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

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

Reacting to Forces at Work in the Nonprofit Marketplace
Part Two

The following tips are based on my 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 second installment of a five-part Tracks to Success series. You can also sign up for regular marketing tips by subscribing to Network for Good's Nonprofit Marketing Newsletter. Click here for more information.

Robin Hood Rule 3

Recognize and react to the forces at work in the marketplace. You must identify the forces influencing your funders' actions and harness those that work in your favor.

It's hard to get attention these days. You can jump up and down and try to attract it alone, or you can latch onto something that's already getting attention in order to energize your efforts. The latter approach is more efficient. Here are three steps you can take to latch onto marketplace forces:

1. Go for a walk in the funders' shoes: In the course of the day, potential funders encounter many marketplace forces that affect the likelihood of their taking action. Think about what those are. Is the funder under pressure to react to certain trends in funding? Is there a major social need attracting popular attention? Can you prove your organization's work is relevant to that need?
2. Draw up a list of marketplace forces influencing your funders: Funders are affected by myriad marketplace forces: demographic, lifestyle, social and cultural, health, environmental, economic, infrastructural, rules and laws, scientific, technological, political, media, business, and competitive factors. Consider how these forces affect your relationship with potential funders. For example, do recent changes in technology help or hinder you? Are there new laws that make your work more important? Does new health research play to your advantage?
3. Divide the list according to ability to influence the marketplace: Narrow your list to the forces that have the greatest effect on your funders. For example, if the environment and health are not especially relevant to your funders' behavior, you need to remove those forces from your list. You want to hone in on a handful of highly influential forces. Next, ascertain the forces in this smaller list that you can use to your advantage, those in your way, and those that may require partners to leverage.

I've seen nonprofits recently get funding using this very exercise, latching onto attention to Katrina relief, childhood obesity, and web 2.0 safety for kids.

Robin Hood Rule 4

Stake a strong competitive position in the minds of your potential funders. You want to make your competitive advantage crystal clear.

There are more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. , and over 100 new ones every day. Every single one of them needs money. So you need to answer the question, what makes your organization different? You can do that by following Rule 3 - tapping into marketplace forces - but you also have to do it by showing what makes your organization unique. What does your organization do that no one else does? Here are three steps you can take to establish a competitive position:

1. List the top competitors: Competitive research is a necessary, ethical process for making more informed decisions. For each grant you are pursuing, think about the direct, indirect, and generic competition you face for funding. The Internet has made gathering information on competitors relatively easy. Search the web to understand competitive messages, products, and strengths or weaknesses. Get on competitors' mailing lists, use their websites, and call their toll-free numbers for more information.
2. Prioritize the list: Just as you did with your analysis of marketplace forces, you want to select a "short-list" of competitors to position yourself against. You should ask yourself how big a threat each competitor is to your success and whether you have the ability to counter that threat with competitive positioning.
3. Stake the competitive position: In thinking about each competitor, you want to establish a competitive position that is unique, based on your organization's strengths, simple to understand, and important to the audience. Some marketers call this delivering your value proposition. A value proposition isn't your mission: it's how your organization lives (or operationalizes) its mission. If you are going to succeed, your funding requests must bring your value proposition to life for your audience. When your potential funder clearly sees how your request is different than that of your competition, it's much easier for you to succeed.

Although competitive strategy is important, you should not get carried away with the concept of competition. You need to stand for a unique idea, but you do not always want to stand alone. You want to reach beyond your niche when it helps advance your goals. If you share a common interest with another cause, you should fight together rather than fight each other. Good partnering can help increase your chances of success; you can make a bigger pie rather than struggle for a piece of the existing pie.

In the next article of this series, we will cover Robin Hood Rule 5, Building Partnerships around Mutual Benefits, and Robin Hood Rule 6, Putting the Case First and the Cause Second.