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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

Letting Your Arrow Fly
Part Five

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 final 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 9

Approach the media as a target market, not as a mouthpiece for the message.

The need to market to the media just as you market to your funding audiences is a powerful yet commonly overlooked concept. I worked as a journalist for Reuters, Associated Press, as well as several newspapers, and I was seldom approached by public-relations people with a sound understanding of the media or of my needs in covering a story. In fact, most people - whether they worked for a company or a nonprofit - simply called me to ask whether I had received their press release or media kit. They viewed the media as a means of getting their message out, not as an audience with a mind of its own.

Here are some steps you can use today to take a marketing approach to media relations:

1. Decide which messages to place in which media: Before you even start to court members of the media or to take their calls, you want to decide how best to advance your organization's agenda through the media. You want to selectively approach media outlets and carefully craft the responses you give to media calls according to the message you want readers, viewers, or listeners to hear. You also need to remind yourself to look for openings, the times when your audience is most likely to receive your organization's message. Finding openings will help you prioritize your media targets. You then want to cultivate relationships with the reporters in those media and devise a strategy for handling incoming requests from key media personnel.
2. Cultivate relationships: You build relationships with members of the media by making their jobs easier. Remember that they need instant expertise and they want to be the first to publish a compelling, accurate story. You want to help them on both of these fronts. Providing such help requires that you become familiar with the stories your priority media outlets cover and the work of key staff at these news organizations.
3. Pitch stories: As you build relationships with reporters, CRAMing them as an audience, you also need to be CRAMing specific stories. Public-relations people like to call the process of CRAMing "story pitching." Reporters ask three questions when they evaluate a pitch: Why now, why is this news, and who cares? If a story is timely and newsworthy but irrelevant to their readers, they won't cover it. If it's newsworthy and relevant but lacks a sense of timeliness or is old, it's probably not going to make the cut. And if it's not newsworthy, it's not a story.
4. Designate and prepare spokespeople: If you succeed in pitching a story - or if a reporter calls you about a story - you need to be well-versed in handling interviews. Designate a spokesperson and instruct your staff to refer all inquiries to him or her. Anyone within your organization who comes into contact with the media should be knowledgeable about the organization's key messages and trained in handling interviews.
5. Don't alienate the media: I would be remiss if I didn't mention three ways to really irritate a reporter.
1. Call simply to ask if someone got your press release. This is the #1 pet peeve of most journalists. Don't do it.
2. Pitch something that shows you did absolutely no homework on the reporter or the media outlet-i.e., pitching a story they'd never cover or one they just did.
3. Fail to get their attention and interest in the first five seconds/words of your contact with them.

If you understand and practice these steps, you can gain a big media-relations advantage.

Robin Hood Rule 10

Good marketing campaigns focus on spurring one audience to a single action.

A marketing campaign is a coordinated, concerted, multi-channel effort to get certain people to take an action. It draws on all the principles we have covered in this series.

Below are seven universal principles of successful marketing campaigns which you can apply to marketing your nonprofit to a funding audience:

1. A campaign should begin by defining the desired action: The first step in designing a marketing campaign is determining what action you want a specific audience to take and planning backward from there.
2. Good campaigns are grounded in the perspective of the audience they are intended to reach: As we discussed in Parts One through Four, audience perspective becomes the basis for forging connections with the people you want to reach.
3. A campaign must be inescapable: To succeed, marketing campaigns must deliver a message many times, over time, in many forms. A few ads do not constitute a campaign. You need to concentrate your marketing efforts, or they won't have an effect.
4. A campaign should stake out a unique competitive position: Your marketing campaign vies for attention with many other marketing campaigns. You have to draw on the principles of competition to make sure the campaign you create not only reinforces the unique competitive position you want to stake out, but also stands out from other campaigns.
5. A campaign should be emblematic of the cause and extend the brand: In making clear the competitive advantage of your product or service, the marketing campaign is defining your cause in the eyes of your audience. It is projecting who you are, what you do, and why your task is important. Therefore the campaign needs to be true to your cause.
6. A campaign must be flexible: Marketing campaigns should be in sync with the marketplace, which shifts all the time. Campaigns must be sensitive to those dynamics. If you fail to retain that flexibility, you may discover you're as irrelevant as a man in tights and clothes from another era (our beloved Robin Hood) running through Central Park.
7. A campaign should be tested many times: Good campaigns are tested before they happen, while they are happening, and after they happen.

It's been a pleasure partnering with GrantStation for this special series on Robin Hood Marketing. In closing, remember: skimping on marketing means you will end up skimping on impact.

If you'd like to learn more about Robin Hood Marketing, please visit my blog at www.nonprofitmarketingblog.com. We practice the Robin Hood Marketing principles every day at Network for Good. For more information about Network for Good, please visit www.networkforgood.org/go.