I would like you to come up with an idea for a new nonprofit organization. Think of a young and growing organization dealing with an important societal need you particularly care about. Examples include organizations helping immigrant or minority groups, increasing awareness and appreciation of various art forms, providing various types of health care and information, protecting our environment and human rights, and so on.
Your imaginary organization was incorporated 6 month ago. That is when you received a large grant (in the amount of $100,000, unrestricted) from a government agency and decided to establish an organization that would permanently pursue the mission you had outlined in the grant proposal. You began your operations with anaggressive fundraising campaign and raised an additional $150,000. Since its inception, your organization has provided only a few basic services without a specific marketing plan. As the Executive Director, your task is to develop a marketing plan in order to facilitate its ambitious expansion and growth.
I recommend that you begin your project by looking at the websites and annual reports of similar nonprofit organizations to understand their organizational design, offerings, and target audiences. This does not mean that you should create a clone of an existing organization. Instead, try proposing something innovative, unique, and valuable for our community.
In your marketing plan, you should:
Establish mission and vision statements for your new organization and briefly describe basic services it has been providing during the first 6 months of
Analyze its organizational
Internal environments
Review organizational goals and objectives
Differentiation and positioning strategies: how the organization offers unique values and services to society compared to competitors
Describe the organizational culture you seek to establish
External analysis
List and briefly describe all target publics including its clients, donors, volunteers, board members and others.
Describe the competition faced by your organization (please, do research on similar local nonprofit and for-profit organizations operating in the same service area).
Point out various aspects of the current macroeconomic situation and how they may affect your organization.
Formulate your core marketing strategy (e.g., new markets? new offerings?)
Describe marketing research you plan to undertake to gain an understanding of how your target audience (You must include service users, donors, funders, and volunteers as groups of target publics) makes decisions about changing their behavior according to your organizational desires. Based on common sense and any online information you can find, make preliminary assumptions about the character of their decision-making (e.g., who are the decision-makers? How, when, where, and why do these potential consumers use or may use your services?), latest trends in demand (is the demand for services growing or declining?) and social, cultural, and economic characteristics of target publics.
Based on your research, provide some ideas and a rationale for the market (the market where your organization competes against its rivals)
Develop a brand for your organization (name, logo, detailed positioning message).
Describe your marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion).
Are you planning on developing a new product or improving the style, or packaging of your current product? What sources of data will you consider guiding your ideas for a new product?
Price – what pricing techniques will you use?
Based on the character of your offering and the traits of your target audiences, how will you be reaching your audiences?
Promotion: what messages would you want to send and what media would you use?
How will you assess the effectiveness of marketing activities?
Describe your implementation plan (responsibilities, tasks, and timeline).
