You are here > Home > Robin Hood Marketing Rules

Robin Hood Marketing Rules: Stealing Corporate Marketing Savvy to Promote Your Cause

by Katya Andresen, Vice President of Marketing, Network for Good

The Heart of Robin Hood Marketing
Part One

Are you struggling to motivate people to give money, take action, or otherwise advance your cause? Are you having trouble getting the attention of funders?

Robin Hood Marketing is an approach to help you do this by stealing some of the savvy of the minds of corporate marketers. The rules are based on my 2006 book, Robin Hood Marketing, and I am pleased to be sharing them with you, along with some new content specific to the interests of GrantStation readers, in this five-part Tracks to Success series. You can also sign up for regular tips like these by subscribing to Network for Good's Nonprofit Marketing Newsletter. Click here for more information.

Robin Hood Rule 1

The most important values are those of our audiences, not our own. The closer we align with our audiences' values, the higher our chances of motivating them to take action.

I was recently on a conference panel with one audience that I know nonprofit organizations want to reach - senior management from three foundations. They all made clear the importance of Robin Hood Rule 1, because they were complaining that grant applicants did not understand their perspective. As one funder explained, they do not sit at a desk reading through grant applications, looking for new ideas to fund. Their foundations already have philanthropic priorities, strategies, and interests. Smart nonprofits learn all about the foundation and speak to that vision. They start from the audience perspective.

To apply Robin Hood Rule 1, we need a clear sense of our audiences' wants and values.
If you're approaching funders, read their websites, peruse their publications and develop a keen understanding of their philanthropic goals. If you're approaching a potential corporate partner, do the same thing - and, in addition, determine their business goals. With these audiences, you're going to need to show how you can help them achieve what they already want to do.

If your organization focuses on individual donors, do some quick-and-dirty research. Get on the phone with a few of your volunteers or current donors and ask them some open-ended questions about the effectiveness of your marketing and communication efforts. Check out which of your organization's emails they are or are not opening. The good news is research can make us far more effective than we would otherwise be as marketers. If you would like to learn more about research, Chapter Two of my book offers an in-depth overview of audience research, and I have also covered research on my blog.

Robin Hood Rule 2

Go beyond the big picture mission and focus on getting people to take specific action.

You'll be most successful if your call to action is short, simple, and prominently positioned. A good call to action cuts through communications clutter with four qualities:

1. Specific: Ask for one concrete action. Telling people to click on a button to donate now is better than asking them to participate in a fundraising campaign. Asking parents to read to their children for fifteen minutes every night is better than asking them to support reading readiness. Specific actions are easier to do - and harder to decline.
2. Feasible: For most people, if the action doesn't seem doable, they won't do it. "Save the earth" does not sound like something any one person can do easily. Make the step you're requesting small and easy, such as "put your plastic in your curbside recycling bin on Tuesdays." You can build up to bigger requests once you have the initial momentum of compliance.
3. Filmable: A good test of whether your call to action is simple and specific enough is to ask if it would be possible to film the audience taking the action you desire. If you don't have a simple visual, your audience won't either. I can't picture myself as being against a legislative bill, but I can see myself calling a member of Congress.
4. First Priority: Make sure what you're asking for is an action that, if people did it, would significantly and immediately advance your marketing goals and your mission. If your call to action will only "raise awareness," take it one step further. You want people to DO something that will truly make a difference for your organization.

In the next article of this series, we will cover Robin Hood Rule 3, Reacting to the Forces at Work in the Nonprofit Marketplace, and Robin Hood Rule 4, Staking a Strong Competitive Positioning.