Today’s Tips for NGOs 021315

Since launching this blog for NGOs and nonprofits (and even small businesses because after all you’re all businesses), I’ve been encouraging you to develop marketing plans because they constitute your precise roads to fulfilling all of your goals both outreach and fundraising.

Additionally, you should periodically review them with your colleagues and conduct reality checks regarding issues and your approaches to dealing with them.

In an article titled “10 Questions to Fine-Tune Your Marketing Strategy,” Terry Tanker listed the following points for consideration. The concepts were formulated for small businesses but nonprofits could certainly benefit from them as well. I’ve added NGO terminology where its clarity would help.

1. Who is the consumer of your products and services? Who are the local and global stakeholders who must be reached for your mission to be achieved?

2. How do your products and services fit the group(s) you’ve identified? How will stakeholders use the information that you possess?

3. How do your major competitors communicate to customers/prospects? How do other NGOs address their missions?

4. What information will make customers/prospects believe in the benefits of our products and services? How will you present your mission and projects to a wide range of stakeholders?

5. Does your company have a personality or a brand that separates us from competitors? Does your NGO have a clearly identifiable brand, image and logo that sets you apart from others?

6. What do you want the customer/prospect to do when they see, hear, or read our marketing message? How do you expect stakeholders to react after you’ve presented your message to them? What are their next steps?

7. Have you established measurements whenever and wherever possible for our program? How will you know when your NGO has reached a short-term or long-term goal?

8. Have you done enough research on our existing customers? Have you sufficiently researched the issue and potentially interested stakeholders?

9. Have you established a database of customers/prospects? Are you keeping accurate files on your research and stakeholders?

10. Do you know enough about social media? Indeed. The world hinges of social media usage.

Devote time and energy to fine-tuning your marketing, outreach and fundraising.

Consumers are known for buying at nonprofit web stores, which are used to generate additional funds for their work, according to nptechforgood.com. For example, according to Shop.org’s annual Holiday 2014 Pre-Holiday Retailer and Consumer Study, two out of five US consumers started their winter holiday shopping in October and online shoppers plan to spend 16% more than brick-and-mortar shoppers during the holiday season on gifts, decorations, greeting cards, and food. All told, online shoppers were expected to spend an average of $931.75. Conscious consumers channel some of their spending power into creating good in the world by shopping at these or similar online stores.

UNICEF Market

Ten Thousand Villages

St. Jude’s Giftshop

Smithsonian Shop

Sierra Club Store

Sevenly

SERRV Store

(RED) Shop

Punjammies

Peacekeeper Cause-Metics

Visit their websites to gauge your opportunities. NGOs should consider selling products and trinkets through their websites to boost their fundraising.

For health NGOs, biomedical engineers at Columbia University developed a smartphone attachment that brings inexpensive HIV tests to remote regions. The device turns a smartphone into a lab that can test human blood for the virus that causes AIDS or the bacteria that cause syphilis. The device is a dongle that attaches to the headphone jack, and requires no separate batteries. An app on the phone reads the results. The dongle contains a lab on a chip. It consists of a one-time-use cassette — which has tiny channels as thin as a human hair — and a pump, which is operated by a mechanical button and draws blood from an inlet through the channels. Boost your outreach by investigating this useful and lifesaving device.

Contact me for more ideas and guidance.

For a global view of what NGOs are doing, please visit my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/BoostingNGOOutreach