How to Market Your Nonprofit like a Space Program
When I was young, my father worked at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., as a technician. One day, he brought my brother and I back into his lab, which was filled with guys in white lab coats looking very important, whirling around equally important-looking machines that permeated the room with an orchestra of electronic sounds and blinking red light bulb eyes.
From that moment on, I was enthralled with NASA, space and the very concept of putting something on a rocket and shooting it into the void. It was only till a lot later in life that I realized the rest of the world was not as interested in the space program as I was.
Two of the world’s greatest space programs were born in the late 1950s when the Soviet space program and NASA competed against each other in a variety of missions.
The intent was to project military power and to facilitate national pride.
But it was expensive.
In the 1960s, during the Apollo program, America at one point spent up to 4% of the national budget on NASA.
Fast forward to today and NASA, to many, is seen as a luxury program — unpopular with most people and overfunded for its results.
It’s lost some of the grandeur of the past and is disconnected from the people. Government agencies that aren’t vital to the survival of a nation are irrevocably linked to their popularity.
The more popular a program, the less likely it is that budget makers will cut its budget. Because of this, space agencies all over the world have started a major marketing media campaign to renew the 1960s passion of space exploration.
What space agencies can teach about improving your marketing
To re-inspire interest they have used a variety of techniques that the every marketer can use, especially those marketing single events or nonprofit organizations.
The ESA (European Space Agency) recently landed an unmanned lander on a comet. They used this event to gain brand awareness with a calculated marketing effort in traditional media and social media. To do so, they released data from the lander as it came in and held a live video conference as the lander landed.
This entailed flooding social media with updates on the landers progress and holding a video Q-and-A. They targeted potential “customers” — such as taxpayers and youth interested in space — with a strategic individualized marketing plan that began years before the event.
This was the fruit of years of effort of getting people involved and building a social web of interested individuals who would spread the awareness of ESA into nontraditional social circles. The greatest success comes through a detailed plan and the ESA’s plan has its roots in a 1998 paper written about how space organizations can market like nonprofits by Ph. Willekens and W.A. Peeters.
They conclude their paper with a very important message for marketers:
For nonprofit organisations, as for commercial companies, ‘marketing’ involves a mixture of elements, analogous to the ingredients for a cooking recipe. The marketing ‘strategy’ forms the key for the preparation of a set of actions directed towards a clearly defined customer or target group. The various target groups as far as the ESA is concerned are: the taxpayers (general public) as ESA’s main ‘end customer’, the youngsters as ESA’s future ‘end-customers’ …
What is your moon landing?
Because space programs, like nonprofits, lack profitability indicators and have long-term goals, they need to plan their marketing strategy in a detailed schedule, making use of all available resources in the company to achieve their endgame goal.
Nonprofits need a “moon landing” or an influential event that defines their organization. All of the organization’s resources should be somehow help getting the word out for the event. Reach out to traditional media sources and use social media heavily. News corporations have people scouring the internet for trending events and items in order to one-up their competition, so take advantage of that interest.
Build a network of interesting people
Use social media heavily. When building up for an event, have a webpage that allows people to contact you easily. By having non-affiliated contacts spreading your message, your brand starts entering into the consciousness of people outside of your traditional target market, which in turn is increasing your probability to go viral.
Categorize different levels of target customers and have a strategy for each of them that ties into your main marketing strategy, particularly event marketing
Target potential “customers,” and meet them on their level of understanding. Have a strategy for children. Have a strategy for the general public where and when you introduce your nonprofit’s goal as well as the goal for the event. Finally, have an in-depth strategy for reaching professionals who could help your organization reach its end goals, and provide them as much information as possible.
The ESA did this by making their data immediately available to everyone online, but it was most accessed by their target audience of professional scientists. While focusing their media on the intermediate level of understanding, they increased their brand awareness into the nontraditional market.
On the day of the event
If you have the technical know-how, live stream the event on the Internet. Tweet it. Facebook it. Do everything under the sun to let people know to tune into your live stream. You can use the live stream as an indicator for a return on your investment. The goal is to get a buzz going about you and your organization in traditional and nontraditional circles.
The ESA won with their marketing effort with a four-step process:
- They had an influential event.
- They selected their targets carefully. The ESA reached out to their audience wherever they may be using mediums the ESA was familiar with. They never changed their message, but they did change that amount of details given in order to pique the interest of the target group in a deliberate manner.
- They found a way to enter non-traditional social media circles by targeting popular websites and people who spread their brand awareness into their own media circles.
- They facilitated a sense of unity with the project. On the day of the landing, they live streamed the event in a way that the watcher felt that they were also a part of the team. This way, the viewer could take pride in ESA’s accomplishment.
You might also like
A/B Testing: How to improve already effective marketing (and win a ticket to Email Summit in Vegas) [More from the blogs]
Email Marketing: Nonprofit cleans list and lifts open rate 225% [MarketingSherpa case study]
Lead Management: How a B2B SaaS nonprofit decreased its sales cycle 99% [MarketingSherpa case study]
Nonprofit Marketing: 3 tips to increase year-end revenue [More from the blogs]
Email Marketing: Nonprofit achieves 12.5 times higher donation revenue per email than industry average [MarketingSherpa case study]
Categories: Non Profit Fundraising event marketing, non-profit marketing, social media
