Marketing Summit

Due to a board connection, we had a summit of marketing folks from 3M come to work this afternoon to talk with us about our e-marketing strategies. We looked over our website, email system, facebook, and twitter and got their input and discussed as we went.

Overall, VERY helpful. They had some resources which sound absolutely AMAZING. Some analytical applications and such which got us all completely nerding out. It was great. There were a few drawbacks.

First, it seems that we continually ran into the same profit V. nonprofit roadblock. Maybe it was only perceived but there seemed to be a certain amount of condescension from certain members of their group in particular. Now usually I can just let that go and still hear what the person is saying and take what is useful from that. But it was a little more difficult today for some reason.

Second, there seemed to be a lack of respect for our financial limitations. WE ARE NOT 3M!! We certainly don't have their marketing budget. While the suggestions they made were helpful, they didn't seem to understand that we can't just go right out and do that. We can work on a plan and integrate it maybe over the next few years, but it'll take some time. And even then, we need to have some confidence that these changes will indeed help us to increase revenue rather than just value to the customer. These in theory are linked but we need some seriously solid numbers in order to really be able to sell these things internally as a good investment. One suggestion was to have appropriate music play on our site for all visitors. That's a great idea! But for the approximate cost of $150 a month...not so much worth it. The shock and disgust on some faces that we thought this was a prohibitive amount was a little of-putting. Especially when there are other things to focus on as priorities.

Third, we need to prioritize. Yes I see the contradiction. (How can you not have music? ...but Prioritize!). This was in reference to Facebook and Twitter. They felt that we were jumping the gun and we needed to really prioritize and focus on improving our website. Now they didn't come out and tell us to ignore these other areas, but that seemed to be the implication. I could have gotten behind that about 4 months ago, before we had started using them. But now that we're into it and have people linked to us, we can't just ignore them till we're ready. We need to maintain at the current level while also building the base of our website content. It's definitely hard and maybe less than ideal, but I can't imagine trying to restart Facebook and twitter pages after leaving them dormant for a year or even just several months. Maybe in the for-profit world, you can focus on one thing at a time individually, but I think the strength of many non-profits is their ability to juggle things and keep it al going, mostly because we don't have the resources to hire the necessary number of people to do the jobs that need to be done.

So in conclusion. Non-profit work is way harder than people think. Go out today, find a non-profit you like (you probably know of several already) and make a donation, however large or small. You have NO idea how much it will be appreciated and how well it will be put to use.