Conversation with Katya Andresen

Conversations on Social Marketing this week kicked off with a presentation from Katya Andresen on the essential elements of social marketing for nonprofit organizations and NGOs. Some of the key points she made during her presentation included her expansive view of where social marketing thinking belongs in the portfolio of an NGO. She identified the usual suspects of outreach efforts and programs. But as she goes into great depth in her book Robin Hood Marketing, she also sees fund raising, media relations, train the trainer activities and corporate partnerships as benefiting from an audience-centered approach. [Note: one of Katya's preparation rituals is to spend the time before her presentation mingling with the participants to learn about them.] Now that she has entered the b'sphere with her blog Getting to the Point, she also adds online and social media to her list of times when one must think like a marketer.

Katya noted that there are three core ideas that nonprofit marketers have to internalize to be successful social marketers:

• Knowing that mission statements aren't enough to create change or attract attention.
• Looking at the world from the point of view of our audience rather than our own.
• Understanding what compels action - that it is not information alone and that it differs for each of our priority audiences.

Her final set of ideas had to do with what she referred to as What I put in the 'to go'€ box.

A perspective and a message that answers the questions:

• Why me?
• What for?
• Why now?
• Who says?
• THEN - Make it EASY TO ACT

Many of these themes formed the basis for the conversation that followed her talk. Another theme that we kept returning to was that marketing is now all about conversations and engaging people where they are, not where we are coming from (such as reciting our mission statement and carrying on the conversation on our terms). The latter is a sure fire recipe for distress - for them and us.