Monthly Archives: June 2015

2 Five Elements for Your Marketing Campaign: Branding

Last Monday I introduced the Open Source Marketing Circuit Questionnaire and  in this and future Monday posts I shall show how it can be adapted to marketing a cause. Many organisations market a cause although often their focus is on products or services and so their cause is not so obvious.

The circuit questionnaire includes five elements and the aim is to think about each element at a deep level.

The analogy is to an electrical circuit.  Get all five right and power will flow.  I’ve used the order in the circuit questionnaire as it follows a logical sequence. However, many people may find a different order works for them.  Some people work through completing what they can and then return to the beginning and find elements that were difficult are now easier.

I shall review the five elements first, before looking at specific questions.  I shall describe the issue covered by an element or question in the circuit questionnaire, suggest how it can be used to market a cause and then use my business and perhaps others as an example. I’ll work through the five elements in this and the next four Monday posts, taking them in the order they appear for ease of reference.  After that I shall return to the beginning and work through some of the questions.  The overview of the five elements will provide context to the more detailed questions.  So, onto today’s topic …

You and Your Brand

Most people believe they are marketing a product, a service or a cause. Actually, for small businesses and organisations, they are marketing themselves. It is really important to understand this. You will make a sale where there is a trusted relationship. Your product, service or cause might be brilliant and you might be able to convey to potential customers its fantastic properties but you need to speak to their hearts. People do not respond solely to logic.

Think of a general election. Many people do not pay a great deal of attention to the parties’ policies. When they enter the ballot box they decide which candidate they trust to run the country. This is not always understood by political activists, especially on the left.

Now you can see an immediate problem. Most organisations, including political parties, are big. There is no one person who is solely responsible for the relationship with the customer or voter. So, most organisations depend upon branding. Sometimes they associate their brand with an individual, perhaps the founder or maybe a patron, party leader or a celebrity. Still, they convey their brand in many ways such as a logo, advertisements, testimonials, stories in the public domain and so on.

Voluntary and community organisations often fail to engage with branding, perhaps because they don’t trust insights from marketers. But how do they convey their cause if they have no figurehead and lack a compelling story to engage potential followers or subscribers?

One challenge is to tell your story in a couple of lines, ideally one sentence. Here is my first attempt for my business:

“A community development worker for over 30 years, I’m committed to local regeneration and bringing community development support to online as well as real life activities.”

I wrote this a couple of months ago. Looking at it now I think it doesn’t really tell a story. It feels a little distant and I’m not happy with the words “I’m committed to” – he would say that wouldn’t he? Here’s my revision:

“My experience of over 30 years as a community development worker informs my support for local regeneration and my offer of support for online and real life activities.”

Which of these two versions do you prefer? How would you improve them?  You can see a more detailed version of my story on my about me page.

Note the aim is to find something about your activities that is unique. Do you think either of my sentences achieves this? Or my longer story?  How could what is distinct about my offer be sharpened further?

2 The Local Economy Revolution

This is the first in a series of reviews of resources about the local economy.  It reviews the ebook, “The Local Economy Revolution” by Della Rucker.  If you’re interested and in the UK, click on the image to go to the UK Amazon site.  In the US, you can get access to it through The Local Economy Revolution website.  Anywhere else and you’ll need to work it out for yourself!

The website is mainly a blog and it provides case studies supporting the book, allowing the ebook to be kept up-to-date without constant updates.  The blog is up-to-date and new posts appear a few times a month.

I’ve started with this book and website because Della Rucker is one of the few people I’ve found who is taking on the local economy.  Someone has suggested the term “local economy” is vague and so it is good to find an activist in a different context, using it.  Further, Rucker has masses of experience and so the book substantially grounds the topic.

Three Undercurrents

Rucker begins by identifying three undercurrents (actually there are four but I’m ignoring the fourth for now) by which she means issues commonly ignored by practitioners in urban regeneration.  So, I’m going to apply them to my experience with Burngreave New Deal for Communities in Sheffield, UK.  If you follow that link you’ll find a summary of my posts on the topic.

Economic Systems and Natural Ecosystems

I was really pleased to see Rucker compare economic systems to natural ecosystems.  This is something I’ve thought for a long time but never written about.  We underestimate natural systems’ complexity at our peril; it is ecosystems that evolve, not individual species.  Evolution is not possible for individual species because it needs the challenge of interaction between species.  Remove one seemingly unassuming species and the system might collapse.

Rucker argues economic systems are similar.  We tend to think of local economies as shops and, if we think a little more deeply, other businesses with maybe a few hidden self-employed.  However, I have argued local markets are more than economic transactions.  The local park, for example, may draw people into a neighbourhood.  So, we need to understand how everything in a neighbourhood or city interacts to support or impede the economy.

Burngreave New Deal recognised this to some extent, involving a range of partners although, like most community projects in the UK, it marginalised the private sector.  To arbitrarily select a neighbourhood of a few thousand houses as an economic unit, perhaps failed to take seriously Sheffield’s complexity.  To spend £50 million pounds in that area did not recognise Burngreave’s connections to the rest of the city.

Economic Systems are Unpredictable

Which brings me to Rucker’s second undercurrent.  Economic systems behave in unpredictable ways.  We fool ourselves if we believe any intervention will have predictable results.  Things are perverse.  They do not behave the way experts say they should.

This explains how Burngreave New Deal could at the same time be the third best New Deal in the country and a total failure. I’ll look at its successes under ‘3’ but it feels like a failure today because when you compare Burngreave with other similar Sheffield neighbourhoods, it is the only one with no forum, no trust, no physical assets and no partnership.  New Deal tore out the infrastructure that made Burngreave a community.

This was not an intended result, its byline was “Legacy not History” – so what went wrong?  Perhaps conflict between the forum and New Deal, the recession, a change in council leadership to a party with its power based in affluent parts of the city, poor decisions about community assets all contributed.  Who would predict that it might be an advantage to live in a neighbourhood that has not had £50 million invested over 10 years?

Talent

Burngreave New Deal did indeed invest in people and its educational results for example were impressive.  What we can’t know is the long-term impact of those results because there is to be no long-term evaluation.  The people who benefited may go on to brilliant careers and make a stupendous contribute for the good of humanity.  But how many will live in Burngreave?  In Sheffield?  And what of those who have not made it?  What has happened to them?

Rucker’s third undercurrent is talent and she makes the point that although many recognise why talent is important, for example, when you set up a businesses, there will always be people in a neighbourhood who do not contribute talent.  One of our greatest challenges is to support the disadvantaged whilst at the same time encouraging those who can contribute talent to step forward.

To a significant degree New Deal recognised this challenge, focusing resources on education and support for young people.  We’ll never know whether that investment was worth it or indeed whether its legacy is better services supporting children and young people today.

Implications and Secret Weapons

All three undercurrents are powerful ideas and certainly the New Deal programme recognised the first and third.  Some of us were aware of the second and watched as our worst fears materialised.  Rucker goes on to name four implications and three secret weapons for the local economy activist.  I’ll review these next time as this post is getting to be rather long.

Do you recognise these undercurrents in your own community?  Are there others you would add?

1 Do we need a campaign for real community development?

Do you know why our neighbourhoods are poorly organised, how they can do better and how to promote real community development online?

You can read about how community development has lost its way in my free ebook, “Community Development is Dead!”.  Find out how to sign up for it at the end of this post. If you are in the UK, you’re sure to disagree about some things I write about.  So, write and tell me what you think! You can comment on the ebook by visiting the post I’ve provided for that purpose.  If you’re not based in the UK, please comment about how your country compares with community development in the UK.

The Central Role of Activist

This sequence of posts, complements the ebook.  I wrote it as an email sequence about a year ago.  My aim at the time was to share some practicalities.  What is real community development; the best way to support community activists?

Not everyone who works in the community is a community development worker.  There are other equally valuable roles; many agencies provide local workers in the community.  So, we need to be clear about what community development is and how it supports the other roles.

In the ebook I explain how we confuse the roles of activist and development worker at our peril! Activists need support from development workers and so confusing the two roles tends to devalue the work of activists. Community activists actually do the work and need the support of development workers.

So, I’ll start by exploring four topics, key to understanding community development and how it differs from the role of activists:

These might not look exciting but together they define some of the problems community development has encountered in the UK.  So next week it’s “Meetings, Meetings, Meetings” – won’t you be glad when they’re over?

7 Introduction to the Circuit Questionnaire

Towards the end of last year I wrote a few posts about needs assessments. My assessment questionnaire, reviewed in those posts, was helpful. I’ve found a better approach that can take someone who has a cause, product or service into a deeper understanding of making their work better known.

Third sector organisations often do not appreciate the Internet is essentially a marketing platform. That is what it is and objections to marketing on ethical grounds somewhat miss the point. If you really don’t want to market, then don’t use the Internet.

The problem is many people associate marketing with buying and selling. In fact it is more accurately about exchange and exchange does not have to include money. A word some people may be happier with is campaigning. Here the exchange is information for support. I might stand on the streets and hand out leaflets and my hope is those who read the leaflet will support my cause. They might sign a petition, join my organisation, vote for me or my candidate. They might donate to the cause and so campaigning can involve financial transactions and so resemble conventional marketing.

Marketing and Campaigning

Sometimes we talk of a marketing campaign because campaigning and marketing are practically the same activity:

Marketing Causes

I’m interested in the overlap between third and private sectors, helping third sector organisations market their cause and possibly generate income too and helping local businesses market their offer as a cause.

Whatever they are doing, they must understand their marketing / campaigning activities holistically. No-one can be effective if they place their online and real life marketing in different boxes. It is the same message and activity carried out in different modes.

Yes, this is complex! The good news is the technical side of the work is far simpler than it used to be. Many people do not know what is possible online (or off for that matter!) or how easy it is. The problem is choosing the best approach to meet your desired outcomes and then building capacity to carry it out. The technical side may be simpler but maintenance of an online programme within an organisation, where you plan to reach people and build relationships with them, can be very demanding. It can have massive implications for the way you do things.

Most organisations and businesses, especially those who are working or plan to work online, need to think in-depth about their approach to all this complexity. They need an in-depth needs assessment.

Circuit Questionnaire

Ben Hunt and his team over at Open Source Marketing (OSM) have devised the Circuit Questionnaire. (OSM is an online resource of marketing techniques and it is free. If you are familiar with marketing, then you may find the site helpful.)  I’ve contributed to developing the Circuit Questionnaire and in this sequence will show how it can be used to market a cause.

The Circuit Questionnaire is a long and detailed series of questions that takes several hours to complete. My plan is to work through the Circuit Questionnaire, explaining the thinking behind it, showing how it can help market causes and use my business as a worked example.

This way I can illustrate how the approach can be used for causes as well as products and services. I will be using the Circuit Questionnaire in all my consultancy packages and this series of posts will help you understand something of the scope of what is possible.

I offer a free trial consultancy session and the details are below: