Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, some thoughts about translating between business marketing advice and your nonprofit marketing world.

I'm curious, when you see marketing frameworks like the example in today's email do you react the way I do?

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

Business marketing advice

My LinkedIn feed is full of marketing advice. It's often presented in the form of a framework or a checklist. And it's almost ALWAYS designed for businesses that are selling a product or service.

LinkedIn posts are a convenient example to share here, but this pattern extends across lots of the other content I consume too. I listen to podcasts about the web and marketing produced for a business audience. I read books with for the same audience.

And in the background, I'm usually thinking "great ideas, but how does would this apply for a nonprofit comms team?"

Let's look at an example:

I don't know Oliver JP Osborne. This post just popped up courtesy of the all-powerful ALGORITHM. And it caught my eye.

The general message resonates. At the top, it says:

Resist the temptation to spend any time on tactics until you have completed your diagnosis and strategy.

100% on board with that message, for all marketers across all sectors.

(Pausing to say: I apologize if that screenshot is too small to read. Click the image or here to go look at the post on LinkedIn where you can expand the image size)

But when you dig down into the details, it's less obvious how this applies in a nonprofit context.

Translating: business world → nonprofit world

In the diagnosis column, this marketing framework suggests that you cover:

• Market Research
• Competitor Research
• Internal Research
• Macroeconomics and Culture
• Segmentation

before developing strategy, before getting to tactics.

I agree with this advice, and I think details like including internal research (understanding the history of your brand and past marketing efforts) are great.

Often the first step in translation is some simple word substitution.

Market → Audience

In the nonprofit marketing and communications world, we typically don't think about an addressable market, as a noun. We're comfortable marketing, as a verb, but we typically think about an audience instead.

Competitors → Peer Organizations

Realistically, many nonprofit's do have competitors – in that there are other entities out there competing for audience members' eyeballs and attention, delivering similar messages, with similar calls to action. But we generally don't reach for the marketplace-type competitor language. So instead of competitor research, you are researching what other peer organizations or authoritative voices in your space are saying and doing.

"Customers" → Multiple Audiences

Audiences is where things get more complex. While a typical for-profit business has a single primary audience (people experiencing the problem solved by their product or service) nonprofit organizations often have multiple audiences:

• Donors or funders
• People impacted by the work, or users of services provided by the org
• Journalists, media, or influential voices in your space
• Policy makers and those that set the conditions in which your org does its work

I think this reality – needing to communicate with multiple audiences – is the key factor that makes nonprofit communications particularly challenging, alongside the typical under-resourcing faced by nonprofit comms teams.

That's it for today. I'm curious how many of you also consume business-centric marketing content and find yourself playing this translation game?

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

Connect on LinkedIn

​

​Unsubscribe · Preferences · 5331 S Macadam Ave, Ste 258 PMB 1090, Portland, OR 97239