Non-profit Organizations
Nonprofit’s compete in a marketplace of ideas, attitudes, and beliefs, where marketing serves the mission and supports both the programs (value proposition) and the organization itself. Marketing encourages a member of the target audience to take action, it influences behavior. Marketing begins with defining the target audience and gaining understanding of its members’ values, needs, and wants; it acknowledges the environment, including the presence of direct and generic competition; it focuses on defining an exchange, honing and delivering the message (communication); and it ends with action by members of the target audience.
There are four broad classes of management decisions for which an understanding of the target audience is especially crucial.
1) How to group total target audiences into similar groupings for purposes of marketing planning (a descriptive understanding of characteristics of the market at a given point in time).
2) Which segments to choose as target markets and how many resources to allocate to each (understanding of associations between market characteristics and behaviors).
3) How to position the desired behavior or behaviors as a desirable value proposition (understanding of causation).
4) How to translate the value proposition into specific elements of the offer, its costs, how it will be delivered, and how it will be communicated (ability to explain causation).
