Advertising for Your Charity
Sharing your personal connection with other people may inspire personal connections for them, too.
I have a magical solution to keep you from working hard while still raising tons of money for your charity. My magical solution is called advertising.
How many infomercials have you seen that pretty much said that same thing? I have the perfect solution to your problem. It works like magic.
Yeah, right… but, then the product is demonstrated and you see how it works like magic
right before your own eyes. This makes a lot of people interested in the product. Then they throw in a crappy FREE gift if you order within the next 500 years
and suddenly some of those people who were interested are now customers.
In the world of charities especially, life is rarely that easy. You probably can’t host an infomercial and expect people to suddenly want to donate, even by offering a free gift.
PBS and the MDA telethon have some of the most charitable success on TV and it will most likely stay that way for a while. But, look at the huge productions they need just to maintain that level of success. Your small, in comparison, charity cannot compete with the giants, so don’t waste time, money and energy trying. Instead, here’s what you should do.
Step One: Believe in Your Cause
It sounds simple enough, like a no-brainer, but many times charity leaders don’t believe that what their charity offers is in high demand or impacts enough people that the general population should care. That type of thinking will get you nowhere. You have to believe in your cause. You have to believe that your cause is worthy enough that everyone should want to donate. If you can’t believe that, maybe you should find someone else to handle your charity’s marketing efforts. Learning to believe in your cause is easy to do.
Before you can believe in any cause, you first have to feel personally connected to it. Your personal connection must reach beyond statements like, it helps my friends,
or I never turn my back on family.
Those are great reasons to donate to a cause one time, but are not reasons to stick with a cause. Your personal connection to the cause must be about you, nobody else. What about this cause makes you feel good? That good feeling is your personal connection. Relish that every chance you get and you will ultimately strengthen your personal connection to the cause.
As your personal connection grows stronger, so will your belief that this cause is worthy of another person’s time, money and energy. Sharing your personal connection with other people may inspire personal connections for them, too. Knowing what makes this cause personal to you might even make some of the boringly repetitive work a little happier. Bit by bit, piece by piece you will learn to fully believe in your cause – and not just a little.
Step Two: Create Positive Experiences
The truth is, when people are happy, they are more willing to spread happiness to others. By creating positive experiences for yourself and other people supporting the cause, the need for barking orders vanishes. Here’s an example of creating a positive experience.
In 2008, SKIP was holding its first and last benefit concert. We had four volunteers who did all of the planning and execution for the event. These volunteers had an established leader, but when it came time for planning the next stage, all four volunteers volunteered to get it done because it was fun. The goal was to raise at least $1,000 in one night for SKIP.
On the night of the event, guests who didn’t know anything about SKIP until they walked through the doors were highly impressed with the cause. Guests who did know something about SKIP were completely blown away. We exceeded our goal of $1,000 significantly for SKIP that night, and just a few months ago I was asked by someone who attended the benefit concert if we were going to plan another one. That event was more than three years ago!
From the example above, it’s clear to see that one positive experience can have a lasting affect on everyone involved. Deciding what that positive experience might be is not in your control, so don’t let everything ride on one big plan. Create as many positive experiences every day as you possibly can. Even the little ones count. Here’s an example from SKIP’s Twitter experience.
We didn’t utilize Twitter until 2009. By then a lot of other charities had already gained a significant amount of followers, so we had to play hard and we had to play well just to catch up.
It was decided early one morning to post care package ideas every minute for an hour. As the minutes passed, the number of followers increased by a couple. Then, about 30 minutes into it new followers were coming in by the truckload. Within one hour we had increased the number of followers we had by about 400. Ah-hah! There’s an idea.
The next several days were spent compiling all kinds of interesting military quotes, facts and stories that we could share with our Twitter followers. Every 23 minutes past the hour another quote, fact or story was shared (with the help of 3rd party software to delay tweets). Our followers grew consistently for weeks at this pace. Then, we changed it up by asking for questions about sending care packages. Our followers responded and the number continued growing. SKIP had earned its way into the hearts and minds of thousands of people all around the world.
SKIP’s positive experience on Twitter, breaking the trend of advertising by numerous other charities, made a difference to a lot of military supporters. Yeah, there were some people who didn’t agree with supporting the troops and felt it necessary to tell us that, but most of the people who followed SKIP did so because we were giving them something fresh to look forward to every hour of every day. We were sharing useful knowledge. It was a very positive experience for SKIP and everyone who followed SKIP.
Step Three: Determine Your Niche
In step two I told you about two things SKIP did that turned out to be positive experiences. Let’s take a closer look at SKIP’s Twitter account.
Eventually, the Twitter account was abandoned. It was abandoned for all the wrong reasons; nobody had time to keep it going.
SKIP missed a great opportunity to utilize this perfectly primed niche to continue expanding its support-base and ultimately garner more support for the future. Sad, but true. Don’t make the same mistake.
When you find something that helps you build relationships with other people, don’t lose sight of its greater purpose – to help your cause continue growing. An advertising niche doesn’t have to be traditional paid advertising. In fact, for charities, paid advertising can actually harm your reputation if used too often or for the wrong things. So, let’s not even discuss paid advertising here. Instead, we’ll talk about finding an advertising niche that’s not traditional. We’ll call it free advertising, even though sometimes it isn’t 100% free.
While trying to find your advertising niche, try as many different avenues as possible (including paid advertising). You’ll want to follow the social networking trends. You’ll want to try posters, brochures and business cards. You’ll want to try planning events and participating with other charities’ events. You’ll want to try sending press releases to local newspapers, and television and radio stations. You’ll want to try electronic newsletters. You’ll want to look for that one thing that makes your charity something refreshing and fun for other people.
Once you’ve narrowed down the massive field to the top three for your charity, you’re ready to move to step four.
Step Four: Create a Marketing Plan
Creating a marketing plan is hard work. I won’t get into much detail here about the process. There are plenty of resources online to get you started and I might write another article later using my personal experience as examples. What I will cover today, however, are the reasons for creating a marketing plan.
Your marketing plan should outline what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, who will be doing it, what it should cost, how long it will take, and what results you expect to see from doing it. Using your three advertising niches, you need to pay special attention to ensure each of them receives equal playing time and are as consistent as possible. Without a marketing plan, you’ll never be able to stay on track and you won’t be giving each niche a fair chance to be successful.
It’s important to note that marketing plans are subject to change any given day. They should never be etched in stone and you should never expect one marketing plan to solve every problem. But, what they can do for you is make life a whole lot easier, realistic and more streamlined. Here are a few tips to help you.
- Consistency is key to any element in marketing. In other words, be very decisive and extremely predictable.
- If something’s not working as expected, try revamping on the fly or eliminate it all together. In other words, always be willing to modify your plan.
- When uncertain of marketing costs, aim higher rather than lower. In other words, financially plan on the high side and try to stay on the low side.
- Look at your marketing plan every day to make sure you’re on the right track. In other words, don’t miss being predictable because you forgot to be predictable.
- When all else fails, start over. In other words, if your plan is falling apart don’t be afraid to trash it and start fresh.
One of my pet peeves when it comes to drafting a marketing plan is having someone shoot it down before it even gets off the ground. No matter how many times I say, this isn’t set in stone; let’s just try it for a month and see what’s working before trashing the whole thing,
occasionally I run into people who absolutely refuse to try anything new. I call them “last place people.” If you are a last place person, I apologize in advance for this next statement.
Last place people are usually among the last to do anything because they need a guarantee that it will work and if you’re surrounded by them today, do your best to go around them and team up with people who aren’t afraid of new experiences. You have to be willing to try new things, even if those things are not free and will require some work. Don’t let last place people hold you or the charity back any longer.
Before you get too excited about new experiences, I’ll remind you that you have to remain predictable. Don’t take risks that leave you stuck at a dead end if they don’t work out. Always carefully calculate the risk and plan the quickest route back to the starting point in case the risk quickly outgrows the potential. That’s hard to do sometimes, but worth the trouble every time.
Step Five: Form Relationships
With your marketing plan ready for action and you eager to try it out, it’s time to build relationships with people so you can measure the success and seamlessly adjust each marketing element as necessary. I’ll put it like this, if the board of directors agrees that the latest newsletter is the best newsletter they’ve ever read, gaining permission to send it is easy. But, if you send it out and only the board of directors are signed up for the newsletter… well, I’ll stop there to save myself the embarrassment. Instead I’ll just say that you need more people to hear you than those who always hear you. Forming relationships with other people is how you do that.
I’ll use social networking as an example for how you might form relationships with other people. SKIP has a Facebook page. We were using it similar to how we used Twitter. What I didn’t tell you earlier is that mixed in with all of the wonderful facts, questions, answers to questions, quotes, stories and other interesting tidbits of information, we also used both of them for blatant advertising. Yep, that’s right, we were always trying to raise money and support for the cause and sometimes that meant sharing something that looked, smelled and tasted exactly like a paid advertisement without the price tag. One advertisement was entirely about signing up for the free monthly newsletter, where we always provided a care package tip, and also tried to raise money and support for the cause. The newsletter reached more than 400 subscribers at its peak, growing from only 100 or so a year before.
Using social networking to build relationships with people all over the world also helped ensure that they found out all of the great things happening with the organization the same day. In very simple language, we were using our 100% free advertising niche to keep SKIP very much alive. We weren’t the first to use social networking in this manner by any means, but it was working for us all the way up until we quit using it as much. That goes back to consistency. When we were consistently trying to improve, just about everything was good. When we stopped being consistent, more and more fell apart.
Step Six: Realize When Enough Is Enough
I’ve harped about being consistent for just about the entire article. Sometimes though, being consistent still doesn’t help you achieve your marketing goal. That’s when you need to realize that maybe it’s not inconsistency that’s killing your motivation. Maybe it’s that you’re doing something that you’re out of ideas for or otherwise just isn’t working. Again, I’ll return to social networking as the example.
SKIP has a YouTube account. A few videos were uploaded, but not one received a significant number of views. None of them went viral, which sucks knowing how much work went into each one. But, rather than quit wasting time with YouTube when we noticed it wasn’t making the slightest impact, we (well okay, I) continued editing and uploading videos until one day I just got bored doing that. Probably not the most useful way I could have spent my time, but I didn’t see that until much later.
You need to know when to say, enough is enough.
Saying it too late may result in backtracking for a very long time. Saying it too early may result in many missed opportunities. The best time to say it is when you feel that there really is no reason to continue despite your efforts thus far, whether that’s because of no ideas, poor results, risk outweighing potential, time constraints or financial limitations. After the YouTube swing and miss, swing and miss, swing and miss I finally realized that I really should have moved on after the third video. But, I hoped things would get better. Sometimes you just have to accept that maybe this particular direction isn’t the best fit for you. Luckily for SKIP, my multiple YouTube strikeouts didn’t cost any money.
With that, enough is enough. Feel free to use the comment section below to ask any questions or say something nice.