Episode 177: Marketing vs. Fundraising - How to Work In Concert
This week, we examine several challenges and solutions to getting marketing and fundraising teams on the same page – how can you work together to drive proper messaging, relationships and gifts for your organization?
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Halette Philanthropy, Randall Hallett. Thank you for your time in joining me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall.
Interestingly enough, today we jump into what I think of as co-equal parts of a nonprofit organization, but sometimes become conflicted internally in terms of what they're trying to accomplish and how they might work together. Today we talk about the differences and the issues involving marketing versus philanthropy or fundraising.
I have a client who has an interesting dynamic, legally in the sector that he is in. He is a very large, part of a very large nonprofit. And I find that the issues involving marketing versus fundraising generally appear more often in large organizations that are smaller, which we'll talk about here in a moment.
My client and good friends problem is that in a very large organization, he is over both marketing and marketing and fundraising. His challenge is that he's got a very small department organization struggling to figure out how to probably look at it from the proper investment perspective of making sure that both marketing and fundraising are both well served.
But I find that both from a consulting perspective and working with clients, as well as my own practical experience, that sometimes marketing and fundraising aren't on the same page. There's conflict. And that's what we want to talk about today is how do we get through that? What are the challenges?
The reason that it seems to be more of an issue in large organizations is you have departments. In a smaller nonprofit or maybe a different way of looking at it is if 100% of your revenue comes from philanthropy. Maybe you're a food bank or you are a homeless shelter. I mean, there's not another revenue stream like in higher ed or in private education like in secondary and primary schools or in healthcare or in museums and zoos where you have admissions and sponsorships and the sponsorships may fall more on the philanthropy side. But there's admissions revenue.
If you're a small nonprofit and all you have in terms of revenue or the money that you need to meet mission, then there isn't a lot of problem because everything is driven to philanthropy messaging. But when you have a business purpose, that's really what we're talking about. Where you're trying to get patients into the hospital, students to apply and attend a school or parents if it's a younger child into primary and secondary education, private education, or you're trying to get people to come to your museum or zoo. What you end up with is a scenario in situation where potentially you have conflict of messaging.
The marketing purpose or a nonprofit or for any business is to really drive business in the door. It's about building awareness and educating the general public about you being there and the value that comes from it. Fundraising narratives, fundraising options are more based on individualistic. So if the for-profit marketing effort is it's a bigger community wide, you define community however you want, series of either advertisements or tweets or emails or whatever, radio ads, TV ads, they're sent to a much larger community. Fundraising narratives are more individually based. They're about letting people know what you do and you have a very defined, hopefully, group of people you're trying to do that with. That it's about developing resources.
Marketing wants to get people in the door. Fundraising wants to develop relationships and then report on those opportunities into those relationships to deepen them. In some ways, these sometimes conflict.
As a practitioner, one of my favorite stories in talking about this is the conversations I had. He is now the head of external relations at MD Anderson and one of the finest people I've ever had the privilege of working with and that's Mr. Tad Bullen. We both worked at the Medical Center. Tad was in charge of marketing. I was in charge of fundraising and philanthropy. And for a while we didn't always see eye to eye, nothing nefarious or bad. We just saw the business of what we were doing a little bit differently. I had come from an organization where I was over the marketing in a secondary private military all-male school up in the St. Paul, Minnesota. So I had control. And this was an enormous organization at the Nebraska Medical Center, a billion dollar plus organization where I didn't have that control. And took me a little while to figure out how to build that kind of relationship with him. And it started with the first part of what we can do and this will be a kind of a sub-tactical is realizing that both of us were using similar techniques to get across the kind of messaging we wanted to get across. That we were storytellers and that we were communicating with people for the most part outside of the organization. The other thing is is that we were really both in different ways promoting the essence of what the Medical Center or your nonprofit, the mission what we were trying to accomplish. This meant gathering stories from internal constituents and leaders and finding ways of making sure people are aware of what we were doing. We relied on a lot of similar skill sets when we were trying to accomplish these things. We were talking about compelling writing, storytelling. We were trying to build relationships, although different, which we'll talk about here in a minute. And we were trying to problem solve, although for different things. And we used data to figure out what exactly we were trying to do and where we accomplishing it. The thing that I took away from Ted Pullin from a marketing perspective, I mean, you can't compare what I was doing in St. Paul Minnesota to what he was managing and leading at Nebraska Medicine and now down at the Medical Center at the time, now down at MD Anderson. The data he collected in terms of how people viewed the survey he did or had other companies to was spectacular. I mean, it was awe inspiring to be honest. So we have similar kind of overall techniques that we use. We have similar skill sets that we're trying to accomplish.
So where does the conflict come? The conflict really comes from what the primary goal is. In fundraising, we know that the number one goal is to raise money and fundraisers do this by working with, I'll call it individuals. Some people say, what about corporations and foundations? Folks, I keep saying this. You can say it however you want. Corporations and foundations don't make decisions. People in those organizations make decisions. So you should be building relationships with those people as well. We do it on a very individual basis. If here in Omaha, Nebraska, when I was at the Medical Center, we were worried about, I mean, essence a couple hundred people before major principle in plan gifts, but we were managing 15, 20, 25,000 people in terms of donors, side months, liebuns, keeping contacts, keeping that. Was there messaging to a larger group for acquisitions? Graffold patient millions? Yes, but that wasn't our primary emphasis. One Poland was trying to and doing it brilliantly. Was trying to market to millions of people across the Midwest and then if you throw in our international populations from the Middle East and from India and other places, it was more than that. So we're trying to do it individually. They're doing it on a much bigger scope and they're talking about getting people to choose to have their medical services at the medical center. That's in a different time frame. That's a different group of people and it's a different rationale for what we were trying to do is to build individual relationships about what flames to be could do to make community better place, make the medical center better place. Marketing wants to get people in the door. If you're at a zoo, they're trying to get people to come and attend Omaha's Henry Dorley Zoo. I keep also advertising this. The number one zoo in the world. You can Google it. It's spectacular. They're drawing people from Chicago, Denver, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Minneapolis. I mean, not just here locally, so they're marketing to all of these people to get them to come and attend the zoo. Museums are this way. Educational units are this way. How do I get students to apply here?
Fundraising is trying to pick out the ones who are the most likely to engage because they love the experience so much that they're willing to have a further conversation. Well, that we're talking about fractions of a percentage of the comparative totality of marketing. The challenge becomes what people are saying inside these conversations when we're trying to get our messaging out. And really what you have is things like this. You're trying to do something, maybe send a mailing or build something out or communicating social media could be a whole lot of it. And marketing seems to put a lot of a boss on it. They get into commentary. We have to approve the brand. I'm sure nobody's heard that or that, well, this, this conflicts with some other messaging that we're doing or this doesn't align with the timeline we want. That becomes incredibly frustrating for fundraising, philanthropically relational, directed people. But we're trying to do what we know we need to do. The marketing people hear this as well, you want to operate outside of what we control. It comes about power, branding, messaging, and you don't know how to write. We've spent our whole lives writing. Why would you want to write for us even to the point when we bring in outside experts? I think about some of the outsourcing even as an estate, you know, planning expert that I am with law school and all the different things I've done in this area where I didn't want to worry about this day to day. We would bring in an outside company. They would submit articles that they know work in terms of getting people to kind of think about plan giving and marketing would say, well, no, no, we got to rewrite these. I'm like, no, we don't. They're thinking about visual appealing. We're thinking about does it move people to think about a gift? They're thinking about, you know, how does this sit with someone who doesn't know us? What would they think about using us or coming to us if you're a museum or a zoo or something? We're thinking about, well, they've already been here and know us. How do we deepen the relationship? All of this comes then to these internal moments when they're strife. The question is, how do you work together?
Because at the end of the day, you're on the same team, aren't you? You're on the same team. The tactical pieces are what do we do about these particular challenges? I want to start with a story. The first thing is that number one, you've got to sit down and have a conversation and it should be, if at all, possible, the head of marketing and the head of philanthropy. To talk about the differences in what you do and also how similar they are. You're in half into my time at the medical center. Tad, he was very, very easily seen and very quickly seen that he was just brilliant. I began to realize I have to change the way that I kind of approach this. So we would sit down and he would say, well, my job is to get people, you know, marketing to get people to think about using the medical center for health services. And I said, good, because we need that. And I pulled open a story that they had written was beautifully done on transplant. So Tad, look at this story. This is so well done.
The first paragraph in any one of the stories you're telling is, here's the service we provide, here's why we're better at it and here's why you should choose us in different ways, phrases, words. And he said, I agree. And I said, I don't want to change that. What about the second paragraph? He says, what do you mean? The fact that we have this physician is because of money raised, but the fact that we have this equipment, be able to do this is because of money raised. Is there a way to include philanthropy in the kinds of stories you're trying to tell? So the first part was just to sit down and listen to find some middle ground. And he looked at me and he says, there's nothing wrong with doing that. Then maybe we should be more closely aligned. I don't want to change your purpose. What I need is a little help in elevating mine. And that can be done in the second or third paragraph. We began to talk about the differences in what we did and how we did it. And we began to agree that we could work together and we never had a problem, but we both had bigger departments. So as leaders, we needed to step up and say to our departments, hey, there's certain things they need to control. The organization marketing should control the brand. That's not philanthropy's job. So I don't really want to hear that. Pull and could go back and say, we need to give them a little more freedom on how they write because while it may seem like, quote, unquote, marketing, it's actually fundraising using very similar skills and their messaging is a little bit different. So the first thing is to sit down, talk about aims, goals, also realize a difference in power structure. If you make this about the chief development for chief philanthropy officer against the chief marketing officer, the organization loses and so do the two leaders. This has to be about what's best for organizations. And philanthropy has to be a part of that solution as well as marketing.
The organization does better if we have more philanthropy and more people coming to us. That's a positive. The second thing is is to really understand the other's goals. Tad was really great as I mentioned about the metrics in how messaging was being received. He recreated the mission statement of the Nebraska Medical Center at the time, serious medicine, extraordinary care. The entire mission was four words described us perfectly. That branding was critically important. How he measured it that it resonated was understood and people made decisions based on it was from outside agencies he used allowed me to better understand why he was messaging the way he was. In the same vein, I brought him my metrics and I said, I'm being asteris this much and it's going to be developed by this many referrals, this many new people coming in, this many major gifts, gift pipelines, gift pyramids. He went, I've never seen any of this. How do we work together? So understand that you should be mutually supportive as well as mutually responsible for bettering each other's side of the equation. The third thing is is coming to an agreement about outsourcing. Not going around the branding standards, not going around review standards, not doing other things, but marketing, particularly in large organizations, has a tendency to be overwhelmed. A lot of people wanting to message what Tad and I worked on together, which I think was incredibly important was I said, there are some things you don't have to worry about as much or what to see all of it. But the plan giving piece that I mentioned a few minutes ago was a prime example. And I actually brought him into the conversations with the people that we had outsourced this to and let him see the kind of details they had and the other client's successes they were having. That gave him the ability to look at his team and say, leave this one alone. Randall's on the right track here.
We certainly can look at it. We want to make sure the branding is correct. We want to make sure we're not saying something crazy. We don't want to violate HIPAA and all the other kind of messaging pieces that go along. They would have waivers that needed to be assigned if we were profiling a particular patient or family. But in the end of the day, the basics of the language, the emails, we would always make sure they saw them, but I got a lot more grace on somebody clamping down on us. Why? Because we began to figure out how to outsource. And when something was pressing, we would have a conversation and say, I'll pay for it. Or he could say, nope, my team will get it done. Okay. That also includes the conversation about what we need said. Sometimes, I would have to go to TAD and say, look, my team wants to say this, your team says it has to be this. This is why this doesn't work because you're using marketing language. You're trying to draw people in. What I want to do is tell a story about how philanthropy made a difference. And so we began to figure out how do we outsource? So outsourcing could have meant the outside company outsourcing could be more trust for the philanthropy people when they write and making sure that we could have the right messaging in place. All of this comes to the fact that if you try to do this once a year, we meet once a year and figure, TAD and I, first of all, we were in executive meetings together twice a week for four hours a week. So either sad by him or across table for a month time. Number two, we would have lunch, try to have lunch every two weeks. I was in his office that say, hey, look, or he'd come up to my office, hey, take a look at this. You need to be constantly conversing about this issue. If you just let it go, it's just going to get worse. Leadership is about sometimes leaning in to the challenge. So the tactical out. What of this particular conversation here on around with Randall is first of all, sit down and listen and realize the different power structures, different goals, how things work, how they're measured. Number two, agree on those mutual beneficial goals that can work together and realize what the other person's goals are so you can be supportive of it. So they can support you and what you're trying to accomplish. Number three is no window outsource and come to some agreement on it. And number four is meet regularly.
Don't run from the problem because it's not going to get better. In the end, there's so much commonality between marketing and fundraising, but the end results, bigger communications versus individualistic, wider audiences versus narrow audiences, making people to use our services versus getting people into deeper relationships to philanthropic and support us. Those nuances at the end of the problem or the challenge. I'm hopeful that these kind of basic four outcomes or suggestions or tactical pieces might get you over their hurdles so you can stop having these internal fights. Because in the end, you're on the same team. And if you don't figure out how to do it, maybe CEO says, I don't need you to want to be him because what I need is a bigger picture or someone to take care of problems. Not bring me more. Tour fours don't usually work in the long term. Collaboration, listening, partnership will get you to your end results. Communication and marketing. Hopefully that's helpful to help you figure out where you need to get to in that discussion. Don't forget to check out the blogs at Halifel Anthropy twice a week posted. Get an RSS feed right to you. And if you'd like to communicate with me, it's podcasted at Halifelanthropy.com. Halifelanthropy has an important role in our world. It's needed. There's so many problems. And while I really believe that commercial free enterprise will take care of a lot of them, there are people left behind in that. Their organizations look behind. There are things left behind. And that's where community and philanthropy come into play.
What you do every day is fill those holes that are critical to our culture, to our heritage, to take care of those that are under served and misrepresented, to care for those the most in need, which brings me in by all time favorite saying. Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen and they're those who wondered what happened. Where people who make things happen, we find others who want to make things happen. But together, our organizations make things happen. For those who are wondering what happened. And that's a pretty cool way to spend the life professionally and maybe even personally. I'll look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of a Round With Randall.
Don't forget, make a great day.