By Lucy Avery, Marketing Communications Manager, Pilotlight
I came to the charity sector from publishing. After ten years of marketing books, I decided I needed a change. I needed to do something different with my skills and be a part of something bigger.
That’s how I found Pilotlight, a leading pro bono charity that amplifies the impact charities, business and individuals can bring to make a better world.
I was the first Marketing Manager Pilotlight had appointed in house, and I had to not only get to grips with what Pilotlight does, how a charity works and the charity sector but also, from a Marketing point of view, a new challenge: the different ways the customer groups relied upon each other.
In my previous role I raised awareness of new books with university lecturers hoping they’d add them to their reading lists; encouraged bookshops to stock those new books; and helped our direct to consumer team sell those new books to students and medical professionals. With Pilotlight, as with any charity, there was a new added element: our customers actually depended upon each other. We needed individuals and employees at our Partner Businesses to give their time to support charities through our programmes. We needed charities to participate in them. Each had a different reason for getting involved, even if they all had the end goal of helping disadvantaged people across the UK. Each was from a different sector and spoke a different language. Each had a different lens through which they viewed our offering.
I was a lone marketeer, wanting to impress my new bosses and, as any marketing and communications professional working in a small charity knows, became a jill of all trades.
I’m happy to say that I survived (!) and over seven fun-filled years later have worked to increase brand awareness, generate leads, engage our customers, and create brand advocates. This is alongside deploying a rebrand, website developments, innovating our content marketing and creating an email marketing database. I’m now involved in a marketing automation project which will help us get smarter with our activities, and have grown the team to take on more responsibilities.
I still remember, halfway through my third week at Pilotlight, working out all the possible customer types we could target, and I came out with a list as long as my arm. There was just so much potential, so much possibility. If I hadn’t been strategic, I would never have accomplished so much for the charity.
So, if you’re in a similar situation, here are my tips for how to get more strategic:
1. Remember, sales is one-to-one, whereas marketing is one to many
This is the essential difference between sales and marketing, as the goal of a sales team is to sell or raise funds or receive donations, whereas the goal of the marketing department should be to create the right environment so a sale can take place. Yes, you may get involved in sales activities, like creating a deck for a particular proposal, but unless you’re templating that deck and enabling the internal teams to use that deck for themselves, you’re not using your skills to the fullest. The superpower of marketing for me is in taking a detailed look at all the possible activities you could do and working out which ones to go for this time. Yes, you can always do another social media post, or send another email, but do you actually need to? What value do these channels and activities have to your goal? This brings me to my next point
2. Have a structured approach to your work
Before you start any marketing activity wind back and think:
- What’s the goal?
- Are there any customer insights I need before I plan how to achieve this? Is there any experience internally on what’s worked well before?
- What approach shall I take?
- Where are my customers most receptive (which will dictate which channels I will concentrate on)?
- What tactics will I use?
- How will I monitor performance and report back?
I’m a planner by nature. Creating a document where I work out my approach to the goal, not only helps me sort through my ideas, but it’s also a great way of sharing the approach with our Leadership Team. I also use it as a reference point when reporting back on how it’s gone.
3. Test and learn
A couple of years into the role I was matched up with Ollie Lloyd, one of our trustees who is a Marketing expert, and this was his mantra for me. In order to get clear on what the data is telling you, you have to work out exactly what you’re testing and what you’re looking to learn from your marketing activity.
If you’re not looking at a dashboard of data that reports your activity on a quarterly basis, create one. You need those numbers not only to be able to learn from your tests, and understand if your approach is working, but to monitor your wins. On a cold winter’s day when you have a lot to get through, knowing that you’ve increased followers on LinkedIn by X% last month will help keep the cold at bay. At least that’s what works for me.
Becoming more strategic will enable you as a marketeer to go from being reactive to being proactive. This will also give you more control over your workload and the marketing activities your charity is deploying.
You may be surprised by how much you can achieve. Good luck!
If your charity wants reach the next stage in its development, and is looking for support with your strategy, operations or your marketing, take a look at how Pilotlight can support you.
