Learn to drive the marketing bus

Who is driving your marketing efforts?

When it comes to creating marketing materials non-profit organizations run into many roadblocks. First, they must stretch valuable donor funds to cover basic advertising, event promotion or sponsorship recognition but can't appear to be wasting money on their own promotional efforts. Then, they can get trapped in a cycle of in-kind support services, student-based initatives and volunteers. The real work of marketing gets side-stepped in favour of the gifts - and personal bias - that sponsors, students and volunteers bring to the table.

Now as a community-building objective this approach is great. It takes all types of people and talent to produce a good marketing pieces but the website project your student intern designed might not match the looke or messages you send in your sponsorship packages. They need to match and its your job to do it.

So, before handing over the marketing keys to anyone take some time to make a few simple choices and stick to them. Doing so will help to define your brand and give you a professional look and feel to your materials. Here's a few tips:

1. Use only two or three fonts in all your material (one for titles, one for body text and one for special occasions.
2. Decide on a colour palette (primary colours, neons, neutrals, earth tones or pastels).
3. Replicate these choices in all your promotional materials - both print and online.
4. Have one clear key message for each piece that you create (i.e. support us, volunteer with us) so the reader can quickly identify with your need.

These four simple steps will go a long way to helping you create a clean and consistent image for your organization. They will also help you guide those people who donate their time and talents to your so they can do their best work for you.