Marketing and communications can support your NFP to manage the impact of demand management.
It can be easy when you are busy and demand is high to think the quick solution is to stop your marketing but this can have serious consequences in the longer-term.
What if demand is only a short term issue and you lose all that brand awareness or worse engagement that you’ve built up with key audiences? Or if others in the sector use the situation to advocate for funding?
It may be that marketing and communications can play a supporting role through this challenging time.
Here’s some ideas about how it can help.
- Be strategic: consider the best role for marketing and communications when your organisation is experiencing demand management stress. It may be that you need to switch from a campaign focus to more engagement with current clients, or marketing communications that supports recruitment. Make strategic choices about what you do and don’t do and consider the short and longer-term trade-offs.
- Educate your audience: marketing and communications can be used to educate your audiences, providing tips and information about how they can learn new behaviours or access other support.
- Advocacy: focus your marketing and communication efforts on advocacy, engaging with key funders, partners and supporters in your network to provide additional funding or support so that you can direct resources into service delivery.
- Prepare for crisis communications: with demand management can come an increase in public commentary and even media interest highlighting that people can’t access key services. Often these can be negative stories and if this occurs you want to be ready with proactive messages, stories about the positive outcomes you provide and spokespeople who can confidently share your messages.
For information on how We Are Savvy can assist your organisation in managing demand surplus in a resource tight environment, speak with us today and start a conversation.