Not-For-Profit could run like Buisness
In my journey of entrepreneurship till now, I have often seen a theme that a successful business is a combination of continuous innovation and good marketing.
Two books that gave me inspiration to write this article.
- The Why Axis — Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life
- Jab Jab Jab Right Hook — How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World
Working with many successful non profit organization makes me share learning and ideas that are share in these books. I am not sure if it applied to all, but it should work wonders for Sustainability Benchmarking and Assessment non profit organization.
Innovation
You may wonder you need big teams, big money, big buildings to do this. However the idea here is do multiple short simple experiments and have a continues learning feedback loop. The method to do this is very simple.
- Build a Hypothesis / Take a guess
- Run the experiment
- Measure the results
- Learn and repeat
In one of the chapters of the book the authors talks about Smile Train founded by Brian Mullaney. He started with an experiment for raising funds. His old data showed if we ask for donation when it says we have already raised 33% of goal. The probability of person giving money increases. However he ran few experiments to figure out that he was getting more success when it says we have already raised 67% of goal. Now that is an innovation to the entire non profit industry.
The book has many such experiments, how they run it and what other methods they discovered in the process. If you do not read the whole book. I would recommend you atleast read two chapters
- What Really makes People Give to Charity?
- What Can Cleft Palates and Opt-Out Boxes Teach Us About People’s Reasons for Giving to Charity?
I wish you all the success in running those experiment. Happy collecting data and analyzing your experiments. Once a client told me,
You should provide valuable information to the businesses, they are competent enough to figure out how to make a profits responsibly
It was so profound. This makes me think, Should non profit have a part product/consulting department for generating operation cost? I would love to see your reply below in comments. This department could find business opportunity from the learning and information you collect during your day to day operations.
Marketing
This is a vast subject and I am no expert on this. However I will talk about one topic that comes naturally in social media marketing.
You can tell your story so beautifully. Since your work will be for good and responsible. The story will have a positive characteristic. People would love to read, listen or see your positive story and the impact you are making. One of the recent video on #gendergap.
You can always take a good photograph of your team or the field work you are doing and add the story about what you are doing. How you are making a difference? Provide value by sharing your experiment results with other not for profits too.
One of the objection I here is there is no one to understand the technology and use these social media. You can always ask for volunteers or interns to help you out. Kids are expert in taking photos and videos. Some are so good with editing as well. If you think it is too much of work, go with simple photo and write a story about it. Here is an example that I have written 3 months back when we visited London to meet our clients. Click here to read it. We didn’t got any business from it but our clients were talking about it and apprenticed because they learned about there peers.
Here is an example of a twitter account, I would like to share. They are not our clients but I like their feed of Sustainable Restaurant Association
Here is a quote from an expert, you can read the whole article of him below
Ultimately, life is about value exchange. Give value to get value.
Non Profit Marketing: the same rules apply
