thanks & regards
Alexander Seraphim
St.Sophia Women’s & Children Deplopment Society
Patna,bihar
India

I agree with you 100% about approaching it from a business perspective, although the “product” may differ the strategy and process is very much the same.

I cut my teeth in marketing funnily enough with an NGO with charitable status and my work as a community educator and PR manager too, many moons ago, had a significant thrust towards raising funds – quite often to ensure I still had a job next month so the incentive was evident. It was hard work until we looked at it from a commercial aspect and ended up actually introducing endorsed commercial services such as insurance, discount products to our constituent membership being retired and ageing people. We received a commission on the products sold that we endorsed and also being a member of our organisation was required in order to obtain the discounts so we gained not only income but our membership grew from 1,500 to 12,000. Now I am not saying this is the way to go for our reader’s organisation but it made us think outside the “not for profit” square and we became more self reliant having the commercial aspect fund the social work we did.

So why do we donate / support?

Individual people donate not only because it is a good thing to do but quite often it has in some way relevance to them, whether personally or part of their employment, thus engaging them. It’s like any marketing – for you to tune in to the message and the medium, you must relate to it.

Corporate donations / sponsorship are quite often made not only because they are good corporate citizens but to be quite blunt there is some ROI. Cause related marketing is very much a part of many companies’ strategy – What’s in it for me?.

Given the above, lets have a look at the organisation at hand based on limited knowledge

Firstly let’s put the end users of the service aside. From a commercial sense can we match the supporters of the cause up. I.e.: I haven’t met too many lawyers who are hard up for a bickie so what if we were to attract sponsors who at the end of the day are wanting to market to the lawyers who are supporting the cause. Say a BMW or such. The organisation promotes the company that supports the cause to its supporter base.

Here’s another angle – remember the relevance. Well, why not engage all legal firms in the area your organisation operates, but don’t target just lawyers and not just those who give up their time pro bono. I’m sure there are staff members of these firms, clerks, admin people who are Christians, they also work in the legal industry so there is more relevance and thus engage them – they feel individually, as a team and as an industry that they are contributing. Even the partners of the firm, if they can’t give their time professionally perhaps they can make a donation. Our company has casual dress days, etc , etc that as a team we get behind and donate to.

So if the organisation was theoretically called “Lawyers for Justice” rename it “Law for Justice” – all of a sudden you have engaged a whole industry not just a single part of the profession and everyone feels involved and a part of a cause they can relate to in their day to day work whether judges, lawyers, clerks, admin staff, court officials.

Perhaps some of these firms can in turn engage some of their suppliers to contribute. Build a recognition program around supporters and donors. The statistics show that people will buy from companies that support causes they are associated with.

You are also now building up a supporter base that is perhaps attractive to other corporate sponsors

This may or may not suit your charter or company beliefs but I know thinking more commercially and taking the business approach Simon wrote about will result in greater benefit

I hope this helps in some way

Good luck with a great cause

John