The marketing department is destroying your organization. Not on purpose, but the very fact that marketing is segregated into a department is what’s doing the damage.
It doesn’t matter how smart (or lacking in smarts) your marketing department is. If marketing isn’t built into your entire organization from top to bottom and side to side, you’re lost.
It’s everyone’s job to tell your story in a way that donors, prospective donors, and third parties (like the press) can understand.
It’s everyone’s job to create memorable, exciting programs that donors can love and support.
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It’s everyone’s job to take part in the conversation that’s forming around the things you impact.
It’s everyone’s job to know, understand, and respect donors.
When these things are only the marketing department’s job, they’ll only get half-way done.
Sadly, many nonprofit marketing departments think it’s their job to be gatekeepers for “marketing” functions, keeping everyone else out of it. That leads, usually, to an irrelevant marketing department that spends its time and energy controlling the message and keeping others quiet, while they themselves neglect the real things: buidling a truly remarkable organization, and the genuine conversation that forms around such organizations. That’s what marketing is becoming.
Unless you have a marketing department.
Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle|Domain, a direct-response agency serving the nonprofit world. He blogs at the Donor Power Blog.
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