Strategy & Messaging
What’s your next move?
There’s a lot of uncertainty out there when it comes to fundraising. For those of you who are just starting out, there’s so much on your plate, it can be hard to decide what to do first. Even once you’re more established, sometimes the old ways of doing things just stop working and you can’t figure out why.
Strategy and research can eliminate much of the uncertainty from your decision-making. I’m talking about a systematic review of your organization to answer the two big questions: 1) What is the best marketing move you can make right now? 2) Is your message connecting with people?
Instead of wasting time doubting and second-guessing, let’s work together so you can make informed, confident choices and build the future you want.
My process
Preliminary Meeting
This is a free consultation about the state of your marketing and any challenges you’re currently facing. If I determine that you’re ready for a long-term marketing plan, I’ll send you a sign-up form and make it official.
2. Discovery
In the discovery session, I dig deep to get a sense of your identity and goals as an organization. How does your staff understand your mission? How do you pitch yourselves? Whom do you see as your best donors and why?
3. Data Collection
Next, I’ll take the temperature outside. I’ll review any metrics you have available and conduct my own polls, surveys, and interviews with select members of your donor base to solve the mystery of what draws some donors in — and where you’re losing others.
4. Submitting the Report
I’ll write up a report, and together we’ll go over my detailed recommendations for your ideal messaging and communications strategy. If you’re interested in moving forward, we can start implementing next steps (either together or bringing in other vendors as needed).
What’s in the report?
✓ Goals: Are you a community organization or aiming for a national profile? Are you focused on broadly raising awareness or addressing an immediate need? Working from a clear vision and sense of your priorities, I can draft a plan to match.
✓ Diagnosis: There’s a whole series of steps involved in building and maintaining relationships with donors. I’ll review your process to see which areas are already working and which can use a boost, whether that means big-picture changes or small but important tweaks. Know what’s going on under the hood, and you know where to focus your energy and resources next.
✓ Messaging: What aspects of your work resonate most strongly with prospects? Are there different messages that work best with different demographics? I’ll boil this down to an elevator pitch that you can keep at the forefront at all times, then prepare you to adapt this idea to your whole range of marketing collateral and your communications at all stages of the marketing process.
✓ Recommendations: What steps do I believe will help you meet your goals? The possibilities are vast. Based on what I’ve learned about your organization, I might recommend anything from reaching out to a new demographic to taking a new approach in your standard pitch; we can explore brochures, website upgrades, email marketing… whatever I believe is best for your situation. I’ll explain how the various options work, what they can do for you, and about how much you can expect to spend making them a reality.
Starting at $4,500
Timeline: 3 to 6 weeks
“100 percent, yes - I would recommend your services! We wanted to improve our image and expand outreach beyond word of mouth referrals. Your observations about our program were on the ball and your marketing advice gave us direction, focus and practical steps to follow. In the end, we got more people talking about us, and isn’t that what it is all about?”
-Yaakov Lieber, Head of Administration, Ohr David
Ready to meet?
To keep our first meeting focused and productive, tell me a little more about your project.
FAQs
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I’m happy to take a look. If you’ve already taken a big chunk out of the workload, naturally, I’ll lower the cost to match.
Fair warning, though: This isn’t a likely scenario. What I’m offering you with this service are my own professional eye and instincts. I prefer to see the whole process through from start to finish to ensure that I don’t miss anything and that I can be confident in my recommendations. Chances are, I’ll decline to take this shortcut if I feel that it would do you a disservice.
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Here’s what I do: I figure out what your strengths are — what makes your organization appeal to donors, what kinds of marketing have been successful for you — and I use that as a springboard. Instead of pushing you into a new and risky approach, I help you pinpoint a foundation that has already proved itself reliable, then advise you on where to go from there.
These recommendations are all based on the goal of helping you build productive, thriving relationships with a wide array of donors.
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While I started out in the film world, I’ve spent the last decade orienting those skills towards the marketing needs of the nonprofit sector. I’ve developed my methodology specifically for this purpose, working with a variety of organizations.
Helping you achieve this success is what gives my work meaning. When clients tell me about the difference I’ve made for them, that’s another injection of energy and motivation for me. There’s nothing like connecting nonprofit organizations with their supporters in an entirely new way.
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Actually, you can.
In fact, I’d encourage you to do so: Once a year, conduct your own review to make sure you’re up to date with the internal and external shifts every nonprofit experiences and that your messaging and marketing are still on task.
But even if you’re already on top of it, it can be useful to get an outside perspective now and again. Honestly, I struggle to do this work for myself, even having developed an exact methodology for handling it!
By the way, I’ve written a handful of posts about how to do this yourself on my blog; I’ve also written a whole book about it. I encourage you to check them both out, even if you do want an external vendor doing the heavy lifting.
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I get you. And I wouldn’t want you to do anything you don’t feel comfortable with.
There are certainly steps we can take to mitigate your concerns. I’m happy to sign an NDA before taking on any such project (and if you don’t have one, I can provide one). In addition, I can share my prep notes for the calls as well as recordings of each call after the fact (though, bear in mind, I may get more candid answers if they know you won’t be listening). If these steps don’t leave you feeling reassured, we can brainstorm other options or just scale back the research process. You’re the boss.
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Here’s what you can expect from the report:
1) An observation of the specific marketing challenge(s) facing you, supported with polls, interview quotes, or general thoughts.
2) An explanation of what I believe this is costing you, so you can judge its importance for yourself.
3) A recommendation for responding to this challenge, including the average price tag, pros and cons of different solutions.
For example, if I say your website needs an overhaul, I’ll explain what I see the business goal of your website to be and where it is currently falling short of achieving this goal. Then, I’d outline what areas I’d change, how I’d go about doing so, and what this would look like in practice.
Not included in the report would be a page-by-page plan for a new website or any new copy. (I can help you with those things as well, but they’d be beyond the scope of pure strategy and into the realm of actual website optimization.)
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Well, for one thing, I keep you in the loop at every stage to make sure you feel good about the work we’re doing. I believe that this is a big part of why I’ve pretty much never gotten negative feedback from clients on the tens of reports I’ve issued.
In fact, the one exception was due to a miscommunication; in that case, I ultimately gave the client a refund. Ever since then, I’ve taken extra pains to make sure that expectations are as clear as possible up front.
Your happiness with the project and the success of your organization are my priorities, and I’ll do what I can to make them a reality.