Kathleen Lane – Facilitating Your Health Promotion Strategy

Every year, or every few years, executives get together and create a strategic plan for their organization. They define (or refine) the organizations vision, mission and values. They might come up with some strategic objectives. Then, most of the time, they create a pretty little report and publish it on their website. And it sits there while business continues as usual.

Great!

As a former competitive athlete (I competed nationally in trampoline gymnastics), I’ve learned a thing or two over the years about goal setting. And of everything I’ve learned, the most important is:

A goal without a plan is nothing more than a dream

The way I see it is that most organizations don’t actually engage in strategic planning. Instead, they set strategic objectives, or strategic goals. Now, don’t get me wrong: strategic goals and objectives are important! But if you want to achieve your goals, you need a plan – and you need to ensure that you bring everyone in your organization on board with the plan.

Strategic planning offers executives an amazing opportunity to come together and discuss how each of their domains fits together.

What does our market research tell us about our customers? Do we need to adapt our strategy to meet their needs? Do we need to focus on a new customer segment?
What does the business climate look like? What opportunities do we foresee? What challenges are there? What’s the local and global economy like? The labour market?
Who is our competition? What do they offer that we don’t?
What makes our organization different and special? How do we communicate that?
Based on all of the above, do we need to update our mission/mandate? Are our goals reasonable? Do all our products and services support our goals?
Do we have the resources to achieve our objectives?

Ideally, this discussion should lead to the development of an action plan detailing the steps the organization will take to achieve the goals, who will be responsible for the implementation, and when each step will be achieved.

Your strategic plan is your roadmap detailing

HOW your organization will achieve its objectives.

Which brings us to the other problem with strategic planning: it usually only happens once a year (at best). As we all know, the business landscape changes quickly. Opportunities can arise out of the blue – and vanish just as quickly. Your projections based on the business climate in January might be completely off by March. A brand new, unanticipated opportunity might pop up in July. How will your organization cope?

Strategic plans are living documents

To get the most value out of your strategic plan, you have to realize that it is a living document. You can’t simply create it once a year and stick in on a shelf. Strategic plans need nurturing and periodic updating. I believe that instead of happening once a year, strategic planning needs to be an ongoing process where each ignificant opportunity or challenge that arises is evaluated to ensire it fits with your vision and mandate. Regular review allows your organization to stay on track to achieving your goals and remain relevant in a changing business landscape.

This book, by Kivi Leroux Miller is an amazing resource for anyone new to content marketing – or anyone looking for some fresh ideas. Despite the title: Content Marketing for Nonprofits, most of the information is applicable to for-profit businesses as well. The book is FULL of very practical suggestions for creating and curating content and for working with different platforms.

Content marketing is not new – and information about it has been around for a while – but Miller brings all the pieces together in a very readable, approachable book. Until I picked up this book in the summer, online marketing was something I didn’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole, despite knowing how important it is for an organization to have a great online presence. Now, I feel ready to jump in the deep end.

The book itself is divided into five sections:

Why content marketing?
Developing a strategy,
Creating a content plan,
Implementing the strategy, and
Using the right tools.

On my first read through, I lingered at the beginning, learning all about what participants, supporters and influences want and why we need to stop interrupting and start attracting our audience with great content. Lately, I’ve been referring to the last three sections quite a bit, since it turns out that I actually did jump in the deep end when I signed myself up for an emarketing course as one of my MBA electives. Our assignment is to work with a real, live company to develop an online marketing plan.

Here are some of the highlights:

Traditionally, marketing classes teach you to think in terms of target markets and target audiences. Miller emphasizes that focusing on specific groups is extremely valuable, but suggests that the term target audience is, perhaps, outdated. In Miller’s words:

…Targeting is troublesome because it conjures the image of you blasting your content toward the audience, rather than you creating content that naturally attracts specific types of people to you. The term audience presents a similar problem because it implies people sitting passively and quietly while you present to them. Today, your goal is engagement with people who care about the same things your organization does.

Engagement brings up new marketing challenges: you (the marketer) no longer have the same kind of control that you once did. With social media, suddenly the old target audience has the power to actively engage in creating, sharing and discussing your message. Miller suggests that it’s more useful to think of the people engaging with your organization online as PSIs:

Participants, who are directly involved with implementing the programs and services of your organization,
Supporters, who actively support your organization, but are not directly involved in program or service delivery, and
Influencers, who are less interested, but can impact the perception of your organization (i.e. journalists).

Understanding your PSIs matters, because ultimately they are the ones who determine if your message is relevant. For example, if you donate to a particular organization, do you care about the nitty-gritty day to day operations? Or do you care about the impact your donation is having? The key to content marketing is to understand what your PSIs want, and to draw them in with free, useful content.

Miller explains how many traditional marketing concepts, such as marketing to emotions and aligning your marketing messages with your organization’s goal, can be applied to content marketing. She also provides a wonderful set of resources for managing your content via content calendars and making it easy for everyone to pitch in. The book is rich with examples of how organizations have applied Miller’s content marketing principles, which makes it easy to visualize how these principles can be applied to your organization.

I believe that the true value of Content Marketing for Nonprofits lies not in the book’s contents, but in the way that Miller bring all the pieces together in an approachable, empowering way. Step-by-step instructions walk you through defining your organization’s “voice” and creating a content calendar. Other chapters provide a wealth of ideas to draw from, such as Eleven Favourite Types of Articles. In the last section of the book, Miller provides an in depth discussion of each communications channel including ways to make your content work, pitfalls to avoid, and several great examples to learn from.

The Bottom Line? You can spend weeks scouring the internet and bookstore to find this information, or you can simply pick up Content Marketing for Nonprofits by Kivi Leroux Miller. This book had definitely found a permanent home in my library.