For-profit Example: Pops in Arcadia, Oklahoma has a niche of selling more types of soda than anyone else. They are in a tiny town, yet are always crowded with customers. See: Route66.com

Many nonprofit leaders think adding new programs and services makes them more competitive. They try to imitate the latest trends they see other nonprofits following, jumping on almost any new bandwagon. They mistakenly believe doing more will mean getting more from their supporters and attracting new segments of clients.

The problem with “more-is-better thinking” is, it usually ends up creating mission drift in your organization and saps your nonprofit’s ability to maintain doing what you already do well.  Take a look at what your organization does, can you explain it in a few seconds, or do you need 45 minutes and a nonprofit jargon dictionary to describe it? If that’s the case, then maybe you are doing too much.

You can distinguish yourself from your competition better by doing less and doing it better than anyone else. You can make a bigger impact by taking the leading role in your niche, by “owning” your category. You can niche-slap your competition. Instead of trying to tread water in a sea of other nonprofits who are also thrashing water trying to stay afloat, you can make contact with a smaller niche that’s easier to reach using guerrilla tactics anyway. When you know your niche, your organization will become more effective at reaching people and they will become more responsive to your higher quality programs and services. So, define your niche instead of expanding what you offer.

Five benefits of having a clearly defined niche:
1. Builds a stellar reputation for your organization. When people in your target think of your organization, they will think of how well you fit their needs and how blessed they are in having contact with your nonprofit. Think of the Special Olympics, they have a clearly defined niche. Ask anyone involved with Special Olympics, they will tell you they hold a deep reverence for the reputation of that organization. As they should.

2. Separates your organization apart from others. If your organization is known for making a difference by doing a narrowly defined task, your nonprofit becomes the kind donors and volunteers notice and want to support. There are many kinds of housing development charities, but there is only one Habitat for Humanity.

3. Gives more access to the target audience. When you become an expert in the needs of a concentrated group, doors start to open to deeper relationships in that community.  A nonprofit museum for the blind would interest the blind and others who serve the blind community. They would be more likely to recommend the blind-focused nonprofit, and may even share data about their clients with a trusted blind museum organization.

4. Brings almost instant credibility: Your knowledge of the community’s needs and the credibility that comes from your reputation causes the target audience to trust you more readily. When your organization builds credibility in your niche, you could become the default authority about the group you serve. Marriage health counselors might be able to help couples of all kinds, but military couples may be more likely to listen to the advice of a military marriage counselor. When stress on the marriages of military couples makes the news, who will reporters call for an expert opinion?

5. Clarifies your tasks. Instead of multiplying the number of things your organization does, you develop a sharp focus on a limited number of tasks and become a stronger organization. The keen focus leads you to become increasingly better at what you do. Who is better at rescuing Labrador Retrievers? A dog rescue nonprofit, or a Labrador Retriever Rescue? Since Labradors are the most popular breed of dogs, that nonprofit would help a lot of dogs.

The book you need most for your nonprofit isn’t available at your public library or local book store; it is one you need to write yourself. You can write the book on the people you want to reach by doing original research. Doing primary research isn’t just a nice idea, it is vitally important to the success of your organization. Primary research doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, but it is not free. To be effective, your organization will have to make an investment in it.

Here are a few benefits gained from doing primary research:

• Helps you while defining the purpose of your marketing.
• Listening can keep you from making stupid mistakes. Ask your spouse.
• Gives you a realistic picture of your present situation.
• Identifies and creates competitive advantage.
• Information fuels creativity.
• Helps identify and segment your target audiences.
• Clarifies your niche in the market.
• Provides insights into how to differentiate your products, programs, and services.
• Keeps you in touch with trends in the changing marketplace.
• Useful in developing your nonprofit’s identity.
• Gives you the outsider perspective, seeing through the eyes of others.
• Gauges perceptions, satisfaction, and awareness.
• Clarifies which marketing mix and media channels are best.
• Changes mistaken assumptions in your organization.
• Beneficial for prioritizing budget planning.
• Makes practical use of response data, sales metrics, membership, and donor records.

by Chris Forbes and Frank Adkins

Fundraising success is not only about what you do to get people to give. It is what you do to make your nonprofit an organization worthy of receiving the support of people. For your cause to succeed, you need to find a lot of people who care about your work. You want the people who support you to do more than write checks, you want them to take ownership of the mission themselves. This can not happen until you are thinking from the perspective of your donors. The Golden Rules below will guide you as you do development for your organization.  Success will require your time and effort, but as you practice and become more familiar with these rules, it will become second nature.

Rule 1: Know Your Donors : The basis of good fundraising is the treatment and cultivation of donors and the ability to ask them to support your organization in proportion to their ability to give. The urgent need for your nonprofit is to know your donors as well as you possibly can. The foundation for having this kind of relationship is quality research and good information. Having a good knowledge of your donors and their contributing habits is key to persuading them to donate their money.

Rule 2: Educate Your Donors: Guerrillas know the meaning of the adage “What people are not up on, they are down on.” They make sure they educate their supporters, because an educated donor is a happy donor. It is tough for people to give their money to an organization when they have fears that the money may be spent unwisely. Some of your donors may have the mistaken notion that giving to your nonprofit is merely fueling a maintenance program that never really solves any problems if you do not keep them updated about your progress and the impact they are making through you. Who wants to give to an impersonal maintenance program? Guerrillas reassure their supporters about why giving to their organization is a smart move. Education calms fears and improves communication.

Rule 3: Help Donors Find Personal Fulfillment: People want to make a difference. They are seeking personal fulfillment through supporting your cause. Nonprofits that are aware of the psychology of their supports are far ahead of other organizations when it comes to attracting support. When your organization can find a way to help people solve their problem of finding fulfillment though charity work, they will be more willing to jump on board to help your cause. They support you because they can feel good about themselves while making the world a better place. The easy part for them is; they only have to write a check. The hard part for you is coming up with a creative way to show the need for donations in a way that is also compelling to the perceived needs of the donor.

Rule 4: Build Trusting Donor Relationships: A recent national poll showed that a whopping 53% of Americans say they sense a “feeling of deception” about marketing. This distrust of marketing is also transferred to the outreach marketing conducted by nonprofits. Some organizations do exaggerate their results and overstate needs when trying to recruit support. Guerrillas are honest in all their marketing because they know that even if your marketing is 99% honest and 1% dishonest, that 1% will stand out in the minds of their target audience. All the marketing spin in the world will not make up for the smallest exaggeration of the truth in the minds of your donors.

Rule 5: Respect Your Donors: Guerrillas know that there’s a world of difference between donor care and donor attention. Many companies lavish attention upon their donors, but only Guerrillas excel at caring and knowing how to make them feel sincerely cared for.

Rule 6: Focus on Current Supporters: Why do you think that it costs five times as much to raise a donation from a new donor than from an existing one? The answer is easy…because the price is high to find a new donor while the price is free to find an existing one. Isn’t it true that it is easier and less expensive to renew a magazine subscription than to attract a new subscriber? That is why it is so important to keep in touch with your current donors. This has the effect over time of constantly increasing donations while reducing your marketing investment. You already have a list of your donors. Go back to it often to update information on them, keep communicating with them so when it’s time to give, it will be easy for you to ask. Donations may start off low, but over time those repeat donors will give more as you develop that relationship. It does not come easy, but you are practicing great guerrilla marketing to help that average donor become a major contributor.

Rule 7: Make Giving Fun: You have a serious mission. The problems are real and you care about them. You want people to grasp the depth of the problems and take ownership of making the solutions happen. Your Guerrilla marketing is outlined by a serious and specific marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun while raising money. It is no secret that your organization has to do something different to get the attention of donors. Nothing gets people’s attention better than a little fun!

Some researchers claim 90% of decisions are made on the subconscious level. Understanding what makes your volunteers tick will give you an incredible guerrilla edge by using psychology. You can learn to maintain volunteer interest–almost reading their minds.

Nonguerrillas only understand about 10% of the reasons that make volunteering attractive to people. Guerrillas know about the rest of the motivational iceberg that is beneath the surface and they use that understanding to deepen the interest of the people they want to recruit.

Here’s a list of 75 reasons people will never tell you they are volunteering. Heck, they may not even be able to tell themselves.

1. To find a personal mission in life
2. To give back
3. To make a difference
4. To change the world
5. To mobilize support
6. To be relevant
7. To belong to a greater cause
8. To legitimize financial support given to a charity
9. To experience spiritual renewal or new power
10. To express love toward mankind
11. To overcome fears
12. To seek the approval of others
13. To appreciate the blessings one has
14. To be patriotic
15. To be loyal to a cause
16. To sacrifice, go beyond one’s self
17. To make right for wrongs committed in the past
18. To have made an impact before death
19. To turn away from worries and responsibilities at home to find inner peace
20. To be compassionate
21. To be able to boast to others
22. To express one’s religious beliefs
23. To overcome guilt for wasting time, energy, or resources in the past
24. To go back to a battlefield with a purpose that is life-giving
25. To try to make use of a language learned in school
26. To learn some new things and grow intellectually
27. To be an expert on the subject matter related to the cause
28. To find one’s self
29. To pretend to be somebody else
30. To be true to what one stands for
31. To see how one’s core values hold up
32. To appreciate one’s daily life back home more
33. To break with routines
34. To experience the thrill of being outside one’s culture
35. To feel what it is like to be a philanthropist
36. To find solutions to problems back home
37. To have an experience to tell others about
38. To take a break from everyday activities of home and work–a temporary escape
39. To confirm one has made the right investments with one’s time
40. To see first hand something that might be historic
41. To see what the circumstances are in other places
42. To gauge resources needed to complete the cause
43. To asses the status of the cause
44. To spy on the “other side” of another cause
45. To get “outside the box”
46. To join the crowd
47. To impress other people at work
48. To have a more interesting life
49. To imitate others who have been models of behavior
50. To respond to the many calls and invitations to volunteer
51. To check the feasibility of being more deeply involved in a cause
52. To see if sustainable change really is possible
53. To believe in a cause more deeply
54. To experience hope by seeing people helped
55. To make one’s own unique contribution
56. To see the rest of the country or world
57. To legitimize one’s political views
58. To have a vacation with a purpose
59. To relieve tensions
60. To experience a “different world”
61. To have a controlled diversion of events, tastes, touch, etc
62. To use one’s imagination
63. To compare other ways of living with one’s own background
64. To compete with other causes
65. To be passionate about something and feel good
66. To be amused by strange people, places, and customs
67. To spend quality time with friends, family, church members, etc
68. To take good pictures and videos
69. To have great stories to tell back home
70. To have souvenirs of other places
71. To go to as many places as one can
72. To go more places than others do
73. To shop in places, ways and for things that are not possible back home
74. To see beautiful things, places, people etc.
75. To explore new ways of communicating

There is no such thing as a “silver bullet” social media tactic that will save your organization. Every situation varies depending on the nature of your work and your intended outcomes. Volunteer mobilization strategies don’t have the same as issues fundraising or advocacy online. But there are some strategies for using social media that apply in most situations for maximum guerrilla impact. Below are 10 strategic principles you can use to get the most out of your social media outreach.

1. Message: In order for your message to have any impact for your cause, it has to contain your message. As in all advertising, a funny or interesting video, even if it becomes a very popular online phenomenon, if it doesn’t get people to take action, it is useless to your nonprofit.

2. Meme: The message of your viral outreach needs to be easy to grasp without explanation and easy to pass on to others.

3. Meeting: Find the media that your target audience likes to use and go where the people are. Media researchers estimate 60% of adults belong to a social network, but most only belong to one. Spread your virus in a variety of networks.

4. Manage: Funnel the contacts you make in social media toward your website or blog. Make your website the second tier of your social media strategy. The third tier, when people register with your site. Mobilize the people who sign up on your site to take action and help spread the message.

5. Material: Give people the content they need to pass on your viral marketing. Provide assets for your audience to make their own videos, allow them to put their picture in an e-card, anything that helps to put them into the story line and send to their contacts.

6. Mobilize: Make it easy to pass your content through word-of-mouse. Choose the video tools that allow you to embed your videos directly into Facebook, blogs, etc. Social bookmark tabs need to post you link and teaser copy into other sites.

7. Medium: Make your content a good match for the medium. Long videos will not be watched as much as shorter ones. Break up paragraphs in articles and write lead sentences remembering they may also serve as the teaser copy for the links when they are visible on other sites.

8. Marketing: Your content needs to have links back to your sites and copy that promotes your organization. Don’t leave the “More Info” section blank; include good copy using your key words and links.

9. Metrics: Watch the statistics. Check not only how many people view, forward, or Tweet your content, also track how many click through and take the next step with your message.

10. Momentum: Start the ball rolling by forwarding your content to the networks of your intended target. Leave room in Tweet messages for people to “re-tweet” (RT) your messages. Prime the commenting by starting the first comment on links and posts you put in other networks. Push your virus into new networks until it takes off on its own.

Guerrillas know that every point of contact your organization has with people is marketing. Your mission statement touches everything you do and is seen by everyone you connect with. With something that important it makes sense to look at it with an eye for marketing. Why is it that mission statements are often written academically or by committees? Shouldn’t they should be written with the intent of using them as persuasive communication? Even the Declaration of Independence, though drafted by a committee, was written by a single person with a knack for words, Thomas Jefferson. Your mission statement should be written with no less thought than the most expensive advertising campaign receives. You wouldn’t expect a Super Bowl advertisement to be written by lawyers would you? Restating your purpose with a marketing mindset can help you connect better with people.  Ask yourself, if your mission statement came up as the results in an internet search engine (a very likely scenario), would you want to click it? What would be the key words people used to find you anyway?

The Three Sentence Guerrilla Mission Statement

Here’s how you write your Guerrilla Marketing mission statement. The three things that will make your organization the most successful are, 1) your passion, 2) what you are best at, and 3) a clear sense of what is the bottom line impact you are trying to make. Sit down and struggle with all the data you have and cull everything you know about what your organization does and is down into just three sentences.

Write three sentences that describe your organization:

1. Why do you exist? (Make sure you are talking about your passions.)
2. What does your organization do? (This is where you talk about what you are best at.)
3. What difference does it make? (Tell what is the impact your organization is making)

They need to be shorter sentences. Putting too much information in your phrases will make your audience’s attention spans start to wander. Imagine you are going to use this as your “elevator speech.” Suppose you have just gotten on an elevator and as soon as the doors close, another person in the elevator asks you to tell them about your organization. You have to tell them in the time it takes to go from the first floor to the second floor what they need to know about your nonprofit. If you can’t say who you are, what you do, and why it is important in :30 seconds, you may be too complicated to become the subject of people’s conversations. You may have bigger problems than marketing. We wish we could write your statements for you, but you are a Guerrilla, you have to do it yourself, the sentences need to come out of your passion. After you have written them, you can enlist help in word-smithing and polishing them. But getting the statements first from your heart will change you forever. These statements become the tools you use you can use in your progression toward unimagined success for your nonprofit.

Example: March of Dimes

1. Why do you exist? Our mission is to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth, and infant mortality.
2. What do you do? We carry out this mission through research, community services, education and advocacy to save babies’ lives.
3. What difference does it make? March of Dimes researchers, volunteers, educators, outreach workers and advocates work together to give all babies a fighting chance against the threats to their health: prematurity, birth defects, low birth weight.

Your niche tells people who you are and determines who you will reach. What you do, and the difference you make in the lives of the people determines your positioning. Choose your niche and you choose your future. If you don’t know what your organization stands for in the minds of the people you want to reach you will fall for anything that looks like an opportunity. Here are a few issues to consider as you decide what niche is right for your organization.

1. Unique: Can you stand out with the niche you select? Don’t choose a niche that is already overloaded with competition, find one that is original. If you are the only one in your niche, you will be much more attractive to the people in the segment. Choose a niche that is big enough for you to serve, but not one that is so large it attracts a flood of imitators.

2. Reachability: Can you really find the people in the target audience? There is no purpose in choosing a unique target if you can’t really connect with them. You may believe you can make a difference in the lives of a group of people you have identified in demographic research, but make sure you can actually spot them on the ground.

3. Substantial: Is the segment large enough to justify the amount of focus you are putting on it? This is a tough call because there are a lot of important causes and needy people. Niche marketing helps assure nonprofits reach under-served communities by encouraging diversification between organizations. But if your target group isn’t very large or significant in some other measurable way, it will be difficult to attract attention and support for your cause.

4. Responsiveness: Do people in the niche want or need what you are offering? Marketing never works well when you are selling what you happen to be making. It only works when you are offering solutions people really need. Discover the needs of people and link your message to the solutions to those needs.

5. Believable: Does what you offer sound plausible to the people in the segment? Can the cause be perceived as a real problem to them? Do you have enough expertise to do what you claim you can do? Is there a track record somewhere that shows you know how you could plausibly solve the problem? Can you articulate the process you will use to attain success? Do people think the product will actually work?

6. Sustainable Impact: Can you really change things? Ultimately, your cause needs to make a difference. Some organizations exist that make long range plans and raise a lot of money initially, only to fizzle out and disappear because they can’t create sustainability. When you can’t demonstrate results, volunteers stop volunteering, funding dries up, and conflict in the organization heats up. Begin with clear, obtainable outcomes in mind.

7. Donor support: Will donors get behind the cause? If what you are doing in your niche is perceived as an eccentric personal project, it will be difficult to find financial partners. To make your ideas work, you will need the generous support of many people. Make sure you have the foundation for financial support to get the job done. Is the problem large enough to attract people who will be loyal to the cause and support it? Even the most important ideas can fail if donors don’t believe in them.

Niche marketing is the opposite of mass marketing. Don’t stop with only refining your focus to a narrow audience. Keep your focus on offering a limited range of high-quality programs, products and services. Don’t expand the number of things your organization does, do what you do best. Know who you are and what your niche is and own that space in the marketplace.

The chart below shows how niche markets compare to mass markets.

How can our ministry reach the young adult generation? Has that question started to take over your organization yet? Everywhere you go, it seems ministry and nonprofit leaders are in near panic trying to figure out the solution to the “young adult problem.” Many are congratulating themselves on their forward-thinking strategies for reaching the next generation. The problem is, reaching young adults is only one of the challenges your organization needs to address. And the questions are going to come faster as the next decade unfolds. Will your organization be prepared to solve other big problems that are just as urgent?
Here is a sample of other facts and questions your organization will face in the coming years:

• Competition from other nonprofits for donors and volunteers has already increased by 65 percent in the past decade andshows no sign of slowing. How will your organization remain viable with increased competition for donors and volunteers?
• Starting this year (2010), birthrates are shifting to “minority majorities,” and non-Caucasian groups will need more promi-nent representation in your organization’s leadership. How will you involve and recruit these new leaders?
• What will your organization do as the population of people age 65 and older increases by two-thirds in the next 10 years?
• In the next five years, new forms of communication will proliferate through mobile technology. GPS-based advertising will be commonplace. How can your organization afford to invest in new media with an already overtaxed communications budget?

There is no need to panic, as some are doing. Read the rest on the Outcomes site

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2010

Looking at the marketing of most organizations is like standing on the sidewalk watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Marketing promotions, events, and activities pass by like parade floats; some are more impressive in design than others, but the parade continues.

The individual items in the parade may not be related to one another, but they are all entertaining in their own way. The parade goes by, float by float…or, rather event by event, promotion by promotion. It’s quite a spectacle to watch.

Then, as the Santa Claus float appears (the end of the year), the marketer knows the parade is almost over until next year. No one seems to stop to ask what all the marketing activity parading by in the nonprofit’s schedule has to do with the results on the bottom line. As long as the promotional items look good (or, at least, look better than last year’s stuff) everyone is satisfied.

What nonprofit marketers need is a parade master who develops a theme for all the marketing they do and leverages the momentum from one marketing activity to the next with the benefit of the organization’s objectives always in mind.

The parade master for your marketing plan is a Guerrilla Marketing calendar. Create a document with 52 lines, one for every week in the year. In five columns across the list each 1) number of the week 2) thrust or emphasis for that week 3) marketing weapons used 4) budget for the week 5) record your results at the end of the week (i.e.; responses, dollars, rating scale, etc). Now all your marketing activity can be seen at a glance, and as a Guerrilla, you can organize your parade of marketing actions into a Guerrilla Marketing victory march for your organization.

Before you conduct primary research, make sure you are aware of what data already exists that can help you in your cause in the form of secondary information. Librarians may not look like dangerous people, but they are because they are dangerously savvy about where to look for the information that could burst the bubble of your bright, but mistaken ideas, or debunk the pet theory you have been nursing.

On the other hand, they might lead you right to the source information that opens up your mind to a new idea that becomes a tremendous advantage for your organization. Market research can help you test your ideas before you sink your time, energy, and money into taking a new direction. A librarian is a good person to have on your marketing team.

There is a gold mine of information available to help your nonprofit if you are prepared to do a little digging at the library. Government census data and reports, economic data, productivity statistics, information from news and trade associations are sitting on the stacks waiting for you right now at the branch library. University libraries often have sociological studies, scientific journals, and host forums that could inform you about topics of interest to your nonprofit’s cause.

Your librarian can help you devise a strategy for harvesting the kind of data you need. Go to your local library, you don’t have to head downtown to get what you need. Even the smallest library has access to enough information to keep your nonprofit in-the-know with reference materials, books, periodicals, and databases.

BTW: This is a good search tool you might find handy http://www.worldcat.org/ it will tell you where to find the nearest copy of any library book you want.