Marketing Essentials: Experience Management. A new appreciation for nonprofit marketing.

In my others posts "Why do people hate marketers?" and "What do marketers really do?" I discuss the abuse and misuse of the word "marketing." Every organization and corporation partakes in marketing although some do not like to think they do. The nonprofit sector is one of the industries that has a strong aversion to the idea of marketing, because, as I explained, there is alot of confusion about what marketing really is. The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as an organizational function and set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value and managing customers in a manner that creates benefits for stakeholders and community. Based on this definition of marketing, it's easy to understand why most nonprofits do not think marketing is relevant to them, after all, most don't have customers per se, nonprofits aren't concerned with creating value for their investors, and benefitting the community is their primary mission, not a bi-product or means to an end.

Let's ignore the word marketing and the AMA definition for now and focus instead on the tasks and requisite skill set of a new professional we'll call the Experience Manager. This Experience Manager is responsible for designing, executing, and optimizing consistent constituent experiences. Constituents is an umbrella term we use to refer to every one whose behavior we want to influence including donors, volunteers, sponsors, and customers. Experiences refers to the processes these various constituents follow to make their decisions to volunteer, donate, sponsor, and purchase merchandise or memberships. These concurrent processes are different because our goal for each constituent is different.

Managing these experiences is important because they shape consumer's perception of the organization, also know as brand. When constituents have consistently rewarding experiences with an organization, the positive perception of that organization grows. The brand becomes strong. Inconsistent or consistently poor experiences contribute to the negative perception of an organization and a weak brand. In other words, brand is the result of consistent experiences - good or bad. We can create brand identity (or recognition) by using the same logo, colors, jingle, and tagline, and we can build brand awareness through effective advertising and celebrity endorsements, but brand strength is not something we can create. Brand strength is something that is earned though the execution of consistently rewarding experiences.

So, this new Experience Manager we introduced above is responsible for identifying constituents and then designing, executing, and optimizing their experiences.

Designing experiences involves mapping out a step-by-step process for converting target constituents into brand ambassadors. This conversion process is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. It requires an understanding of research methodologies, psychology, economics, pop culture, accounting, art and media.
Executing experiences involves procuring the resources required to support the intended experience. Successful execution requires planning, project management, procurement, logistics, communication, leadership, and collaboration skills.
Optimizing experiences involves tracking and analyzing constituent behavior to identify success and failure points. This requires an understanding of technology, analytics, statistics, and accounting.

To what end is the Experience Manager engaged in these activities? Building brand strength is one goal, albeit an intermediate objective or a means to the end. Another word for brand strength is trust. Trust is certainly something every nonprofit organization is keen on building, because trust is a precondition for loyalty. Fund-raising executives, program managers, and membership directors all rely on constituent trust to procure donations, recruit volunteers, and grow revenue. If they acted independently of each other, the experiences they would deliver would be expensive and incomplete. It would be difficult turning a volunteer into a donor and turning a customer into a volunteer. The hand-offs would be clumbsy, untimely, and probably improvised.

The Experience Manager is responsible for designing, executing, and optimizing consistent experiences in order to build trust with constituents so that the organization can maximize its relationships with them. Naturally, because we're dealing with charitable organizations, the Experience Manager performs these activities in a manner that is socially responsible and beneficial. Now, simply replace the fictitious title Experience Manager with the real title Nonprofit Marketer.