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 create your calendar to make it easy to format and share with your team.

2. In the second column put down the Thrust or emphasis in your marketing plan for that week. Are you promoting and event? Emphasizing a core message? Doing some Fundraising? Keep track of your messages in your calendar to make sure you are balancing your outreach and using your core messages and benefits effectively.

3. In the third column list the Marketing weapons used that week. There are 200 Guerrilla marketing weapons. Many of them are free. We will be talking about each one on this blog. Each one is also discussed in our book. Use more than one weapon each week. Guerrillas think in terms of combinations of marketing weapons.

4. Column Four: Budget for the week. You don’t have to spend a lot of money as a Guerrilla, but you will need to spend some. Keeping track of the money invested in your marketing makes it easier to evaluate your outreach and makes budgeting easier at the end of the year.

5. Five: Record your results at the end of the week. Keep track of your results: What were the number of responses, How many dollars were raised? Create a personalized rating scale designed for your organizations objectives. Guerrillas keep track of their marketing so they can evaluate what is effective and what is not.

If you keep good records and use your calendar regularly, at the end of the year, your annual marketing report will be easy to prepare and will reveal your stunning results.

“Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits” with Jay Conrad Levinson Chris Forbes, & Frank Adkins. Pre-order now on Amazon: http://ow.ly/MFT7 in stores July 2nd.