Last night at 7 p.m. I got a call from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts looking for donations. The call began "Ms.Gunst, as someone who has donated to The Museum of Fine Arts in the past, we wanted to reach out to you to see if you'd be interested in donating again...." As I prepare for an marketing meeting this week with The Art Connection, an organization that I'm on the board of, it made me think that we've really got to work extra hard to get funding in this economic environment. And, to steal a page from the corporate marketing play book, we've got to better understand not just what our "competition" is offering, but how they are marketing to many of the same people that we'll be targeting with our upcoming campaigns and events.
My thinking about the topic and some on-line searching lead me to a great blog written by a woman who wrote the book on non-profit marketing. Katya Andresen does a great job teaching others about how to motivate others to support your cause.
These days, we can't just expect a white knight to come in and donate to our causes so that we can just keep on doing what we've always been doing, because that's just not going to work. And, you have to look at what other organizations are doing to tap your base for funding that you're counting on. To be honest, I haven't donated to the Museum of Fine Arts in over 10 years. And, then I think I bought an annual membership so that I could get tickets to an opening party for an art exhibit that I was interested in. Think about it. If this organization is keeping up a mailing list of donors through the decades and having telemarketers call them at the dinner hour on a Saturday night, what's your competition doing to tap your market for donations that should be going to your organization?
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