Weeks away from death, 39-year-old Mike Stemrow, a financial analyst with the Chicago Board of Trade, was barely able to walk the two blocks to a neighborhood supermarket without exhaustion. Mike was dying from a lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis, a debilitating lung disease.
On the same spring morning, hundreds of miles away in Algona, Iowa, Pam Westend, a vivacious 17-year-old high school volleyball star awoke with flu-like symptoms. She fell back to sleep, awoke, began talking incoherently and experienced seizures. As an ambulance rushed her to the hospital, she fell into a coma and died from a ruptured blood vessel in her brain. On the day she was to attend her junior prom, Pam’s parents made the decision to donate her organs. Mike received her lungs.
On a Sunday morning two years later, Mike’s engaging smile graced the front page of the Chicago Sunday Sun-Times as he bounded up the stairs of the 94-floor John Hancock Center. Clad in shorts, Nikes and a t-shirt bearing Pam’s photo, he was training for Hustle Up the Hancock, a fundraising climb to the top of the Chicago landmark organized by the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago. In a week he’d lead a team of 27 climbers including members of Pam’s family up 1,632 steps to the Hancock Observatory.
Three pages of text and photos introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to Mike and Pam's amazing story of life and death, courage and triumph. At the climb, TV, radio and print reporters fought to hear Mike’s incredible story. They heard about the devastating effects of cystic fibrosis, the need for research and the sobering fact that one million people in the Chicago area suffer from lung disease.
At the time, I was the marketing director for ALAMC. Hustle Up the Hancock is an Chicago annual spectacle drawing participants from across the country and occasionally across the ocean. It’s also a critical fundraising event for the association, raising $1.3 million in 2007. But the significance of Hustle extends beyond fundraising and the work of one nonprofit.
The event dramatically illustrates the power all nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have to educate, advocate, fundraise and recruit – advance the mission – by leveraging assets that are uniquely nonprofit. These assets are the keys to exceptional nonprofit marketing.
Mike’s climb and its attendant publicity illustrate the power of several assets, but none that resonates more with the media than a personal narrative. Most NPOs have access to volunteers, clients or beneficiaries with similar fascinating, inspiring, and perhaps, courageous stories. It’s just a matter of finding them. Personal stories allow the marketer to weave in the organization’s work and mission. Instead of simply announcing an upcoming event that might generate a two-paragraph item in the local newspaper, introduce reporters to a local resident who is making a difference and you’ll get a feature-length article.
The media love to tell stories. Help them find compelling ones and you’ve found the key to unlimited publicity. Stories of personal struggles are ideal vehicles for publicizing your group’s work, mission and activities.
Every nonprofit event involves people. Switching your primary focus from issuing news releases to pitching personal stories and you’ll increase your news coverage. We increased ours eight-fold.
At ALAMC the spokesperson would receive carefully scripted message points to ensure that every second of airtime or inch of news space was used efficiently. Message points might have included a plea for more volunteers, an announcement of an upcoming event or even a thank you to a sponsor, but they always included contact information such as a web address or phone number. After the interview we tried to expand the coverage by offering photographs, interviews with specialists, interesting sidebars – virtually anything to make the story better and our role bigger.
Story telling never gets to be old news. Each year we used personal stories to publicize bike rides, stair climbs, health conferences or social events and to introduce new programs. We never abandoned traditional news releases, we just ramped up media coverage by capitalizing on a key asset.
In addition to local and national newspaper coverage, Mike's story was broadcast to five million viewers in 35 TV markets nationwide. Viewers learned about the stair climb, cystic fibrosis and the work of the Association. They saw an interview with the CEO, caught glimpses of 4,000 climbers pushing themselves to the limit, watched 343 firefighters memorializing those lost in 9/11 and received live reports from TV news personalities making the climb. It was a heady time – and uniquely nonprofit.
Building a strategic marketing plan around a nonprofit's assets is the premise of this blog. NPOs can never fulfill their potential if we pursue traditional marketing strategies that were developed for the retail environment, dependent on huge advertising outlays for the purpose of maximizing income and defeating competition..
Nonprofits enjoy a powerful set of marketing tools that are unavailable to corporations but priceless to charities. By building a marketing plan around narratives, partnerships, volunteers, credibility and other largely overlooked assets you can dramatically enhance your organization’s performance. Not listed on balance sheets, nor tied to budget size, these exclusive resources are the secret weapon for taking nonprofits to new marketing heights.
Friends of mine who work for nonprofits often complain that a lack of money prevents them from promoting worthwhile events. Whether hawking a fundraiser, seminar or new social service, they long for more money to get their message out. Exposing the organization’s work to more people, they argue, leads to better attendance, greater influence in shaping public policy, more financial security and ultimately, a stronger, more vibrant nonprofit.
Of course, money helps. Deep pockets buy newspaper advertisements and splashy TV campaigns, ad agencies and even Hollywood celebrities. Money is a valuable asset, but the same nonprofit colleagues who wish for large budgets tend to overlook assets that are far more powerful, more potent and more dynamic than those found in the corporate sector. A toe-to-toe comparison of budgets might suggest nonprofit resources are woefully inadequate, but deeper inspection reveals that even the smallest nonprofit has the marketing firepower to make the bluest blue-chip corporation green with envy.
Without exploiting these strengths, it's difficult for nonprofits to fulfill their potential. Without using their inherent advantages, they are relegated to ill-fitting traditional marketing that looks anemic by corporate standards. A cornerstone tenet of traditional marketing says advertising is good and more advertising is better. Swallowing that bromide could send any nonprofit marketer into a serious depression.
I once subscribed to the conventional wisdom that nonprofits were moneyless and therefore relatively powerless. Now I know better. During the last ten years, I’ve come to appreciate the marketing advantages inherent in nonprofits – and discarded the traditional marketing strategies I learned in text books and business school, and practiced for many years as a consultant.
Traditional strategies are conceived using a set of business concepts -- income, competition, market share and consumption – that are jarringly different from a nonprofit environment. As the old adage goes, you can't build a strong house on a weak foundation, in this case, a marketing toolbox constructed for another purpose.
Years ago I was the VP of marketing for a bank with a multi-million dollar communication budget. Later, I ran a marketing consulting firm for twenty years managing both for-profit, not-for-profit and political clients. For seven years, I was marketing director of the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago (later the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago), and for the last four, Executive Director of Marketing for the University of Illinois at Chicago. I can say without hesitation, it’s much easier to market short-pocketed nonprofits than for-profits with million dollar marketing budgets. Success comes from discarding conventional wisdom and adopting the new nonprofit paradigm described in this book.
A friend gently reminded me that her nonprofit is much smaller and its name less recognizable than the American Lung Association, Habitat for Humanity or the Red Cross. While that may be true, the beauty of the new paradigm is that the fuel for smart marketing is not limited to large nonprofits. These assets are present when three people get together with a nonprofit mission. Mike’s face wasn’t splashed across the front page because he was an American Lung Association volunteer or because we twisted the writer’s arm. The Chicago Sun-Times would have reported his story if he were walking five miles to raise money for the local library.
This blog outlines the hidden assets that are key to successful marketing. You’ll learn how to leverage them to achieve your goals, and you’ll find step-by-step instructions to give your nonprofit the visibility, influence and success it richly deserves.
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