People often have this misconception that investments in marketing almost always run contrary to an organization's mission. They feel that any spending that isn’t directly tied to the mission runs counter to the good you accomplish in the world. Bob Roark and his guest, Stu Swineford, tackle this very subject today. Stu is the author of Mission: Uncomfortable - How Nonprofits Can Embrace Purpose-Driven Marketing to Survive and Thrive. Stu talks about purpose-driven marketing, showing that marketing isn’t really a bad thing, especially if you’re the leader of a non-profit organization or its marketing department.

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[embed]https://youtu.be/XIxoAhUkEbc[/embed]

Purpose-Driven Marketing With Stu Swineford

Marketing is not a dirty word. As a leader of a nonprofit organization or its marketing department, you may have been told that investments in marketing run contrary to your organization's mission. At the least, you may feel that any spending can't be directly tied to the mission that runs counter to the good you accomplish in the world. We're going to talk about that. My guest is Stu Swineford. Stu is the co-author of Mission Uncomfortable: How Nonprofits Can Embrace Purpose-driven Marketing to Survive and Thrive. He's also the co-founder of Relish Studio, a digital marketing firm and he's also the host of his own podcast, Relish This. Stu, thanks for taking your time.

Thank you for having me on, Bob. I appreciate it.

Fair disclosure, Stu and I are working together on a website. They do awesome work so I can attest to that right upfront. One of the things that we wanted to cover is one, we will talk about purpose-driven marketing and then the pillars of purpose-driven marketing, which are attract, connect, bond and inspire. Stu, maybe the first thing that we want to dig into is your thoughts on purpose-driven marketing.

Thanks, Bob. Purpose-driven marketing is a phrase that we came to over the course of a few years where we're trying to give people the idea that marketing shouldn't just be an activity that you spend money on and check a box but it is something that should return an outcome. A lot of people think about marketing as a cost. One of the things that we've tried to establish in purpose-driven marketing is that it's more of an investment. It's something that you're doing to either run experiments or prove a hypothesis or tackle a challenge that you're having with your organization.

There should be an outcome attached to that and it should be a positive outcome. That's what purpose-driven marketing is all about. Purpose-driven marketing can be applied to both for-profit and nonprofit businesses. It's marketing that has a specific goal in mind and we try to create all of the mechanisms by which you can attain that goal. In the context of Mission Uncomfortable, the book that I wrote, it's geared toward those businesses in the nonprofit sector specifically but the purpose-driven sector, additionally, to try and help them fuel growth.

Fair disclosure, too, I read your book. Thank you for providing the copy. In the nonprofit arena, the folks that are in charge of marketing are trying to identify who their avatar or ideal donor and/or client might be.

We usually start these discussions with an exercise that we call the values, vision and mission exercise. It takes some nonprofits a second to wrap their arms around it because their entire MO is around values, vision and mission. Making sure that that culture is intact and defined and everyone has a North Star so that we know what direction that we're going. When we work for for-profit businesses, we do an exercise that we call find the money and this can be something that a nonprofit can do as well. Essentially, it's looking back at your prior performance if you have historical data to look at and finding out information about your volunteers and donors.

Who are these people that are rising to the top that tend to produce the best outcomes for your organization? How can you get in front of more of those? The persona exercise then follows on the heels of that where after you've established who these people are, you can look for similarities and develop a persona or an avatar for that target audience that you're trying to reach. Whether it's in the volunteer space, donor space, corporate donor space or a repeat donor engagement. Trying to identify so that when those people show up, you understand what they're looking for and what is motivating them that'll get them engaged with your organization.

One of the things that hadn't crossed my mind, not that it should, is I was thinking about mostly donors and projects. What I was not keen on was the recognition of the contribution of the volunteer. In the book, you were talking about structuring. “This volunteer’s been working on five separate projects in this one group. This volunteer did ten projects.” It's a mechanism to reward a continual effort, which was quite remarkable.

[bctt tweet="Purpose-driven marketing can be applied to both for-profit and non-profit that has a very specific goal in mind." via="no"]

We've talked about stakeholders and those can be anyone who has some attachment to or engagement with your organization so that could be everybody from a beneficiary. For example, if you’re a nonprofit that helps the homeless. The houseless person has a touchpoint with your organization and they may then, hopefully through all the activities that you're doing to help them out, become a volunteer. At that point, they have two touches with your organization. From the volunteer standpoint, they may be able, at some point, to donate. They may become a repeat donor. They may become a board member at some point or may have the opportunity to rise up and bring a corporation that they're involved in as a sponsor.

Those stakeholders become valuable. You can escalate and move people around that ecosystem with your organization. It's easier to sell to or to get somebody to take a second action than it is to get them to take the first action. This was where the inspire phase comes into play. Being mindful of how to keep people engaged with your organization even in off-times. If you don't have any volunteer opportunities, how do you keep them engaged? How do you get them to spread the word? Leveraging all of those assets to your advantage as a nonprofit.

In the nonprofit space versus the for-profit space, both of them have mission statements and have things they’re trying to do and at the end of the day, it's a tax code differential. A lot of the business principles that apply to nonprofits apply to for-profit. That recognition has come a long way. We were talking about the pillars of purpose-driven marketing. We were talking about the avatar in round terms. Let's dig into the first activity, which would be the attract side of the pillar.

The attract phase is when you, as an organization or a business like a nonprofit, are trying to gain someone's attention in some fashion so that they come to your website or reach out in some way to take an action. That could be everything from earned media through public relations, what you're doing on social media, blog posts, for example, that you're putting out there that provide value and people are interested in that exchange. It’s essentially all of those elements that draw people to your organization. It could be a sign on the side of a truck if you're out and about giving food away or picking up donations for your organization. All of those places that you show up in that ecosystem where you have the ability to attract someone to your organization, that's essentially the attract phase. It's similar to what you might be doing in the for-profit space as well.

I'm curious, in thinking about the nonprofit sophistication, I'm sure it varies as far as SEO and paid traffic and so on. What's your experience and exposure to those types of techniques by nonprofits?

Nonprofits have some additional resources that either many aren't aware of or they don't have the capacity to take advantage of them. One is Google gives out grants to nonprofits and you have to qualify for the grant but the bar is low on that. Essentially, Google gives you $10,000 a month in Google AdWords spend to play with to drive traffic back to your property. That's an example of one of those things that maybe nonprofits aren't taking advantage of.

The other thing that we certainly see and this comes into this inbound methodology if anyone out there has done some research on inbound, is providing something of value to use as a value exchange. When we talk about value, this might be some checklist. If you're an organization that does a lot of work in the outdoor space like Leave No Trace, for example, they put out these little cards that you can clip to your backpack. They give you all the information about Leave No Trace and how to get rid of a campfire that you've created or how to deal with waste, for example. All of these little things would come on a card.

They could give that card away as a PDF on the site for people who are exploring ways to be more thoughtful in the outdoors