LISTEN!
Oct/05/09 11:09 AM Filed in: Development, Marketing, Strategy
By Barry McLeish
Is listening to your donors, volunteers, customers, and clients a priority to you and your development and marketing team?
The reason it should be is pretty important. You and I are devoting a lot of dollars, time, and energy to our organization and hopefully, trying to define and manage what people think of us. Some call this “brand management.” Unfortunately, you may have the cart before the horse. Your brand is whatever your stakeholders are currently saying about you and your organization. They decide what your brand is more than you do.
Do you know what your donors, volunteers, customers, and clients think your brand is about? I only know one way to really find this information out and that is by listening.
Let me quote someone I have never met but would love to – the quote is from Ricardo Guimaraes, founder of Thymus Branding:
You and I know that there is a lot of money being spent already on market research by many organizations – for profit and nonprofit. You most likely familiar with some of the problems that come along with research; bias of surveys, limitations of focus groups, too much information, and on and on.
My concern is a little different: there are lots of ways to listen. It is obviously important for you as a marketer to know what the donor, volunteer, or customer is feeling when they deal with your cause. However, most of us do not have a plan for listening. You must clarify your objectives for listening first. Don’t just try to gather a lot of information and hope for insights – doing this means you will fail. And because of the relative ease of working online, don’t just start monitoring your community of stakeholders looking for tidbits.
First, decide what is feasible given the community of people who are your stakeholders. A constituency over 65 years of age necessitates one path; a clientele between 14 and 19 years of age necessitates another path.
Second, what are your goals for listening? Are you going to just listen looking for information, are you looking for ways to create a viral (word-of-mouth) campaign, or are you trying to energize your best donors to give more?
Third, is this a flash-in-the-pan exercise or are you going to begin a process of routinely engaging your constituents in listening exercises and ultimately creating an ongoing dialogue with them? Your strategy here matters, especially if you’re looking for relationships with your stakeholders to change in the future.
Finally, are you going to use social media, phone interviews, face-to-face – what applications are you going to use?
Decide today that your organization is going to be one that listens to its stakeholders – all of the time. Good luck in the days ahead.
Is listening to your donors, volunteers, customers, and clients a priority to you and your development and marketing team?
The reason it should be is pretty important. You and I are devoting a lot of dollars, time, and energy to our organization and hopefully, trying to define and manage what people think of us. Some call this “brand management.” Unfortunately, you may have the cart before the horse. Your brand is whatever your stakeholders are currently saying about you and your organization. They decide what your brand is more than you do.
Do you know what your donors, volunteers, customers, and clients think your brand is about? I only know one way to really find this information out and that is by listening.
Let me quote someone I have never met but would love to – the quote is from Ricardo Guimaraes, founder of Thymus Branding:
- The value of a brand belongs to the market and not to the company. The company in this sense is a tool to create value for the brand. Brand in this sense – it lives outside the company, not in the company. When I say that the management is not prepared for dealing with the brand, it is because in their mind-set they are managing a closed structure that is the company. The brand is an open structure – they don’t know how to manage an open structure. (Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2008)
You and I know that there is a lot of money being spent already on market research by many organizations – for profit and nonprofit. You most likely familiar with some of the problems that come along with research; bias of surveys, limitations of focus groups, too much information, and on and on.
My concern is a little different: there are lots of ways to listen. It is obviously important for you as a marketer to know what the donor, volunteer, or customer is feeling when they deal with your cause. However, most of us do not have a plan for listening. You must clarify your objectives for listening first. Don’t just try to gather a lot of information and hope for insights – doing this means you will fail. And because of the relative ease of working online, don’t just start monitoring your community of stakeholders looking for tidbits.
First, decide what is feasible given the community of people who are your stakeholders. A constituency over 65 years of age necessitates one path; a clientele between 14 and 19 years of age necessitates another path.
Second, what are your goals for listening? Are you going to just listen looking for information, are you looking for ways to create a viral (word-of-mouth) campaign, or are you trying to energize your best donors to give more?
Third, is this a flash-in-the-pan exercise or are you going to begin a process of routinely engaging your constituents in listening exercises and ultimately creating an ongoing dialogue with them? Your strategy here matters, especially if you’re looking for relationships with your stakeholders to change in the future.
Finally, are you going to use social media, phone interviews, face-to-face – what applications are you going to use?
Decide today that your organization is going to be one that listens to its stakeholders – all of the time. Good luck in the days ahead.