Articles

There’s an almost endless list of things for your charity to consider when developing or polishing up a strategic marketing plan. Here are five of the most important:

1. Who are your audiences? 

Everything in marketing and comms revolves around who you wish to engage with. This, instinctively, is obvious: but can be harder to figure out than it seems. So what can you do? Start by listing all your stakeholders: your beneficiaries, partners, potential trustees, current and potential supporters. Don’t get hung up on which are most important, just write them all down without too much thought. Got that done? Right, now, how could you prioritise them? Can you batch them up in any way? They’re all important but which one or two should you focus on to begin with? You need to start somewhere. 

Now think about their needs. What problems, difficulties, issues or circumstances are they experiencing that your charity can help with? This can be an interesting exercise because whilst it’s easy to be clear about what your charity needs and offers, that’s not always the same as what somebody wants from it. A wildlife charity I worked with recently wants to recruit more members so it can continue to support and expand its project and programme work. One of their target audiences is people who are retired. But lots of charities wish to engage with that demographic so they need a way to stand out. And they were struggling to figure out how. We imagined a fictional scenario where a new grandparent wishes to actively contribute to a positive natural environment for their new grandchild. Becoming a member of this wildlife charity could help them to do that. This is a seemingly obvious example but when you’re in the marketing ‘hot seat’ it can be surprisingly difficult to make these sorts of simple connections. And it’s this kind of exercise that produces marketing ideas that will appeal directly to your audiences’ needs.

2. Who are your ‘referral partners’?

A referral partner is an organisation or person actively engaged with one or more of your audiences, and is not a competitor. With your renewed clarity about your target audiences, you can begin to think about potential referral partners. They could be a product or service provider, a public sector body or a membership organisation. In any event they will have connections to the audiences you wish to engage with. You can help them out by making introductions, and they can do the same for you. A well-organised referral partner programme can be a lovely, and often, inexpensive way for a charity to extend its influence and its impact.

3. What about your vision and objectives?

Marketing, like so many disciplines, is often about convincing people in your organisation to buy into your plan. Different people are motivated in different ways and whilst you shouldn’t conflate vision with objectives they can both serve as motivators. Setting SMART objectives is a well-known tool so I won’t dwell on that here. Where I have had notable success is with using storytelling to describe an organisation’s vision. Depending on the scope of the strategy the vision could be for your whole organisation,  for a particular area within the charity, or for your comms and marketing team.

Try framing your vision as a story of what things will look like, say, 3 or 5 years in the future. For charities, where impact and purpose are normally prioritised over  commercial/revenue-based objectives, this can be a great way to get people on board by fueling their imaginations. Try starting your vision with “it’s July 2029 and the XYZ team is planning their next 5-year marketing strategy. The last 5 years have seen a period of stellar growth in …”. Then describe what’s happened over the last 5 years, how it was achieved, and some of the issues that were overcome.

4. Your current marketing

How well will your current marketing support the objectives you’ve set for the audiences you wish to focus on? With new insights into your target audiences, you may need to consider different channels and other types of content. What do you think would be the best way to reach our ‘new grandparent’ persona? I’m seeing organisations using WhatsApp in place of email marketing and getting some great results. How well-equipped is your team to use these channels and to develop suitable content? Can you support them with training, or do you need to bring in a specialist? CharityComms’ Freelance Directory could be a good place to start.

5. How can you get buy-in from budget holders and the wider team?

I mentioned the use of story-telling to get buy-in. This worked for one of my clients who’d been a bit on the fence until then. Here are three other things that have delivered penny-dropping buy-in moments for me:

• Detailed analysis of the current situation. A decent strategy must be rooted in your charity’s current reality, as well as your desired outcomes. And when I’m supporting charities as an external consultant, I need a decent grasp of the current reality before coming up with any smart ideas… Laying out the details in an organised way of a charity’s current position can help stakeholders get on board with the changes you’re suggesting. It can be a relief to have an external person being frank, polite, and businesslike about the charity’s weaknesses and how to address them.
• Lively audience-persona workshops. Developing audience insights, as per my first point above, is often best done in a group workshop. As well as delivering ideas for the marketing plan and content, these workshops can get teams behind the plan by helping them to focus on their audiences’ needs, as well as their beneficiaries’ needs. 
• And finally, risk management. Good practice in any discipline, marketing is no exception. My preferred method is to just get going with defining a few risks and then add to the list as you go along. Put them into a table with the headings of risk, severity, likelihood, risk rating (severity x likelihood), mitigation and owner. And then present them as part of the plan.

If you’re struggling to get started on your charity’s strategic marketing plan, I’m currently offering a 1-hour planning session for £99. You’ll get a framework, some clarity on how to use it, and a head-start with defining your audience personas. Contact me by email at [email protected], or by phone/WhatsApp on 07813-894341.