit marketers have realized this isn’t enough.  The point of marketing isn’t to offer what we think is best - it’s to listen to consumers, understand their needs, and innovate to meet those needs.  Marketing in this way permeates an entire organization, because it fuels product development, not just promotion.  This is what great companies do - and what nonprofits need to do.  What do your donors want?  What do your beneficiaries feel?  How can you structure all you do to meet their needs better?

At Network for Good, we’re always looking for the latest and greatest resources to help nonprofits engage with supporters online. And we get a lot of questions about how to raise more money online – now! 

Inspired by the great work that nonprofits do every day, I called on some of the smartest people I know in the nonprofit fundraising world to help me write this eBook and give you 50 creative ideas that you can start using today to raise more money for your cause. 

Get your free copy of How to Raise a Lot More Money Now: 50 Great Ideas from 11 Top Experts. 

I’d like to give a special thanks to all of my friends who contributed: Jeff Brooks, Mark Rovner, Jocelyn Harmon, Alia McKee, Sarah Durham, Kivi Leroux Miller, Chris Forbes, Nancy Schwartz, Beth Kanter, and Allison Fine.

I recently did an interview with Achieve CEO Derrick Feldmann.  Achieve helps nonprofits engage supporters.  Here are some excerpts!

Taglines are tough.  Try to sum up your essence in a few pithy words.  It’s hard!  It feels like telling your life story in a haiku.

So Nancy Schwartz comes to the rescue with her inspiring annual tagline awards - and a pithy summary of how to write a great tagline: make it snappy!  Let people know within two seconds what your organization does and how it helps them!

As Nancy says:

Too many nonprofits don’t have a tagline because they can’t craft one that works, or, even worse, they use one that doesn’t work very well. That’s 72% of all nonprofits according to a recent GettingAttention.org survey.

If that’s you, Nancy 2010 Tagline Contest for Nonprofits will inspire you. Nancy is a nonprofit marketing expert, and she’s hosting the third annual Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards Program (a.k.a. The Taggies).

This year there are three new categories —Special Event, Fundraising Campaign and Program (product, service or other program) taglines—in addition to Organizational taglines. You can enter up to four (4) separate taglines—one for each of the award program’s categories: your organization’s tagline; a tagline for any program operated by your organization; a tagline for a fundraising campaign; and a tagline for any special event your organization produces.

All entrants will receive a free copy of the fully-updated 2010 Nonprofit Tagline Report in late fall. It’s the only complete guide to building your org’s brand in 8 words or less—filled with how-tos, don’t-dos and models.
Enter today—the deadline for entries is July 28.

Go for it.

Allison Fine and Beth Kanter have interesting thoughts on this question in their new report for the Case Foundation, which reviews the results and lessons of their last America’s Giving Challenge.  The Challenge raised more than $2.1 million for nonprofits from over 105,000.  The 2009 Challenge, organized by the Case Foundation, Causes and PARADE ran for 30 days, during which thousands of individuals competed for donors, donations and matching awards from the Case Foundation for their favorite charitable causes.

The report covers what worked and didn’t - and provides recommendations on how to improve future giving challenges.  I can’t think of anyone better to do the report—Allison and Beth just released the book, The Networked Nonprofit.  You can hear them talk about it here.

Read the whole report here, but here are some highlights on what makes for effective campaigns:

Personal Appeals: Personal solicitations to pre-existing networks of donors and friends through multiple channels were rated as the most effective methods for fundraising. Thirty-five percent of contest participants rated messaging to friends through Facebook as most effective; 32 percent rated personal email to friends, family and colleagues as effective or most effective; and 25 percent rated email to an existing organizational donor base as effective or most effective.

Use of Distributed Networks: Social media enables on and offline grassroots activism, giving nonprofits the ability to coordinate large numbers of people across distributed networks. This type of grassroots activism can be enormously effective for contests or any type of cause-based movement.  Some like Atlas Corps recruited 150 “Campaign Captains” before the contest started. Other organizations broke their efforts down into bite-size pieces for their volunteers by creating templates to use to send messages to their friends, post and comment on blogs, and create their own videos.

Additional assets included:
• Thankfulness: Many of the winners cited the importance of thanking
donors profusely throughout the contest.
• Transparency: Creating public spaces to share information about who is
doing what is also a very effective strategy.
• Videos: Most of the 2009 winners, including Conversational Case Study
subject Darius Goes West, made good use of videos to chronicle their
efforts.
• Storytelling: The ability to tell stories to compel people to act in short,
funny and meaningful ways was an essential element of success.
• Calls to Action: From YouTube’s annotations program to requests to tell
five additional friends, strong campaigns included great calls-to-action,
blending social stories with hard marketing.

One of the greatest things the Case Foundation did this year (in my view) was to provide nonprofits with a lot of training on how to engage supporters online.  I participated - you can see my training and Beth’s here:

The technology thinker Steve Rubel today proclaimed the end of the web as we know it.

He identifies these trends, and I quote from this article:

1) The canvas. The iPad has been deemed by some a blank slate. When you use any mobile device, you’re really only able to do one thing at a time. This means that we become entirely engrossed in whatever we have on the screen. Companies will need to up the ante if they hope to keep users in their fold longer. Development costs will go up, and the economics of content and experiences will look more like Hollywood—where a few hits deliver enough profit to pay for the dogs—than Madison Avenue.

2) Content snacking. How often do you consume media meals—e.g. engage with a unit of media like a newspaper, magazine or film from start to finish in one sitting? My guess is that you do this less than you did 10 years ago. Content snacking rules today. Popular digital metrics, such as time spent, may soon be useless.

3) Infinite choice. It never ceases to amaze me what a single mobile device can hold. Every time I turn on my phone, my finger needs to decide what’s more important to me at that time—friends, work, entertainment, etc. Choice will scale, human attention is finite, and mobile devices put all of this in our pockets. Time is your competition.

He says to succeed, we must: appropriate the best tools rather than inventing them; create partnerships to cut through the noise; and focus on digestible sized content.

I agree with most of this, and here’s how I’d translate it for our sector and nonprofit marketing thinkers:

1.) Do not build anything yourself. Co-opt useful tools (like those from my employer, the nonprofit Network for Good), point to great content, join existing conversations on vibrant communities rather than building your own. Don’t try to create shiny tools that lure donors; go to where donors are online, using the tools everyone else already built.

2.) Stop thinking like the lone wolf. How can you join a movement with momentum? What partners can strengthen your case? In our sector, none of us have the resources to go it alone in the noisy online space. Getting and keeping attention has to mean corralling resources beyond our own.

3.) Get concise, pithy and to the point online. DO NOT put your offline content online - it won’t work. Read my advice on snackers here.

The bottom line? Your online strategy has to evolve all the time, because how we interact with technology changes constantly. Adapt or fail.

As you know, I’ve been completely fascinated in recent months with behavioral economics and its relation to our work.  I wrote a paean to Dan Ariely, the dean of the field, in the Network for Good ebook, “Homer Simpson for Nonprofits: How People Really Think and What It Means to Your Cause - a Guide to Behavioral Economics for Nonprofit Leaders.”  Dan Ariely has had a tremendous influence on my thinking about marketing, fundraising and life.

So I’m thrilled to announce Dan Ariely himself is presenting a webinar for Network for Good next Tuesday. 

DO NOT MISS THIS.

Here’s what’s in store July 20th at 1 pm ET:

We all think our donors and constituents are rational, so that’s how we communicate with them.  But are they?  Is anyone? Join Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (February 2008) and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (June 2010), as he walks us through the simple experiments he’s used to study how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational.

His experiments examine a wide range of daily behaviors such as buying (or not), saving (or not), ordering food in restaurants, pain management, procrastination, dishonesty, and decision making under different emotional states. These interesting, amusing, and informative experiments demonstrate profound ideas that fly in the face of common wisdom.
On this call, we’ll address:

• What are the motivations behind our donors’ actions?
• What does this mean for your organization when trying to engage with donors online and off?
• How can you use this knowledge to increase the impact of your organization’s communications?

Here’s the registration link.

Here is Dan’s amazing story, along with a quick overview of standard vs. behavioral economics.

In their new book, The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting With Social Media To Drive Change, co-authors Beth Kanter and Allison Fine show nonprofits a new way of operating in our increasingly connected world: a networked approach enabled by social technologies, where connections are leveraged to increase impact in effective ways that drive change for the betterment of our society and planet.

Tomorrow, Beth Kanter will be joining Network for Good for a FREE Nonprofit 911 webinar to show how social media is catalyzing this shift away from “organization-centric” advocacy, governance and communications toward a “networked” approach.  She’ll walk call participants through how to analyze and understand their social networks, how to leverage those networks to maximize their returns, how to create a social culture to nurture these connections, and how and why organizations and the individuals who run them must value relationships as well as transactions.  She’ll also answer specific questions from webinar participants about how their organizations can maximize their returns from social media. 

We’ll also be giving away free copies of The Networked Nonprofit to call participants, so register today!

This is not a terribly original thought, but it’s certainly a critical one: failure is how we learn.

There are times when you will fail as a fundraiser.  You will fail as a marketer.  You will think you know your audience, you will be certain you know your message, and you will be wrong.

Your audiences aren’t necessarily rational, they aren’t necessarily consistent, and they aren’t necessarily predictable.

Welcome to the imperfection that we all exhibit - and face.

We’re just weeks away from fundraising season, and it’s so easy to go into it cowed and meek.  Worried about results, focused on what we might not get, and conservative in our approach. Why?  Because we fear failure.

The problem is, fear of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy - it makes us fail and worse, it makes us fail foolishly.  It makes us safe and boring (not good), too focused on extracting value from donors instead of offering them the chance to make a difference (not good), and so focused on the downside of missed targets that we fail to embrace their gifts: what they teach us (also not good).  For example, if an email bombs - and you use an email campaign tool - at least you know what didn’t work and why.  That insight is gold.  Better to have a big failure that yields insights than an unimaginative campaign with crappy results that net no knowledge at all.

Listening to my seven-year-old screech her way through violin practice tonight - after crying that nothing was perfect the first go-round - and then screeching once again, with a few good notes and satisfaction in her own persistance, I was reminded the best we can do is press on, boldly test, critically examine, and reflectively learn. Look at missteps - if they happen - as useful guidance as to where the right path may lie. 

Iin the important months ahead, be brave in your outreach, boldly giving to your donors, and most of all, generous with yourself.  Don’t be fearful in your practice as a fundraiser - it will only lessen your results and limit your understanding.

The nonprofit Nanhi Kali, which seeks to change the lives of impoverished girls, just launched an unusual campaign with a unique storytelling gambit: an animated character whose life path is determined by the donations the organization received.

You can check out the Girl Story campaign here. 

Says Nanhi Kali:

The story follows the path of a young girl named Tarla—a character based on a composite of real-life girls that Nanhi Kali has helped in the past. Tarla wants to go to school to better her life. Whether Tarla succeeds, however, is up to the viewer, as her story will progress only via audience donations unlocking new chapters.  Viewers who donate will receive updated emails on Tarla’s progress and journey. They will also receive a thank you email for their contribution from Tarla herself.  Should viewers choose not to donate, Tarla’s story ends there, in parallel circumstances to what happens to many girls in real life who don’t have the resources they need to succeed.

Here’s what I like about the campaign: It’s based in storytelling, it’s focused on impact and it encourages donor engagement.  We need more of all of those things in our sector.  Bonus points for the fact it’s also unusual.

Here’s what I’m not sure about: Tarla is an animated figure, not real, and I can’t really help her.  She’s a stand-in for other girls I might help, but her story lacks the immediacy of real people for me.  Fundraisers often use composites, but adding a cartoon on top of a composite and making the interaction game-like (donate to see more) seems to add further abstraction to the human impact of a gift.  I asked the organization and their creative firm (Strawberry Frog) about this fact, and Creative Director, Josh Greenspan said via email:

“We knew from the beginning that we wanted an animated story. We can only guess at the psychology behind it, but frequently, animated stories are viewed as more emotional than live action ones. Perhaps the issue becomes ‘too real’ when faced with a person in need, especially a child. That said our goal wasn’t to create an animated sob story. It was extremely important to us that Tarla be a strong and determined character. Yes, she’s seen crying in the film series, but she wants your donations, not your pity. Throughout the story Tarla defies social dogma, gender discrimination, disapproving parents and more. These are not the deeds of a pathetic young girl looking for a handout. We believe that the simple animation style and gritty filmic quality provides a compelling and honest feel, while not overshadowing a truly inspirational story.”

I’m not sure that a cartoon will elicit the reactions that a real person would, but the story is certainly compelling and donors have surprised me before.  So I asked about fundraising results - and was told it is too early to tell.

So, folks, what do you think?  Will this work?

UPDATE: I asked Jeff Brooks of Future Fundraising Now Blog his thoughts (because I put a LOT of stock in his take) and here’s what he said:

I’ll be surprised if this works.  The problem is, it’s NOT REAL.  You can sponsor a real child through any number of excellent child sponsorship organizations, and they’ll give you a real story of a real child whose life you helped transform.  Given that, why would a cartoon story be compelling?

The cartoon is not emotional.  The strongest thing it has is fake tears.  Where’s the real desolation of poverty and ignorance? Making it a cartoon just emphasizes the lack of reality here.

The Impact:  Online fundraising studies have repeatedly proven that engaging donors through multiple channels – online and off – yields the best results, with donors giving more, more often.  If you’re only relying on offline channels, you’re missing an opportunity to significantly increase giving.

The Price: Adding online outreach to your fundraising strategy is a wise budgetary move.  The highest marketing cost for most nonprofits is direct mail newsletters and appeals, so it’s frugal to move as much of your outreach online as possible.  Email is vastly less expensive than offline outreach, and online donations are far more efficient than processing checks – plus the average online gift is triple the typical offline one.

Your Supporters:  Today’s donors don’t want to be treated like walking wallets.  They expect a convenient, personalized, conversational and interactive experience with your organization.  Online giving enables you to make donating fast and easy for the growing number of people who prefer to donate online.  Email lets you segment your donors according to their interests, send them timely communications, and allow them to participate in what they are reading by clicking and writing back. That’s a winning engagement formula.

This is from Google. (Hat tip to Grace for the video.)

The average nonprofit has 100 stories at least this compelling.

We have to get better at telling them!

Get inspired to do more, better storytelling:

Since you’re reading my blog, you probably believe that we as nonprofit professionals need to know marketing – no matter how small, how underbudgeted, or how overworked we may be.

We need more people like you.

Why?  Because we cannot afford not to do marketing.  You cannot move people without it.  As worthy as our causes may be, simply telling people that what we do matters is not an outreach strategy. 

We need people who understand this throughout all levels of organizations, from executive directors to communications departments to fundraising staff.  Strong marketing and communications help us shift from a preaching to a persuasion perspective, making everything we do work better. 

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, my good friend and esteemed marketing guru Kivi Leroux Miller has written a book – The Nonprofit Marketing Guide – for nonprofits with small staff and meager resources, which describes most of us, and it shows us all how to do more with less.  Through working smarter and communicating better, we can have great impact without deep pockets. You can read my interview with Kivi here.

Kivi will be sharing her wisdom – and answering questions – on a Network for Good Nonprofit 911 webinar on June 29th. 

Tune in to hear her address:
• Why it’s OK to roll your eyes when your board says they want to “get our name out there” - but just not in front of them. She’ll tell you what to say instead.
• How to get people who think marketing is slimy/a waste of time/fluff to think you walk on water!
• How to cut your communications to-do list in half in less than 10 minutes.
• How to write yourself a permission slip to stop doing the stuff that’s driving you crazy.

We’ll also be giving away copies of Kivi’s book to a few lucky call participants, so register now!

My favorite idea from the marvelous book Switch is bright spots.  PLEASE take three minutes and be enlightened with this great advice:

The brilliant Mark Rovner and I did a Nework for Good Nonprofit 911 Webinar yesterday: Messaging from the Right Side of Your Brain (available for free on demand).

Here’s what we said:

Our problem with messaging is we talk too often sap the emotion and color from our work when we seek to put it into words.  We talk about our work in analytical ways when we should be speaking from the heart to compel people to action.

What if you could effortlessly convey the heart and soul of your work every time you sit down to write web copy or your next fundraising appeal?  We all know passion is infectious, but writing from your own place of passion and commitment can be a real challenge in the hectic and demanding environment of your nonprofit.

So we offered four exercises to move you from your left to your right brain in messaging.

First, imagine you’re in an art museum gazing at a picture that captures the heart of your work.  Mission statements and statistics don’t count!  Those go on the placard next to the picture that tells you the boring details about the art.  What we find is nonprofits don’t fill the frame with a picture that moves donors - they just focus on the placard.  Fill your empty frame.  What do you see?  What faces, what scenes, what expressions?  This is what you want to convey in your messaging.

Second, fill that frame with a hero that demonstrates the best of your work.  Who is that person?  What are they doing?

Third, try to distill that visual vocuabulary into a phrase that is your brand mantra.  Nonprofits offered some good ones on the call.  My favorite:

Bringing hope home (for an organization helping fill the homes of people in great need with furniture - and bringing them training and opportunity).

Last, in less than six words, tell the whole story of your organization.  My favorites were:

I woke up to puppy breath. You?  (for an animal adoption agency)

You were. They are. You can. (private boarding school)

Try these out!  Share what they evoke.  And then try to push your fundraising toward this kind of right-brain thinking!

On the heels of GivingUSA’s gloomy news about 2009 giving overall (see my last post) Blackbaud’s charitable giving index shows 2010 is better.  Giving continues to recover this year online and off - especially for smaller organizations:

More on the report is here.

It is part of the Nonprofit Times Sector Dash, which you can find here.

Giving USA today released their data on charitable giving in 2009.  You can get a free executive summary here.

The highlights:

Total estimated charitable giving in the United States dropped 3.6 percent in 2009 (-3.2 percent adjusted for inflation). This reflects the continued recession in 2009, which particularly affected charitable recipients that otherwise receive contributions for new buildings, endowment campaigns, and long-term planning. These include education, arts, foundations, and freestanding donor-advised funds (which are part of public-society benefit). The types of charities that showed estimated growth typically provide immediate services, such as human services, health, inter­national aid, and even environment. Religion showed a very slight decrease.
Individual giving fell an estimated 0.4 percent in 2009 (no change adjusted for inflation). Many reports suggest that individual contributions increased toward the very end of the year, as stock market indices rose and as media coverage highlighted the needs faced by charitable organizations.

Charitable bequests fell an estimated 23.9 percent in 2009 (-23.6 percent adjusted for inflation). This reflects the unusually high level of bequest giving announced in 2008 by the Internal Revenue Service in its data released in late 2009. The 2009 estimate is $0.58 billion (2.5 percent) above the 2007 estimate.

Foundation grantmaking by private, community, and operating foundations fell by 8.9 percent, according to the Foundation Center (-8.6 percent adjusted for inflation). This is a less severe drop than foundations anticipated when the Foundation Center surveyed them early in 2009.

Corporate giving rose an estimated 5.5 percent (5.9 percent adjusted for inflation). This unexpected bounce takes corporate giving to within 1 percent of its pre-recession level. According to at least two reports (Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy and Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Entrepreneurs Foundation), corporations increased their in-kind donations, which are less affected by recessions. This shift explains at least some of the growth.

Giving to religion fell an esti­mated 0.7 percent in 2009 (an estimated decrease of 0.3 percent adjusted for inflation).

Giving to education declined an estimated 3.6 percent in 2009 (-3.2 percent adjusted for inflation).

Giving to foundations dropped an estimated 8 percent (-7.6 percent adjusted for inflation), according to the Foundation Center.

Giving to human services rose an estimated 2.3 percent (2.7 percent adjusted for inflation). This seems to reflect efforts that donors made to continue emergency aid services as an increasing number of people suffered from the continuing recession.

Giving for health shows an estimated increase, with growth of 3.8 percent (4.2 percent adjusted for inflation).

Giving for public-society benefit organizations declined an estimated 4.6 percent (-4.2 percent adjusted for inflation).

Giving to arts, culture and humanities organizations dropped an estimated 2.0 percent (-2.4 percent adjusted for inflation).

Giving to international affairs (which includes aid, development, and relief activities) increased 6.2 percent (6.6 percent adjusted for inflation).

Giving to individuals decreased by 3.6 percent in current dollars in 2009. Most often, these are gifts of medications to patients in need and are made by operating foundations created by pharmaceutical manufacturers.

I’m very excited to announce my friend esteemed marketing guru, Kivi Leroux Miller, has a great book hot off the presses: The Nonprofit Marketing Guide.  It’s highly recommended reading.  You can order it here and at Network for Good we’re hosting free webinar on the book on June 29. I should add I was pleased and proud to write the foreword of the book.

Pictured: Me (left), Beth Kanter (second from left), Wendy Brovold and Kivi Leroux (far right) at Kivi’s book signing at NTC.

I interviewed Kivi about the book this weekend.  Here’s what she had to say:

Katya: Writing a book is tough – speaking from experience, it can be maddening.  You’ve got to really feel motivated about what you have to say!  What compelled you to write your book?

Kivi: I worked for about 10 years as a communications department of one for maybe a dozen nonprofits as a staff member, volunteer, board member, and consultant. It was 100% on-the-job training and trial-and-error because I couldn’t find any books or websites or anything that told me how to do this job. Everything out there was either too fundraising specific or for large, well-funded organizations, or it was just too academic and boring to slog through. When I decided to transition out of consulting and into training and blogging full-time in 2007, creating a real-world, easy-to-read handbook with a balanced mix of strategy and tactics seemed like a natural fit. And you told me to go for it! So I wrote the book I wished I’d had available to me when I started working in nonprofit marketing way back when.   

Katya: What single most important insight do you hope nonprofits will gain from this book?  What’s the “if you only remember one thing, remember this” thought of the book?

Kivi: That a single person - that lone communications director - really can do some very powerful, creative work that will produce lasting results for their cause. My greatest hope for the book is that it really inspires and empowers nonprofit staff, volunteers, and board members to believe they can do amazing things with their marketing, no matter how little money or staff they have. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not cheerleader material at all, but I do feel like a cheerleader for all those small nonprofits out there.

Katya: You and I are professional soul mates in many ways – one is we agree all marketing should begin with the question – who am I engaging with and what do I want them to do?  Then you plan from there.  How does one embark that process – which is (like all things) of course easier than it sounds?

Kivi: The feeling is mutual!  I answered this question on Nancy Schwart’z blog last week (Nancy is another professional soul mate of mine). The first thing to do is to get really specific. When I ask nonprofits what they want people to do, I often get answers with words like support, help, or understand in them. And that’s where I start quoting you: I tell them to make it a “filmable moment.” Show me what someone physically does when they support, help, or understand. Forcing people to visualize someone following through on a call to action is the very first step.

Then you can start talking about what it would take to get the right people to take those actions, including who those right people really are, why they would do it, what’s stopping them now, etc. And it’s very rarely one thing. It’s ultimately about building a relationship with that person. Once you get through those conversations, then I usually try to circle back to the bigger goals. If these people did what we are asking them to do, what difference would it make? That’s how you tie the marketing back into the mission.

Katya: What do you have to say to the statement, “my organization/boss does not believe in marketing”?

Kivi: Your organization/boss is an idiot. OK, maybe not an idiot, but still desperately in need of a reality check. Helping staff who must endure a lack of support like this for their work is one of the reasons that I started the book with a chapter called “Ten New Realities for Nonprofits.” It’s a brand new world out there. The Internet, generational changes, the recession, they’ve all changed the way that nonprofits have to operate in very significant ways. In Chapter Two I talk about what marketing is and isn’t, which will also be helpful for people who need to do a little remedial education with the higher-ups!

Katya: What’s your favorite sentence/soundbite in the book?

Kivi: Hmmm . . . I might have to go back and read the book to answer that one. Actually, my favorite sound bite isn’t something I wrote, but from the review blurb that Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation wrote about the book. She said, “Kivi’s book delivers solid tactics and strategies, while at the same time driving home the point that nonprofit marketing should have a soul.” I just love that. It’s the perfect summary of what I was trying to do, even though I never articulated it that well!