Do You Want to Be Known as ‘Not for Profit’ or ‘For a Purpose?’

Matt

Matt

A graphic designer with a passion for working with charities and small businesses. I work with my clients to reformulate design ideas together, so you can count on me to achieve your goal.
Matt

Matt

A graphic designer with a passion for working with charities and small businesses. I work with my clients to reformulate design ideas together, so you can count on me to achieve your goal.

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It’s amazing how you can get completely different responses just from the way you execute something.

Take two similar methods of selling as an example: cold calling and door-to-door sales.

With cold calling, you wouldn’t get much of a positive response and very little conversions. Whereas if you offer someone something of value before broaching the subject of the product or service you want to sell, they would be more likely to buy from you.

Both methods are trying to sell to people outright, but the door-to-door sales is a slightly more effective execution.

It’s funny right? But when you think about it, it makes sense.

Let’s look at the two examples in more detail.

Although they are both the same, with the cold caller, it’s very impersonal and the fact that they are immediately trying to sell to us makes us feel frustrated and annoyed. What they are usually selling is also something that we don’t need, so it makes us feel mistreated and it’s an inconvenience to our day.

With the door-to-door salesman, the execution has a different focus. First, it’s face to face, which immediately makes it more personal and gives credibility to the organisation that they represent. Second, they start to build a relationship first, telling you a bit about the organisation and offering something of value such as a free prize draw competition that you’ll be included in. Although people still don’t particularly like this way of selling, this method works slightly better as it builds a bit of trust beforehand.

The point is, although both of these methods are selling something, people view them in different ways, therefore making the one slightly more effective than the other.

Why Charities Need to Apply this to Their Marketing

Understanding what makes people want to donate and support a cause is obviously crucial in the charity industry, but it’s not all down to what social media channels you are or aren’t using and testing endless marketing campaigns hoping something will go viral. What if it was as easy as changing your focus so that your executions were producing the desired result?

As charities are under a lot of pressure these days to disclose their budgets to the public, let’s look at the idea of ‘money’ as an example.

Although we all know that money makes the world go around, we sometimes don’t like to think about just how much, and this is the same for charities. People like to believe that when they give to a cause it gets spent on the cause, when in actual fact, not all of it directly does. Much of the money makes up the income for that charity, it funds their fundraising and marketing efforts, and although this is all to raise even more money to go towards the cause, people don’t like to think of their money being spent that way.

Here in lies the problems that charities have.

So, how could they overcome this?

By applying the selling examples above, in order to change how people view charities and how they need to spend their money, charities need to execute their marketing efforts differently.

The problem with being ‘Not for Profit’ is that your focus looks at money. Everybody knows that a charity income is good, it means you can change more lives and make a bigger difference, and they want to help the cause. However, just using the word ‘profit’ makes people focus on the money rather than the cause itself.

To counteract this and generate the response you want, how about branding yourself as a ‘For a Purpose’ charity instead? This simple change of message means the same thing, but completely changes your perspective and therefore how people view you. Your focus has now shifted away from money towards delivery, change and results, so every marketing effort you now make, makes people aware that every action is for the cause.

It’s the same message but there’s a powerful difference.

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