There’s a dangerous trend occurring in the nonprofit sector these days, and that’s the tendency to equate fundraising with marketing your organisation. That’s not to say, however, that there’s isn’t a relationship between the two.

Marketing vs. Branding vs. Fundraising

In fact, one of the key objectives of marketing is to establish your nonprofit’s reputation and image. Fundraising simply builds upon the foundation, and favourable environment, created by your brand. So, while the terms are related, they are not equal. They do not mean the same thing. They cannot be used interchangeably.

Part of the confusion between the meaning of these two terms, and their importance, is that branding isn’t the sole objective of marketing. A positive brand image should be one of your marketing goals, and the results of your fundraising campaigns are certainly influenced by your brand’s image, but nonprofits must communicate with others for many reasons, not just to manage their reputation and garner donations.

Despite these realities, nonprofits everywhere are now combining their fund development and marketing departments.

Marketing’s Key Goals – Keep the Focus on Service

When we’re fundraising, it’s essential that our messaging stays true to our brand. In fact, all our internal and external communications should stay true to our brand, but we must move past the thought of using our communications as only a source for fund development.

At the heart of every nonprofit should be the heart to serve our communities. Instead of creating content on our blogs and social media profiles to simply drive donations, we shouldn’t forget about our ability and call to serve others. Whether it’s articles on our blogs, or other posts on our social media channels, we have a powerful opportunity to educate others, spread awareness about needs, and give a voice to the oppressed, overlooked, and under-represented.

We also have the opportunity to raise the profile of our nonprofit and increase engagement with others in our communities and build meaningful dialogue and goodwill to effect positive change.

We should still promote our programs and event and use effective storytelling to build support. We should still manage our nonprofit’s brand, but increases in fundraising shouldn’t be the only focus, or even the primary focus, all the time. We shouldn’t let the responsibility to really serve others and meet their needs get lost in the shuffle of chasing contributions.

The Importance of Investing in Communications Skills

Any significant change starts with a new, bold idea. We need skilled marketing communicators to help our organisations to start conversations and help our nonprofits advance these ideas forward, until they gain widespread support and become top of mind for our followers.

This means that as nonprofits, we really need to do a better job at professional development, and invest in providing education, and networking opportunities for our communicators in our organisations. We can do this by bucking the trend of combining the marketing and fundraising departments and giving marketing its own budget. Another strategy is to have the marketing head report directly to the board chair and executive director.

This simple step ensures that marketing has a literal seat at the table during budget talks and strategy sessions. This goes a long way to ensuring that your NFP has everything it needs to create a marketing communications strategy for brand development, support for beneficiaries, and fundraising.

We should also encourage our marketers to develop their communications and other professional skills. We can do this by encouraging them to join and actively participate in professional associations, conferences and training that will allow them to develop the skills and connections that they need to meet all our nonprofit’s communications goals, not just the ones that focus on driving gift-giving.