Understanding the needs of your audience is the basis of a successful marketing strategy. It is the starting point for developing a new marketing plan. It is the preparatory work which must be performed, whether you are designing a new strategy or making a mid-course correction to an existing plan. Audience needs analysis is to marketing strategy development as architectural design is to building a home. If you do not get the home design right, building an aesthetically appealing and structurally safe house is impossible. Likewise, if you do not develop a thorough portrait of your audience, building a marketing strategy that attracts your audience and leads to improved business performance will be unlikely. This article reviews a unique method developed by Coalescent Marketing for analyzing the needs of a nonprofit audience from a values-based needs (VBN) approach. A Values-Based Approach The term needs is generic to marketing strategy development. Since nonprofit audiences are making decisions to align their values rather than buy products, this method is customized for the nonprofit environment by concentrating on a values-based approach. By starting with a values-based approach, the marketing strategy results in an alignment with the causes your nonprofit represents. Identifying values-based needs is at the core of the marketing concept of satisfying the needs of customers (your constituents). To base your strategy and marketing messages on the needs of your constituents is central to what it means to be market oriented. This process often requires research, secondary or primary, but it cannot be skipped. It often appears that secondary research is not available; however organizations such as Barna Research, The Pew Forum, The Center for Missional Research and The Association of Religion Data Archives are just a few sources of valuable research. You may have several constituent groups and the questions you need to ask about each of their needs include the following: 1. What is their demand: what specific charities are they willing to pay for? 2. What are their wants: what explicit causes are they are likely to support? 3. What are their stated needs: why do they say they have a desire to support your cause? 4. What are their latent needs: what basic human needs drive their longing for affiliation with your cause? For example, the constituents for a food shelf have a demand is to donate to the food shelf, a want is to feed the less fortunate, a stated need is to take care of those in their community, and a latent need is to satisfy a sense of altruism. Only by following this descending line of questioning to the latent need will you find the VBN you must appeal to in your marketing strategy. Rating, Graphing & Identifying Clusters Your constituents will express many VBNs. To narrow the list to a manageable set, rate each VBN on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is least important and 5 is most important. Next, by constructing and analyzing a graph, clusters of VBNs can be identified. In such a case several VBNs are consistently rated as the most important across all constituents. These can be used as the basis for constructing messages that resound with the needs of the constituents you are marketing to. To take this a step further, these VBNs can now be related to the strengths and weaknesses of your organization to develop marketing strategies that make the most of on your strengths or overcome perceived weaknesses in the market. Results The value-based needs approach addresses two important issues in the nonprofit marketing strategy development space. First, it transfers the strategic marketing development process from the for-profit sector to the nonprofit sector. There is no denying the difference between the two. It is surprising that no other approach emphasizes the values alignment constituents bring to their decisions about investing their money and time in the cause represented by a nonprofit. By discovering the VBNs of your constituents, you are following the most basic tenet of marketing in a way that makes sense in the nonprofit context. Second, VBN is the tool the enables nonprofits to gain a market orientation. This implies a focus that is necessary if strategic marketing planning is to be effectively implemented. By understanding the VBNs of your constituents first, your strategy, implementation and marketing operations can be aligned to address those needs. The final analysis shows that those nonprofits which implement a market oriented marketing strategy are better performing organizations. Today, economic conditions demand attention to the bottom line. In fact, the bottom line economic benefits are significant. When a market orientation is put into practice, such as a value-based needs approach, marketing costs are lower and income growth is higher.
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