Marketing of Nonprofit Organizations

Dear Colleagues,

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) serve a unique purpose, filling gaps left by governments and for-profits. NPOs have the potential to do a lot of good in their communities. Furthermore, to fill that gap, the number of nonprofit organizations has grown tremendously in the last three decades which has created more competition for the limited amount of funds available to NPOs from the government, corporations, and foundations. With this growth in number and importance of NPOs has come a greater interest from the nonprofit sector in marketing their organizations to not only clients but potential donors and volunteers. Still, marketing is still a relatively new concept to the NPOs community. Nonprofits did not apply marketing techniques until the 1960s. While marketing your NPO is now a well accepted practice, staff at smaller NPOs in particular still struggle with how to effectively market their mission and need to the outside community. Usually, NPOs have applied traditional marketing techniques to their NPO marketing strategy. However, traditional marketing theories are inappropriate for NPOs, because most of these theories focus on the exchange process and making a profit. The perception of marketing is different in nonprofit organizations as they do not use profit as the primary measure of success. Furthermore, unlike for profit organizations NPOs have three distinct market segments, donors, volunteers and clients, each of whom has different needs and interests in the organization. This difference is further compounded by the fact that NPOs, smaller ones particularly, do not always have in house expertise in marketing and are often unsure how to effectively market to these divergent markets. This limits their ability to develop a stable base of both donors and volunteers and even clients. Research specifically in nonprofit marketing techniques can aid NPOs to better reach out to potential clients, donors and volunteers and thus have the resources to follow their missions.

Dr. Jennifer A. Pope
Guest Editor

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• Marketing
• nonprofit organizations
• marketing theory for NPOs
• resource access, marketing expertise