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Marketing Your Mission
Case Studies in Practice
Rebecca
Leet & Associates serve charitable, foundation and
association leaders who work to increase organizational
effectiveness in promoting social change. In 2000,
Leet presented a series of case studies demonstrating the
impact of integrating communications to advance
organization performance. Drawn from her writing, Leet
shares stories from her
book Marketing for Mission, published by the National
Center for Nonprofit Boards, 1998. Leet is former editor of the newsletter Strategic Governance for Nonprofit Executives and Boards
(Aspen Publishing).
Taking a Closer Look: Zero to Three
One
of the top international organizations tracking research
on the social and emotional development of young
children kept all its knowledge within the profession
for more than 20 years.
It resisted reaching out to parents, which would
have great positive benefit for children, partly because
it could not agree on what parents most needed to know.
Under new executive leadership, the group decided
to ask parents what they wanted
to know – and it listened to what was said. By
participating with their target market, rather
than selling to it, they discovered how to talk
to parents and what to tell them – thereby greatly
expanding the impact of their knowledge on those they
most wanted to help, infants and toddlers.
Here
is the story:
No
one at Zero to
Three would say that the organization takes a marketing
for mission approach to achieving its mission.
The internationally renowned researchers and
practitioners on its board would faint dead away if they
did. But
that is what it is happening.
Zero
to Three (ZTT)
is among the top sources internationally for research
data on the social and emotional development of young
children.
Its mission is to advance the healthy development
of America’s babies and young children. It has been
the major catalyst for creation of a new
multidisciplinary field of “infant/family
professionals.”
Founded by leading researchers in medicine,
mental health and child development, ZTT
is governed by those on the cutting edge of the infant
development field.
Its weighty publications have traditionally kept
pediatricians and early childhood professionals
up-to-date on the latest breakthroughs in mental health
and development in very young children.
When
Matthew Melmed came on board as chief executive in 1994,
he asked the staff and board why the organization
didn’t seek its mission directly by sharing its
knowledge with parents.
Over time, they began to agree.
However, rather than developing educational
materials that told parents what ZTT
knew they needed
to understand. The organization did research to
determine (1) what parents want to know to be better
parents; (2) where they go to receive this information;
and (3) what barriers prevent them from getting it.
Without calling it marketing, they applied a
marketing approach: ask your target market about their
desires, then design and deliver your product
accordingly.
Through
focus groups and surveys, parents told ZTT
that they wanted to know how to gauge if their child was
developing normally.
As importantly, they also told ZTT that they only
wanted this information when they needed it and they had no time to plow through another book or attend a
class. So ZTT
communicated understandable information about normal
development through means that parents could digest
quickly in the ordinary course of their lives.
One way they did that was by putting information
on the back of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereal boxes
distributed to 25 million people.
Another method was to create a growth chart where, as
parents record their toddler’s height, they can see
– in short blurbs – what emotional, physical, and
intellectual activity they can expect from a child that
age. One
indicator of how hungry parents are for this information: when the Rice Krispies boxes hit the stores, the
number of visits to the parent section of ZTT’s
website tripled.
Zero
to Three’s
outreach to parents is a good example of marketing
for mission. First, it looked at its mission and its
chief tool, its cutting edge research.
It asked itself whether it was using that tool to
maximum benefit in service of the mission.
Second, when it recognized that it was
overlooking a major target market – parents – it
resisted telling that market what it needed to know.
Instead, it asked that market what would move it to take actions consistent with
ZTT’s
mission.
And, third, it designed messages that met the
market’s needs and delivered them in ways the market
desired.
ZTT
had no shortage of experts on what parents’ need to
know. But
it was smart enough to recognize that it did not have all
the information it needed to help parents.
Its needed to harness the information held by parents
to understand the best strategies to undertake to
achieve their mission. This is frequently the case, and is a central
tenet of marketing for mission: to figure out how to motivate a targeted group to
take action, it is usually necessary to plumb that group
for essential information.
No matter how eminent an organization’s
experts, they cannot hold all the knowledge needed to
move a specific audience to action.
ZTT
is so dedicated to its mission that it has been willing
to go outside its comfort zone in an effort to change
the way parents interact with their children. Information on Rice Krispies boxes is not the kind of
educational material one might expect from an august
organization that is in business to translate and
disseminate scientific research.
However, as ZTT
knows, it is not in business just to share cutting edge
research. It
is in business to improve the lives of children.
Taking a Closer Look:
Greater Kansas City Community Foundation
A
Midwest community foundation is building community by
engaging more donors, but not in the usual way.
Instead of soliciting donors, it is meeting the
needs of customers – adopting a marketing mindset.
Its results have been so significant that its
peers are arriving in droves to be tutored. Between 1992 and 1999, the foundation increased its
contributions 600 percent and the number of funds
managed grew from 110 to 455.
Here
is the story:
In the early 1990's,
Janice C. Kreamer recognized that the best way for the Greater Kansas City
Community Foundation
(GKCCF)
to build the community was not by
managing grants but by serving donors. Over five years, the foundation president
restructured the institution, moving away from
check-writing and toward unleashing the financial and
intellectual capital of as many donors as possible.
She believed that more people would become involved with community programs, and contribute at
higher levels, if the experience satisfied their reasons
for involvement.
She
was correct.
In 1999, the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation funneled $75.5 million into the community, up from $15.7
million just five years earlier. The
same year,
it received $132 million in
contributions, an increase of more than 600 percent over
1992. One
year earlier, it raised more money than any other
community foundation in the nation.
The
Kansas City experience indicates that community foundations
may be best able to create change by sharing the power
– and satisfaction – of the purse with those who
hold the purse strings.
It demonstrates a key marketing strategy for mission
principle: goals may be achieved faster and better when
non-profits share their power to do good with those who
actually have the means – financial, physical, or
other – to do so.
Inherent in this approach is a shift in focus
from solely the organization’s agenda to the
intersection between that and the customer’s agenda.
This
change is difficult for many in the non-profit world to
adopt. GKCCF was no exception.
It took five years, and more than 60 percent of
the 38-member staff turned over.
Many could not adjust to the change in their role
and their power.
GKCCF
has many examples of how understanding donors’
motivations and helping them express their desires
through appropriate community activities has resulted in
meeting community needs.
One involves a couple which, in 1993, established
a scholarship fund at GKCCF in memory of a daughter who
was killed. Originally,
the fund’s purpose was to award a scholarship for a
female who attended their daughter’s high school.
A few years later, when the family wanted to do
more, the foundation helped them expand the fund to
support girls from their daughter’s middle school who
were involved in extracurricular activities.
Still later, again with foundation help, the
program broadened to support 5th and 6th
grade girls in two elementary schools.
When the foundation recently received a request
to underwrite the cost of 10 girls participating in an
esteem-building program built around athletics, the staff
thought of this family.
They offered the family the opportunity – and
received full funding.
Would
the desire of the parents to help girls have been
achieved without the help of the Foundation?
Perhaps. Were
more girls helped because of the partnership of the
parents and the Foundation?
Undoubtedly.
Did the foundation achieve its mission while
serving its customer? Absolutely.
Taking a Closer Look: The Nature
Conservancy
A
national environmental organization knew that its usual
operating methods would not achieve its goal of
protecting the Earth’s sole remaining habitat for
several species of freshwater mussels.
It found a new means by taking a marketing
approach: identifying where its mission overlapped with
the self-interest of its target market, and building a
program from there. The approach led it not only to a new way of protecting the
mussels but also to a new problem-solving approach that
it has since applied in dozens of other locations.
Here
is the story:
The
Nature Conservancy (TNC) opened an office in
southwestern Virginia in 1993 because it wanted to
protect 50 rare aquatic species, including some
freshwater mussels that existed nowhere else on earth.
The area involved was too large to purchase, so
another solution had to be found.
The key to The Nature Conservancy’s new
thinking was to explore what it had in common with
people whose actions were threatening the mussels before
it designed a protection program.
TNC
field staff discovered that they shared more goals with
the local people than they had expected.
From a foundation of their mutual desires, The
Conservancy created a novel method of achieving their
mission: The Forest Bank.
Building from mutuality is a key element of marketing
for mission.
The
watershed that threatened the mussels was in
Virginia’s Clinch Valley, where the headwaters of
three rivers are located.
For generations, the economy of the area depended
heavily upon coal mining; when that receded, landowners
turned to cutting down the area’s vibrant forests to
produce timber. Heavy
logging practices, including clear-cutting, threatened
the watershed and, hence, endangered the mussels.
The
mission challenge for The Nature Conservancy was to stop
the unsuitable timber cutting practices and save the
mussels. The
challenge for the local landowners was to earn a living
from the only resource they had – their trees.
Although The Nature Conservancy owned six nature
preserves in the Clinch Valley, it knew it could not
meet its challenge through its usual strategy of buying
land. It had to find another way.
So,
for the first time in what has since become a common
practice at The Nature Conservancy, the organization
conducted focus groups in the community. “We wanted to
understand what people cared about – how they valued
their natural resources,” says Gloria Fahst.
Fahst was on the Government Relations staff of
TNC and, thus, more accustomed to solving environmental
threats through government action than market research.
“Basically,
we were trying to learn about the local community and to
connect our goals with local values about natural
resources. We
knew we couldn’t own all the land we needed to
impact,” she says. “We were looking for common
ground: what
do they care about that we care about that will lead to
protecting the area’s biodiversity?”
What
The Conservancy found was that local landowners loathed
the clear-cutting of their hearty forests.
The forest was their heritage, and one that they
wished to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
However, first they had to earn a living.
It seemed to local landowners as though they were
in a no-win position:
cut the forest to generate income – and lose
the forest. Or
keep the forest and have no income – and move away to
support their families.
The
Nature Conservancy, however, created a third option,
which met the desires of the target market while
achieving the Conservancy’s mission as well. It was based on the concept of “sustainable” timber
cutting – cutting trees in such a manner and at such a
rate that the forests remain
economically and ecologically vibrant.
Its approach – which it calls the Forest Bank
– met the needs of the local landowners and the local
mussels.
The
innovative Forest Bank accepts voluntary “deposits”
from forest landowners of the right to grow, manage, and
harvest trees on their land.
The landowner retains ownership of the land
itself. The
Bank pays the landowners a guaranteed annual dividend
based on the value of his or her initial deposit –
much like a savings bank does on a certificate of
deposit. To
fund these dividends, the Forest Bank harvests and sells
timber from the lands on
a sustainable basis.
The watershed is protected, and the landowners
reap these benefits:
-
Steady income from an otherwise non-liquid asset
-
Freedom from managing the land or timber resource
-
Continued access to the traditional value of the land for hunting, collecting firewood, and beauty
-
Preservation of the forest for future generation
-
The option of selling the land should the need arise
-
The option of selling the stands of trees to The Nature Conservancy and receiving their cash value
To
The Conservancy, the Forest Bank idea hinted at the
wisdom of identifying the desires it shares with a
target market prior to designing a solution. The
Conservancy has since used the approach, which it calls
“community based conservation”, in dozens of other
places. And
The Conservancy is converting others to its approach:
they now find that their foundation supporters
are increasingly willing to fund such market research.
The
Forest Bank is a prime example of marketing
for mission. After
identifying a problem, The Nature Conservancy did not
look at specific solutions first. Instead, it focused on the people whose actions would determine whether and how the problem could be solved.
It determined what desires motivated those people
to act as The Nature Conservancy wanted them to. Then it
designed a solution that satisfied the desires of the
target market while achieving the mission of The Nature
Conservancy.
This case study was written by Rebecca Leet, who is the author
of Marketing for Mission (NCNB, 1998). She
can be contacted at (703) 533-8966 or at
RLeet@LeetAssociates.com.
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