Imagine this: you’ve already started treating marketing as core mission support and created a marketing plan that is aligned with your overall strategic goals. A dedicated team or staff member is handling marketing, and leadership is engaged with the process and understands its importance.
If you’ve taken these steps, you’ve made the most challenging and most important commitments on your way to completely revolutionizing your nonprofit’s marketing.
Now what?
To take your marketing to the next level and have an even bigger impact, you should ensure your brand is aligned with your mission and values, give your stakeholders the tools they need to be your ambassadors and have methods in place to measure the impact of marketing on your mission.
Ensure your brand image and identity are in alignment with your mission and values.
If you hope to garner public support and foster a true understanding of your mission and vision, your nonprofit’s external presentation is just as important as your internal strategies and goals. And your external image must be directly aligned with those internal strategies.
You never want to leave your stakeholders wondering, “what does this organization actually do?” And you certainly don’t want to leave your them feeling disconnected from your organization due to exclusive, negative or even possibly harmful language. In recent years, many organizations have rebranded, not only to ensure they’re aligned with the scope of their mission, but also to differentiate from other organizations and better represent the stakeholders they serve.
[bctt tweet=”To garner public support and foster a true understanding of your mission and vision, your nonprofit’s external presentation is just as important as your internal strategies and goals.” username=”ProsperStrat”]If you think your organization may be in need of a rebrand, take our nonprofit rebranding needs self-assessment to determine whether rebranding may be able to help you solve your challenges.
Give your stakeholders the tools they need to be brand and mission ambassadors.
All of the people your organization comes in contact with –– from employees, to volunteers, to donors, to board members, to the people you serve and more –– have the potential to amplify your brand, your mission, and your overall impact. So, help them share your story with things like clear key messages, employee advocacy tools and a library of success stories about the people and communities your organization serves.
“The Brand IDEA: Managing Nonprofit Brands with Integrity, Democracy, and Affinity,” describes Brand Democracy as the idea that an organization trusts its members, staff, participants and volunteers to communicate their own understanding of the organization’s core identity. Customizable key messages are a crucial part of this.
Key messages are statements that succinctly explain the who, what, why and where of your organization and to what end you do your work. Who do you serve? What do you do to achieve your mission? Why do you do what you do? Where is your impact focused? What’s the intended result of your actions and focus? Ideally, these messages can be customized for each of your unique audiences, and each of your stakeholders will have the freedom of brand democracy to share their own versions of these key messages from their own perspectives.
[bctt tweet=”All of the people your organization comes in contact with –– from employees, to volunteers, to donors, to board members, to the people you serve and more –– have the potential to amplify your brand, your mission, and your impact.” username=”ProsperStrat”]Measure the impact of marketing on your mission and continually optimize your efforts to drive more social change.
The marketing plan you’ve created should not only be aligned with your organization’s strategic goals but should also clearly outline ways in which you’ll measure how your marketing tactics are delivering on those organizational goals.
Remember: measurement is not intended to pressure you or your team members into performance, and falling short of goals should never be blamed on any one person. Don’t let metrics tracking and analysis be a stressor. Instead, metrics should be viewed as teaching tools that provide opportunities to consider how each marketing strategy and tactic can continuously be improved for even greater mission impact, even the ones that are already performing well.
[bctt tweet=”Metrics should be viewed as teaching tools that provide opportunities to consider how each marketing strategy and tactic can continuously be improved for even greater mission impact.” username=”ProsperStrat”]Are you ready to make these commitments to take your nonprofit’s marketing impact to the next level? Read more about them in the Nonprofit Marketing Manifesto.
