Number 2: Strategic Positioning

What’s the hole in the marketplace that you will uniquely fill and live? There is a lot that nonprofits can learn from the strategic approach to communications that consumer brands use to convince consumers to buy their products.

It’s really about defining your nonprofit brand with the intent to capture emotional engagement from a specific audience. I have discovered that most nonprofit development directors and CMO’s don’t think strategically about how their brands can drive fundraising.

Here are the five steps to doing just that.

1) The first thing you need to do is define your target audience. Once you do that, ideas will start to flow. It’s not okay to say that everyone is a potential donor or that everyone in my region with money is a potential donor. It’s not true and that’s no way to connect emotionally with a group of prospective donors. What you want to avoid is the idea of mass because mass is dull and boring. You need focus. This requires some digging to understand the hopes and dreams of your donor, potential donor, their family and their friends. What is their mindset? What is their worldview?

2) Think deeply about your organization’s vision, mission and values. Find an expression of them that is simple and connects with the target audience that you’ve identified. What is the high order change you’re trying to make?

Seth Godin gives a simple example of this in his book This Is Marketing.“Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill bit. They want a quarter inch hole.” The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. No one wants a hole. What people want is the shelf that will go on the wall once they drill the hole. Actually, what they want is how they’ll feel once they see how uncluttered everything is, when they put their stuff on the shelf that went on the wall. Now that there is a quarter inch hole. But wait…They also want the satisfaction of knowing they did it themselves. Or perhaps the increase in status they’ll get when their spouse adores the work. Or the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the bedroom isn’t a mess, and that it feels safe and clean. People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill bit. They want to feel safe and respected.”

This is your high order benefit. It’s hard work and a really good idea to engage a large cross section of your organization in this process because that will accomplish a couple of things for you. First, you’ll get good ideas and thinking from a range of different disciplines. Second, you’ll get broad ownership and buy-in which will come in very handy later in the process.

3) Find an expression of your positioning that resonates with both your internal and external target audience. Getting this right is likely to involve qualitative or quantitative research; or both. Don’t fall into the trap of accepting a golf clap as an endorsement of your idea. You need an enthusiastic and visceral response from your audiences.

Words and feelings matter a lot here. That’s the reason more and more nonprofits are turning to pros to help them articulate a strategic positioning in a compelling way. It is, after all, the copy that serves as a summation of all that you do and a call to action for a donation.

Here is a brief format for expressing a strategic positioning. It’s borrowed from the classic template established by P&G.

TO: (Target audience definition)

(ORGANIZATION/BRAND) is the brand of (CATEGORY OR CONTEXT)

THAT: (Benefit statement)

BECAUSE: (Reasons to believe)

SO THAT: (High order or aspirational benefit)

4) Expose and educate your internal constituents. Every person in your organization should be living and breathing your brand. This accomplishes a few things. It gets everyone on the same page as to what your organization is really about. People start speaking a common language. And it spreads.

It also serves to energize people and their conversations about your brand. As a result, you’ll find new ideas emerging with higher degree of enthusiasm. Marketing buzzwords for this sort of thing are “organizational alignment” and “operationalizing the brand” and so forth. But it’s really just getting everyone on the same page enthusiastically.

5) Go to market. All of your communications whether direct mail, email, newsletters, posts, web updates, events, cases for support — all of it should be on strategy. In other words it should deliver against and reinforce what the brand stands for and represents.

When you define your brand in this way, you’ve created a central idea that will serve as connective tissue as you start to tell stories across all different media. Your communications will have focus and consistency. And your entire organization is living it. That’s a big win that will lead to increased giving for years to come.