I recently met with the President and Director of Development of a local non-profit about updating their Marketing / Communications program.  It’s an interesting time to be working in the non-profit world, due to all of the “new media” outlets that are available to them now.

In most cases, non-profit organizations haven’t had the budgets to do the sort of marketing that consumer brands do, and so they often haven’t had modern, industry-standard marketing discipline applied to their efforts in that sphere.  I have done some great TV work over the years for non-profit clients, thanks to the government mandate that the networks run a certain number of PSA’s (part of the deal for using the bandwidth, which is a public asset).  It’s not easy to get the TV produced, since the budgets tend to be a small fraction of what we usually spend, but we always find a way.  And often the work turns out great.  Unfortunately, the government doesn’t mandate when the networks have to run it, so they put the PSAs on in the middle of the night and few people actually see them.

But the spots look good on everyone’s reels.  And now they can be distributed for essentially no cost over the internet, played on the charity’s web site, Facebook page, and anyplace else that can be accessed online (and not part of the traditional payed media environment).  Far out.  Now we can actually afford to distribute that work.

So the marketing challenge in working for non-profits isn’t about resources anymore (or the lack thereof).  Now it’s about the usual concerns of focusing the strategy, producing engaging content, and integrating the message across all of the output channels.  Which are the same issues that crop up in the work we do for big consumer brands.  The playing field has been leveled, and there’s a great deal of discussion about bringing the rigor we apply to traditional marketing into the non-profit world.  There’s some education that needs to happen on both the Client and Agency side to make that a reality.  But that just takes a bit of time, and an openness to learning.

Should be an interesting project, working for a client that isn’t trying to “sell” anything, but only exists to serve a particular population.  They need marketing, too, if they want to expand their services.