If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you are looking for ways to increase your impact. Social return on investment, or social ROI, lets you objectively define and measure your impact. Once you can define and measure impact, use that ability to identify communities to serve. Decisions about who and where you choose to serve–what the private sector calls market entry decisions–have a huge influence on the impact that you have.
Continue reading Using Social ROI for Market Entry Decisions
Plenty of people, including public sector marketers, think design means making things look cool or trendy or pretty. However, looking good is only a by-product. Design is the thought and intention behind creating a product or service that succeeds in filling a need. To ensure success, true marketers create systems not things.
Continue reading Marketers Create Systems Not Things For Improving The Social Good
“If you’re the kind of person who tends to succeed in what you start, changing what you start could be the most extraordinary thing you do.”
I previously featured this quote in a post about why society needs great marketers. If you’re a marketer interested in or working in the public and social sectors, maybe you’ve wanted to start a nonprofit of your own. As someone who has started his own business and worked at startups and nonprofits, I advise you to think long and hard before you start a nonprofit. It might not be the best way to have the impact you desire.
If you design goods and services for your clients, instead of with them, you are forced to make assumptions. Inevitably, your assumptions will be wrong. With bad assumptions you risk your goods and services not meeting your clients needs. That means you are wasting your time and money, and your clients’ time and money. With basic needs like health and sanitation, you are also be risking your clients’ lives. At the intersection of nonprofits and client-centered design lies fulfilling your mission for your clients.
Continue reading With, Not For: Nonprofits and Client-Centered Design
Reach and frequency are marketing metrics for planning and evaluating promotional activities. Is your message reaching who you want to reach, as often as you want to reach them? Here are ways to plan for and increase reach and frequency.
Continue reading Reach and Frequency Are Fundamental Marketing Metrics
In the US, public debts keep mounting, taxpayers keep insisting on lower taxes, and vital services and infrastructure keep declining. We need to find a new way of designing and paying for government. Cost cutting isn’t enough. We need transformation. Lean production principles can transform public and social sector work.
Continue reading Increase Your Public and Social Sector Impact Through Lean Methodologies
Can you do well while doing good? This is the ultimate question for marketer the social good. Doing well in the public and social sector means more than just money. Earning money leads to sustainability and scale, two qualities that communities desperately need and funders desperately seek.
Continue reading Impact Investing: Return on Investment From Marketing Social Goods
Pricing and payments are core aspects of marketing a product or service. For public and social sector marketers, pricing isn’t always straightforward. Often the buyer isn’t the user, and the goal isn’t about making more money or beating the competition. It’s hard to put a price on open space such as watersheds and parks is hard. How do you determine a cost or value, let alone identify a buyer?
In the island paradise of Seychelles, marketers are collaborating to find a better way to price and pay for both existing national debts and new investments in commons with current funds.
Continue reading Governing the Commons: Pricing a new marine protected area in Seychelles
In the United States, discussion of delivery drones usually follows stories such as this New York Times piece about Amazon testing drone delivery of packages. Drone delivery also offers hope to public and social sector organizations as well.
Continue reading Distribution: The Promise of Drone Delivery in the Social Sector
Nonprofits often receive funding for providing a specific service, but not for the organizational infrastructure that supports the service. Running a food bank or crisis hotline is crucial work. Who is going to pay the rent, phone bill, and liability insurance needed to provide such services?
Donors have historically avoided funding “overhead.” Understandably, they want as much of their money as possible going to services. The problem comes in not fully funding your nonprofit for all the costs that contribute to providing services.