Posted at 18:59h
in
IMC,
Nonprofit
by Bonnie Harris
[caption id="attachment_6353" align="alignright" width="300"]
Headwaters Relief in Colorado.[/caption]
As I wrote last week, IMC is not easy. It's definitely a case of progress, never perfection. And yet nonprofits seem to have grasped many of the components of integrated marketing and are running with it. I thought that was worth a little bit more analysis to see why that would be true.
1.
Nonprofits understand the buying behavior of their target audience. Face it, trying to get money out of people for charity is really, really hard. It takes a great deal of understanding of your audience in terms of what pulls at their heart strings. (As marketers, isn't that what we're all trying to do?) Good nonprofits know the basic messages that appeal to their targets, how they get their information and how best to influence those decisions via the use of media placements, email, social media and other channels. The
Red Cross does this better than anyone else. Sign up for their email newsletter and experience them leading you by the nose through their IMC channels. Brilliant, really.
2.
Nonprofits usually don't have money to burn. Unless you were lucky enough to work on one of the .orgs spawned by the Big Tobacco settlements, for the most part a nonprofit marketer is working on a tiny budget. This breeds creativity and that's what IMC is all about. Nonprofits jumped on the social media bandwagon (and other brand new bandwagons) as soon as they could.
