Can UnMarketing Help My Christian Service Nonprofit?

“UnMar­ket­ing? We don’t even have time for mar­ket­ing!” True, these are tough times. For many Chris­t­ian ser­vice non­prof­its the clients and oppor­tu­ni­ties keep com­ing even when the sup­port does­n’t. Might mar­ket­ing be a solu­tion? And just what is UnMarketing?

Actu­al­ly, some non­prof­its think mar­ket­ing is a neg­a­tive con­cept. “That’s for peo­ple with prod­ucts… peo­ple who track sales… and think about cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion.” In fact, mar­ket­ing is con­cerned with “cre­at­ing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing, and deliv­er­ing val­ue to cus­tomers and for man­ag­ing cus­tomer rela­tion­ships.” As some­one who has been involved with non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions for over 22 years, I won­der if there might be a ben­e­fit to think­ing of our donors as cus­tomers and our dona­tions as sales? Are we oblig­at­ed to ensure donor sat­is­fac­tion? What would our donors say was our prod­uct — not the prod­uct we deliv­er to our clients, but the one we deliv­er to the donors themselves?

And what about UnMar­ket­ing? That’s the title of a book by Scott Strat­ten… “UnMar­ket­ing: Stop Mar­ket­ing. Start Engag­ing.”  Scott and a host of oth­er mar­ket­ing gurus main­tain that there is a ben­e­fit to orga­ni­za­tions from online engage­ment with their cus­tomers (think donors) through devel­op­ing Inter­net con­tent (in blogs, social media, and video shar­ing sites.)

A recent report by Net­work for Good tends to sup­port the con­cept of UnMar­ket­ing for non­prof­its. They found that “char­i­ty web­sites with a brand­ed dona­tion page received more dona­tions (5x more!) and at high­er aver­age val­ues than those with a gener­ic dona­tion page.” I took a list of sites sug­gest­ed by Net­work for Good and found that 9 of the 10 sites they sug­gest­ed as exam­ples with brand­ed dona­tion pages were effec­tive­ly prac­tic­ing UnMar­ket­ing.  Does the brand­ed dona­tion page make the dif­fer­ence or is it the non­prof­it’s extra efforts at social engage­ment with their supporters?

Was my sur­vey con­clu­sive? No, but enough to make me want to try the con­cept with a few non­prof­its oper­at­ing in my area of inter­est and expe­ri­ence. There­fore, the pur­pose of this blog is to explore the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of UnMar­ket­ing by Chris­t­ian ser­vice non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions. Before we begin, here are a cou­ple of under­ly­ing premises:

 1. There is a path to devel­op­ing devot­ed fol­low­ers (I call them advo­cates.) The path involves intro­duc­tion, edu­ca­tion, iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, com­mit­ment, and advo­ca­cy. We will talk more about this process in a lat­er blog post.

 2. If a typ­i­cal small to mid­dle-sized non­prof­it is going to be suc­cess­ful at UnMar­ket­ing, it must be done on a shoe­string. Small to mid­dle-sized non­prof­its don’t have the time or bud­get to sup­port an expen­sive exper­i­ment. At the non­prof­it I’ll describe in my next post, our efforts to this point have all been done with volunteers.

 3. Final­ly, I’m look­ing for­ward to your feed­back in the com­ments sec­tion of these posts. I’m hop­ing that our con­ver­sa­tions here will help us to become more effec­tive UnMar­keters for our causes.

Next Up: “Good Advice Before You Tinker… Choose Your Experts Well…”