Do your marketing staff scramble to fill requests from fundraising staff without the time to be proactive? Do operating staff think of marketers as the writers of tweets…. the makers of videos…. Peons who write direct mail letters? Does your board celebrate fundraising stars and completely ignore marketing?

My background is marketing in the for-profit sector. When I see how marketing staff are treated in the non-profit sector, it blows my mind!

Marketing in the for-profit sector

In for-profit companies, marketing and sales are treated equally. They do different jobs, with different skills, but equal. That is because the reputation of marketing is different. In the for-profit sector, marketing is split into two:

• the art of marketing (eg direct mail letters, brochures, websites, etc. This is similar to what happens in the non-profit sector)

• the science of marketing (eg profitability. This does not happen in non-profits.)

Many times as a marketing manager, I was pulled into meetings well above my pay grade, because of the work I did on the science side. My colleagues viewed marketers as the Defenders of the Profitability of our product line. A huge part of my job was to analyze revenues and costs. I would receive the data from our database staff and then interpret it for senior staff. I would analyze:

• cost efficiency of the revenue streams

• churn in the portfolio

• break even point of new initiatives.

No senior staff cares about the look of a brochure. If that was all they thought that marketers did, marketers would never get the profile that we do.

How to change the reputation of your marketing staff

Senior staff care about revenues and costs. Be proactive and start raising the issue yourself.

MAS recently completed a research project investigating the marketing best practices of mid-sized nonprofits. We did 10 in-depth marketing audits. Not one participant had a role for a data analyst. They all had database people who willingly produced any report requested. The reports produced were hard to consolidate and analyze strategically. No one knew what kinds of reports to request. That requires the skills of a data analyst; since no one had a data analyst, it fell to the senior marketer. But it was not a formal part of the marketer’s role and they were busy putting out fires elsewhere.

How can you make marketing decisions, without marketing data?

Analyzing cost effectiveness is what we learn in business school. It requires the strategic skills to understand what is important, plus an understanding of basic cost accounting. I do not need to know much about cost accounting – just enough to know what questions to ask and to understand the answers from the CFO. Here is an example of a question “when calculating the minimum sales required to cost justify a new fundraising position, should I include overhead costs?” (By the way, the answer is …. “It depends”…. spoken like a true accountant!) If marketers are not having conversations like that, you are not doing marketing. You are doing ½ of marketing – the fluffy half. If all marketing staff focus on blogs and brochures … no wonder marketing gets ignored.

What is the science side of marketing?

You might think that Science is defined as the metrics from social media, I disagree. Just because the metrics are numbers does not make them science. A poem can be judged based in its “readability score” but that does not make it a science. Social media is about awareness building, which is an art.

Instead, I define the Science of Marketing as the cost effectiveness of your revenue streams. Here is a description of the role

• Design reports that fill the information needs of senior staff

• Complete reports based on data received from database officers

• Lead annual review by providing data to justify marketing activities for next year (eg acquisition activities vs retention activities)

• Analyze results from marketing experiments and share learnings

The science of marketing is not marketing, it is cost accounting.

If you want to get ideas for templates to request, click here. Any staff or volunteer with a business degree can create the marketing infrastructure that you need. You can do it yourself, or you can ask MAS to help you pro bono.

Lelia MacDonald is a Volunteer Consultant with MAS - a pro bono management consulting charity. For 25 years, the retired professionals at MAS have helped over 1,300 nonprofits and charities become better at governance, strategy, HR, marketing and fundraising. Contact MAS today, for free.