Here’s a question that might make you uncomfortable: When was the last time you thought about marketing as something more than a tool to support fundraising?
If you’re like many nonprofit leaders, the answer is probably “never.” And that’s exactly the problem we’re tackling in this week’s episode of Changemaker Conversations.
For too long, the nonprofit sector has been thinking way too small about marketing. We’ve relegated it to a support function for the fundraising department, treating it as a necessary evil to convince donors to give rather than recognizing its true potential as a strategic lever that can advance every aspect of your mission.
It’s time to change that narrative. Marketing isn’t just about fundraising—it’s about building awareness, recruiting volunteers, strengthening partnerships, diversifying revenue streams, and ultimately driving the social change your organization exists to create.
The Problem: Marketing as a Fundraising Afterthought
Walk into most nonprofit organizations and you’ll find marketing tucked away in a corner, understaffed and underbudget, focused almost exclusively on donor communications. The prevailing mindset? “Marketing serves fundraising so that fundraising can fund our mission.”
This approach is not only limiting—it’s backwards.
Consider this: Companies selling soda invest billions in marketing and brand development. Yet nonprofits working to solve hunger, homelessness, and other critical social issues decide it’s not worth investing even a fraction of that amount to build awareness and drive engagement around work that’s infinitely more important to society.
The overhead myth touches marketing departments harder than almost anywhere else, creating a vicious cycle where organizations can’t invest in the very function that could help them break through to new levels of impact and sustainability.
The Solution: Marketing as a Mission Driver
Seven years ago, we wrote the Nonprofit Marketing Manifesto—a document that challenged the sector to think bigger about marketing’s role. In collaboration with our clients, we defined 10 commitments that organizations make when they truly embrace marketing as a mission driver.
Here are some of the key commitments that can transform how your organization approaches marketing:
Commitment #2: Develop a Strong Brand Identity Aligned with Mission and Values
Gone are the days when nonprofits can slap together a generic logo of people holding hands and call it a brand. Organizations that treat marketing as a mission driver recognize that their brand is the key that unlocks their mission and values for stakeholders. They invest in creating brands that reflect the importance of their work.
Commitment #3: Align Internally Around Your Brand
Marketing as a mission driver isn’t just the marketing department’s job—it’s everyone’s job. This means ensuring that every staff member, from direct services to finance, understands and can articulate your organization’s key messages, values, and mission. Everyone becomes a brand ambassador.
Commitment #5: Develop a Marketing Plan That Aligns with Your Strategic Plan
This might be the most important shift of all. Instead of asking “What can marketing do for fundraising?” start asking “How can marketing serve every pillar, objective, and key result in our strategic plan?” When you look at your strategic goals and consider how marketing can advance each one, you’ll discover opportunities you never knew existed.
Commitment #7: Ensure Marketing is Overseen at the Highest Level
Marketing should be an executive leadership function with a substantial budget. If your organization is serious about marketing as a mission driver, it needs to be represented in the C-suite and supported accordingly.
Commitment #8: Empower Communities Through Marketing
This commitment was particularly provocative when we first wrote it, but it’s become central to our work around strength-based communication. Organizations must reject “poverty porn” approaches that marginalize or stereotype the people they serve. Instead, lead with the strengths and opportunities inherent in the people and communites you work with.
What we’ve since proven with data is that strength-based communication approaches aren’t just more ethical—they’re just as effective, if not more so, than traditional needs-based messaging.
Who to Engage and How
Successfully leveraging marketing as a mission driver requires engagement at three levels:
Up: Help executive leadership understand this new approach to marketing. Most good leaders get it once they see the bigger picture.
Down: Educate your marketing team, fundraising partners, and other department colleagues about their role in carrying the mission forward through every stakeholder interaction.
Across: Engage everyone in your organization, including direct services staff who may not traditionally think about marketing. When marketing succeeds, everyone succeeds.
Don’t forget to engage your constituents in the marketing planning process, as well. Just like in strategic planning, the people and communities you serve should have a voice in how they want to be represented and how your organization shows up in the world.
What Organizations Stand to Gain
When nonprofits embrace marketing as a mission driver, they gain momentum toward any goal in their strategic plan. Marketing can serve:
- Fundraising goals through sophisticated donor engagement strategies
- Advocacy goals by changing how issues are perceived and building movement support
- Program growth goals by attracting participants and building community awareness
- Partnership goals by positioning your organization as a credible collaborator
- Staffing goals by strengthening your employer brand and employee value proposition
- and so much more
The possibilities are endless when you stop limiting marketing to fundraising support.
Meeting the Moment
If we were writing the Manifesto today, we’d add an 11th commitment: ensuring that marketing meets the moment while maintaining mission focus. There are times when you can be overt about aspects of your mission, and times when you need to dial things back to protect funding streams without losing sight of your core purpose.
Marketing provides the strategic flexibility to navigate these challenging waters. It’s a lever you can adjust to stay true to your mission while being smart about how you communicate in different political and social climates.
Getting Started: Two Scenarios
Scenario 1: You’re a Small Marketing Shop
If you’re a one-person marketing department or working at a smaller organization without C-suite visibility, start by quietly incorporating these principles into your work. Develop marketing plans that tie directly to your strategic plan objectives. Measure success against mission-driving metrics, not just social media followers or email list size. As you demonstrate the connection between marketing and strategic goals, you’ll naturally begin to elevate marketing’s position within your organization.
Scenario 2: You’re an Executive-Level Marketing Leader
If you have a team and visibility with senior leadership, start with education. Share the Nonprofit Marketing Manifesto with your executive team, board and marketing staff. Use it to set a new tone about marketing’s role in your organization. Create your own marketing mission statement that establishes marketing as a strategic driver rather than a tactical support function.
The Bottom Line
It’s time to stop playing small with marketing. Your organization’s work is too important to relegate marketing to an understaffed team with a shoestring budget and a narrow focus on donor acquisition.
Treat marketing as the mission-critical function it should be. Give it executive oversight, adequate budget, and strategic alignment with your biggest organizational goals. When you do, you’ll discover that marketing isn’t just a support function—it’s one of your most powerful tools for creating the social change your organization exists to drive.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
- Nonprofit Marketing Manifesto
- Nonprofit Marketing Revolution Webinar Series
- Strength-based Communication
About Changemaker Conversations
Changemaker Conversations is a podcast for nonprofit leaders who are ready to build smarter, more strategic organizations with less friction and more joy. Join hosts Alyssa Conrardy and Lindsay Mullen, Principals at Prosper Strategies, every other week as they pull you out of the day-to-day grind and refocus your attention on the big picture through candid conversations about the challenges facing nonprofit leaders today.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit changemakerconversations.com for show notes and additional resources. If you have ideas for future episode topics or guests, email us at hello@changemakerconversations.com.
