Learn to develop a personalized battle plan for your organization using the proven weapons of Guerrilla marketing to promote, recruit, motivate, and raise more money for your nonprofit.  Chris Forbes and Frank Adkins, co-authors of thew new book, Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits with Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of Guerrilla marketing, will show you how “going guerrilla” can give your organization the survivor’s edge.

Join the webinar to find out how to:

A few lucky participants will win a free [...]

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Recently Pastor Rick Warren posted this article on his blog and newsletter “Eleven ideas for researching your community” with Guerrilla research tips useful to faith-based nonprofits for learning about their community. A large percentage of nonprofits, including the largest organizations in the United Stated, are affiliated with religion. We feel the ideas in the article are suitable for any nonprofit, so we are re-posting them here. Our book is designed to be useful for all types of nonprofits. You can find more easy-to-implement research ideas in our book that was recently published by Entrepreneur Press, available on Amazon and in bookstores. Do a zip code search (here) chances are high there’s a Barnes & Noble near you with Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits in stock right now!

How do you find [...]

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Only you can judge if your organization is ready to get involved in social media. Some organizations are hesitant to get involved in social media because they fear losing control of their message. You don’t lose control of your message with social media, you lose the illusion of control. You don’t have control.

New media have changed the face of communication forever. Gone are the days of one-way communication. New media are not going away and they are positioned to impact internet communications for the foreseeable future.  The question is not if your organization will use social media, it is more a question of when. Don’t be afraid to use social media to include people in the storyline of your nonprofit’s work. Your donors are looking for a more personalized [...]

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Our book Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits was written with the needs of the smaller nonprofit in mind, but we also knew as we wrote it that even workers in larger nonprofits would benefit from the principles of guerrilla marketing. That’s why we researched our audience and tried to anticipate their needs in the book. Below is a profile of an average nonprofit communication director. It is based on statistics found in secondary sources and primary research interviews. We didn’t have to spend a lot of money to create the profile, all it took was the time and energy to do the research ourselves. You can create a persona profile of your audience too. It helps you put a face on the people you want to reach.

Nancy Nonprofit: Communication Director

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Many nonprofits make the mistake of trying to get the people they want to reach to think exactly like them, when they really should focus on getting people to take action by understanding their audiences better. Nonprofit marketing results don’t require the target audience to accept the worldview of the marketer before they take action. Your goal as a nonprofit leader is not to turn everyone into a exact clone of yourself. It is to get people to sense ownership of the problems and take action.  You don’t need people to think like you, you need to train yourself to think like them. A key to knowing how to get people to take action, is knowledge of your market.

Guerrillas understand the context of the people they want to [...]

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We have interviewed nonprofit leaders in preparation for the book and found some communication people who say they don’t use Guerrilla Marketing. Knowing what we know about the benefits of going Guerrilla, it’s hard to understand why anyone would resist the secrets that have helped so many. Apparently, some nonprofits fear they will lose some credibility if they use Guerrilla Marketing. The folks who feel this way tend to have a cartoon image of what Guerrilla Marketing is all about. Guerrilla Marketing isn’t all about in-your-face media tactics. It is more about having an acute focus on excellence, rather than on flashy gimmicks. You may already have in mind what you think Guerrilla Marketing is all about. But take a second look. There’s more to it than a few attention-getting [...]

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You are learning about Guerrilla Marketing, but you may find you are too busy, or not in the right place in your role to lead the marketing attack for your organization. Your nonprofit can still benefit from Guerrilla Marketing principles by finding someone in your own ranks who can get excited about the thought of aggressive, proactive marketing.

You will need someone with the staying power and courage to make it their responsibility. A good Guerrilla will have the personality traits of:

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Marketing is not something you do when all else fails. It’s what you do all the time if you want to be effective. Marketing is a never-ending circle of activity that starts with your ideas about making the world a better place and ends with the sustainable change that fulfills your mission.

To be effective you can’t treat marketing like a program your organization uses when it runs low on funds or can’t find enough volunteers. Marketing isn’t a weapon you use to instantly convince people to access your products, programs, and services–it’s how you learn to make the products, programs, and services people want in a way that will be the most effective toward achieving your mission.

People give, volunteer, and access your nonprofit because they want to. Marketing [...]

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Many nonprofits miss opportunities to improve their marketing simply because they don’t put their plans into a calendar. Month-by-month they let events, promotions, and outreach go by and don’t realize their greatest opportunities for increased effectiveness are parading right in front of them, on their calendar. If you practice the simple discipline of keeping a calendar, it will help keep your marketing mindset active all year long and can make it easier next year too!

To make a marketing calendar just create a 12 month summary of all your Guerrilla marketing activities by creating a list with 52 lines, one for every week in the year. In five columns across the list aspects of your Guerrilla marketing activity,

1. Number of the week. You can use a spreadsheet to [...]

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Just confirmed that I will be speaking as the final keynote for the 2010 AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference in Chicago this October 11-13th.  This is going to be a great conference with a lot of practical advice to give your nonprofit a survivor’s edge in this tight economy. I hope you will make plans to come! Here is a little from the AMA site about the conference with more information to come:

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Market or Die: Achieving Success in Unprecedented Times

It’s a new era for nonprofits in 2010, quite literally an era of “do or die.” According to The Nonprofit Times, “60% of nonprofits have three months or less of cash in the bank. Half of those have only one month.” Nonprofits that seek growth and sustainability have [...]

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