The marketing tactics used by non-profitable organizations are commonly known as non-profit marketing. Marketing for non-profitable organizations sounds like an uncommon thing to implement, as profits are not an important aspect. However, as well as any company, they need customers in order to subsist in the market.
Marketing´s main goal is to increase sales, yet there are many different strategies to achieve the goal. For example, by increasing brand awareness, the public recognizes the product, which leads us most of the times into a sale.
In the case of non-profitable organizations, marketing is focused on the awareness and the communication of the company’s objectives. Is important to let people know about the organization, which are their goals and how to achieve them. This is used not only to attract new customers but also volunteers or people willing to cooperate with the organization.
In the end, non-profitable marketing is seeking to create a relationship with the public so they are involved and happy to participate in achieving the organization’s goals.
Not all the non-profitable marketing campaigns work, the key for success is to adjust it to the target and make a relation with the cause. This way companies are able to use wisely the money spent on communication and save it from less effective campaigns. Is harder to catch customers are attention when your company belongs to this sector, the impact on social media is lower in these companies.
The author, Jay Alduous, which is the chief strategist at Social Capital Partnership, identified three basic categories of non-profitable marketing:
1. Donation or collaboration in return for something
The first category is based on traditional marketing. This way the organization promotes a donation or collaboration in return for something form the company. Normally, the something given is a small object with a big sentimental value but not economical.
2. Fundraising
The second consist of customer fundraising, where people have the opportunity to donate for a company or organization. This is popular between celebrities with big influences willing to donate money or other articles for a cause. Nowadays the popularity of this category has increased in private companies, which ask for money to start new creative business ideas.
3. Sponsorships
The third is the sponsorships in events or programs. This is the most used by companies in order to achieve awareness as well as have a direct influence on the image. Also, it is a way of accessing to different markets niches. Sponsorships events could be more cost-effective than mainstream advertising.
These tactics are profitable in terms of money, the amount invested worth the donations or collaborations achieved. The approaches are many and varied, from Facebook Causes, which provides the option for people to donate to different NGOs directly through Facebook, to Google Ad Grants, Google Ads for charities and non-profits, which provides $10,000 credit of free advertising on AdWords per month. The difficulty, in this case, is to reach a large enough number of people willing to donate the amount needed by an organization.