Turn Your Staff and Board into a Marketing TeamOn Tuesday, I’m presenting the webinar, Turning Your Whole Staff and Board into an Effective Marketing Team.  Nonprofit marketers and fundraisers are overwhelmed and overworked. The best way to solve that problem is to get some help with your to-do list. The natural place to look for help is among your current staff and board. But they’re busy too, right?

Of course they are. But there are some very simple things you can do to turn them into a marketing team, whether they know it or not, without really increasing their workload.

The reality is that they are already marketing for you every time they talk about work, inside and outside the office. All you have to do is help them do that better.

Start with a simple three-step approach:

1. Train Them.

Show them what you mean by marketing by starting with the conversations they are already having. Some people refer to this as the elevator pitch, but it’s just as likely to be the “on the train” pitch or the “happy hour” pitch. Ask people to share how they talk about the place they work (or volunteer) when they are with friends and family. How do they explain their jobs? Go from there.

2. Encourage Them.

Make it easy to do the right thing. Use technology tools like shared calendars so they know what’s coming up next and marketing banks so they know exactly where to go for your logo files. Give them lots of examples of what you consider good marketing and bad (“Check out this post on Facebook . . . you could do that” or “Let’s try to avoid getting ourselves into these kinds of debates on Twitter.”)

3. Appreciate Them.

Make praising the small victories a regular part of your routine (I call this “blowing kisses”). Celebrate things like someone sharing a great client story with you (even if you had to clean it up in order to actually use it) or someone meeting one of your deadlines for submitting ideas for the newsletter. Have some fun with it.

I’ll be sharing many more ideas on how to grow your marketing team without hiring anyone new on the webinar. I hope you’ll join us!

Turning Your Whole Staff and Board into an Effective Marketing Team
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
1:00 – 2:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 -11:00 a.m. Pacific)
$35, or included with the All-Access Pass

Published On: February 28, 2011|Categories: Communications Plans and Marketing Strategies|