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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Many organizations have no idea what marketing is. Some even resist marketing as contradicting their values. You can speed past these organizations by availing yourself of an education in marketing. Its easy to do with the many seminars, workshops, the internet, and the numerous volumes of marketing books published each year. Insights may come slowly, but rest assured, your real world experience and insatiable interest in marketing will yield practical applications that benefit your organization.

“Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits” with Jay Conrad Levinson, Frank Adkins, & Chris Forbes. Pre-order now on Amazon:  in stores July 2nd.

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Just because something looks good or is entertaining, doesn’t mean it is effective for your nonprofit’s marketing. Too often nonprofit leaders buy into the notion that what is holding back their organization is the quality of their artwork. The new communication director who joins a nonprofit’s staff and announces they are going to change the logo and rebrand their organization is a cliche. Contrary to popular belief a brand new design for all your organization’s marketing collateral is not the cure all for what may be troubling your organization’s marketing. Usually nonprofits don’t need a new artistic schtick, they need new marketing mindset.

Nonguerrillas believe they can inspire people and move them to act with the quality of their art work and the cleverness of their copy. But true Guerrillas [...]

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Hear Chris Forbes co-author of “Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits” (in stores July 2nd from Entrepreneur Press)  in this free one hour webinar sponsored by MinistryCOM.org Though the upcoming workshop is tailored with many of the needs of faith-based marketers in mind, the webinar will present general guerrilla marketing principles that apply to any nonprofit organization. Presenter Chris Forbes (Edmond, OK) is a certified GM coach specializing in nonprofit marketing. He frequently consults within the Southern Baptist Convention with 16 million + members

Pre-order “Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits” by Jay Conrad Levinson, Chris Forbes, and Frank Adkins

Here are the details from MinistryCOM.org

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