This post will be in response to Rabiaal’s post regarding marketing in religion:https://blogs.ubc.ca/rabiaalaqillahshazali/2013/11/03/unseen-application-marketing-in-religion/

Rabiaal interestingly brought up the possible 4P’s of marketing with regards to the religion, and gave examples of how it may or may not be effective. I’d like to dive a little bit deeper into the question about marketing and see how everything fits together in a more business context.

How does a religious organization survive?

This is probably the biggest question when it comes to cash flow of an organization that should, on the outset, promote charity, poverty and community. The largest sum of money from religious organizations come from donations, if not all of them.

While donations are not exactly purely transactionary in nature, there is a general consensus that with donations, people do expect certain things out of a religious institutions.

This begs the question of: What do the consumers (devotees) expect from their money and how do these institutions fulfill it?

Place

In order to attract and retain devotees, usually places of worship are renovated and extended to increase attendance, improve loyalty as well as ensuring that devotees feel as comfortable as possible during their time there.

Price

In order to keep a steady flow of revenue, many places of worship utilizes a system where a small portion of the devotees’ income is donated to the organization. However, many places also have an entirely voluntary system, which focuses on its core offerings to encourage devotees’ to donate regularly.

Product

Often, in order to fulfill the growing needs of devotees, money is invested in the religious teacher to further their studies. This is a form of investment to better serve the ‘product’ of better and more thoughtful teachings in the future.

Promotion

Major religions such as Christianity and Islam actively encourage different forms of spreading the religion through peaceful and friendly means. Essentially, religious institutions rely heavily on the word-of-mouth for their promotion.

As seen above, religious institutions also highly depend on business skills in order to thrive and strengthen in today’s world.