Over the past several months I've been reading extensively about nonprofit campaigns. There's a push by some folks to frame NPO campaign strategy as social marketing. They suggest treating campaigns as consumer marketing initiatives, while acknowledging that the model has to be tweaked b/c the product is social good versus a hard good. A tangential framework guides the recent popularity of social entrepreneurship.
The theory is that the model has worked well for business over the past 60 years or so and the lessons will apply to NPOs. I certainly see a lot of validity to this argument. I've seen many nonprofits try to solve problems without reference the private sector where the problem has already been solved time and again. In addition to all of the silos in the NPO world, there seems to be an even bigger silo containing all NPOs from private sector business thinking. The social marketing concept is old, however. It was developed in the 70s. I suppose it just hasn't been picked up widely yet.
Or has it? I've only seen reference to the concept here and there - and very infrequently by people running campaigns. But at the same time, the practice seems to be widely in use. Campaigns don't talk about their branding initiatives, but they try to 'get their name out there.' Campaigns don't talk about price, but they try to figure out incentives to entice new supporters. They don't talk about product, but they package membership benefits. I'm generalizing, but I am seeing a trend to borrow social marketing concepts but to leave them unnamed (and only partially adopted - perhaps because some of the concepts seem unpalatable to NPOs, such as "selling in").
I've also been reading network and organizing theory. Most recently, I was going through materials from Marshall Ganz's Harvard organizing course. So my conundrum is this: where do social marketing and organizing meet in the Web2.0 world? On one hand, they appear to be one and the same. On the other, the terms themselves and the spirit that they evoke put them at different ends of a mentality spectrum. Organizing is people meeting people, engaging in dialogues, getting hands dirty, being a leader. In the words of Ganz: "Organizers identify, recruit and develop leadership; build community around leadership; and build power out of community. Organizers bring people together, challenging them to act on behalf of their shared values and interests."
That sounds like a far cry from the ethos of marketing. To be fair social marketing endeavors to "listen to the needs and desires of the target audience themselves, and [to build] the program from there." ref But words are important. The phrase "target audience" betrays a perspective which is different from that of the Organizer who works with "people." I don't see the phrase "target audience" anywhere in Ganz's writings (at least via a Google search of the web site).
Ganz does present a chart that distinguishes social marketing from organizing - the former being driven by entrepreneurs and the latter by Organizers. He also states that Organizers address citizens while social marketing addresses customers. So now I'm confused (wish I could have taken that class). I'm left with questions about nonprofits and their modus operandi. By nature of being 501c3 nonprofit corporations, is the NPO approach, by definition, social marketing? Does this prove my earlier hypothesis that NPOs are actually all taking a social marketing approach, but not necessarily giving it that appellation?
Why does it matter? It sounds like a purely semantic issue. But I think that in developing nonprofit strategy, it's critical to define the role of the NPO as Organizer or marketer. Doing so changes everything. It changes how the NPO sees its role - and therefore affects its ongoing strategy & resulting choice of actions. A marketer with customers is going to try to sell a product. An Organizer is going to develop a personal relationship among people and attempt to connect them to each other to solve a problem. Of course, the nonprofit web2.0 tech buzz is all about the latter and every NPO claims to be doing just that (or trying to figure out how to do it).
I wonder if defining roles more explicitly would help NPOs to better take advantage of NP tech. Or is it structurally impossible for a NPO to act as an Organizer? Do the demands of payroll (and such) prevent the NPO from becoming an Organizer in the Ganzian sense? Will NPOs always perform a marketer's function? Or does web2.0 tech free the NPO from enough of the bonds of being a corporation (such as formalized membership structures - as per Marty Kearns & Co's Power to the Edges treatise posits) to enable it to become an Organizer? If the bonds are loosed and it actually becomes an Organizer, should it cease to be a NPO and reclassify itself as a civic group -- jettisoning all of the c3 structure? I don't think so. I see a lot of value in a formalized structure (such as ongoing institutional knowledge and a system for funneling funds towards causes, among others).
So I suppose my meta questions is: in developing NPO web2.0 strategy can one believe that their NPO is an Organizer? Or are there structural boundaries that necessitate that the NPO is actually a marketer (even if it likes to think of itself as an Organizer)? My overarching premise is that referring to an NPO by an accurate name helps it frame, develop and implement more effective strategy.
(or do I just need to read some more Ganz to figure this out?)
References:
Power to the Edges: http://www.pacefunders.org/pdf/05.06.05%20Final%20Version%201.0.pdf
Ganz Organizing: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k2139&pageid=icb.page60811
Social Marketing:
http://www.social-marketing.com/Whatis.html
http://www.wildapricot.com/blogs/newsblog/archive/2007/03/07/marketing-guidelines-for-non-profit-service-providers-an-overview.aspx
Comments