Many people from the private sector fail to realize just how competitive the nonprofit industry can be. In today’s world, every donor, volunteer, and person you hope to serve are faced with more options than they know what to do with. Between email, social media, direct mail, phone calls, donor events, billboards, etc., the average person is asked to take in more than they could ever absorb. The challenge for us as nonprofit marketers becomes answering a series of key why questions:
- Why care? (“What is the need that you solve?”)
- Why us? (“What makes you different?”)
- Why now? (“What makes the need urgent?”)
To successfully market your nonprofit, you need to have clear answers to these questions. We will tackle each of these questions in a bit more detail:
1) Why care?
Put simply, why is the need you are solving worth solving. Here we need to be storytellers – we need to be able to draw our prospects to see the world through the eyes of those we are serving. What would it feel like to be in their shoes? Make that pain real.
2) Why us?
What makes you uniquely qualified to meet the above needs? What about your approach separates you from the pack? Do you have metrics to prove it?
3) Why now?
What happens if this need goes unmet for 6 months? For a year? Why must this need be solved NOW?
If you have good answers to these that you can simply communicate to the world – you will have no problem standing out.
