Capturing the Intangible:
What the Business World Can Learn From the Nonprofit/NGO Sector

Discovering what is required to capture the intangible has been a decade worth of trial and error, while Gary Wexler has observed and evaluated the practices of Passion Marketing within the Nonprofit/Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) sector. These discoveries led to the creation of the Passion Marketing Principles - the first marketing paradigm ever created exclusively for the Nonprofit/NGO sector. While we thought we were creating this paradigm exclusively for Nonprofits/NGOs, we have now learned how relevant it is to business, especially Principles 9-13.

	Cause		Dignity		Ideas
	Results		Evaluation		Collaborations
	Money & Time		Decision Making		Inspiration
	Soul		Partnerships
	Vision		Community Mapping

All marketing paradigms are built from the bottom line up. In a business paradigm, the bottom line is about profit. In the Nonprofit/NGO paradigm, the bottom line is about the cause.

Businesses market to sell products and services. Nonprofits/NGOs market for three reasons:

1. Fundraising
2. Recruitment of participants
3. Advocacy and education to change community opinion about an issue

In business marketing, people are asked to spend their money and get a product or service in return. In Nonprofit/NGO marketing, people are asked to give their money or time and become a better person in return.

In business marketing, the sale most often occurs on a self-interest level: What is in it for me? In Passion Marketing, the sale also occurs on the intangible, or soul level: How does this cause affect my soul and the soul of our society?

Business marketing is market-driven. What does the marketplace need and what will it buy? Nonprofit/NGO marketing is leadership-driven. Leadership has a vision for a better community or society and leads people down the path of involvement.

Business images can be irreverent, cynical and filled with outlandish humor. Nonprofit/NGO marketing images must be bold, dramatic, powerful and dignified. Nobody gives away his or her time, money or involvement for a joke. They give it away because they believe the act dignifies them.

Business marketing creates large budgets to produce results that can be evaluated by sales. Nonprofits/NGOs will never spend millions of dollars on marketing. Therefore, the results cannot be evaluated by marketing alone. Results will only be created in partnership with fund-raisers, community organizers and policy makers. A Passion Marketing plan includes these collaborative strategies, which often require organizational and community change.

Business marketing decisions are driven by quarterly earnings. Nonprofit/NGO marketing decisions are driven by process. Marketers must know how to bring together professionals, board members, volunteers and donors to create dynamic results.

In the business world, marketing is executed mostly through advertising, public relations, promotions, Internet and direct response.

In the Nonprofit/NGO world, while the tactics may be similar, the marketing is executed through intersections. Intersections open up to many different types of new tactics, such as conversational dinners. Intersections work because marketing results in this sector are dependent upon deep partnerships between the marketers and the fund-raisers, marketers and the policy people responsible for advocacy or the marketers and the recruiters responsible for membership or attendance.

For example, in the case of the marketers and the fund-raisers, the partnership begins at the beginning of the cultivation of the donor, until that person becomes a donor. The DNA of this relationship starts with the strand of the fund-raising plan and its entire multitude of steps and interactions with the donor. The marketing strand intersects multiple times with the fund-raising strand from the beginning, moving up as the cultivation continues. Each time the fundraising strand crosses the marketing strand, it creates an intersection with great possibilities.

In the business world, this same partnership DNA/marketing intersection applies to the relationship between marketers and salespeople, marketers and researchers, and marketers and merchandisers.

Business marketers have extensive budgets to take the penetration wide, but are often at a loss how to take it targeted and deep.

Nonprofits/NGOs do not have extensive budgets to affect a wide swath of people through marketing. Therefore, establishing segmented audiences is critical to success. In this way the penetration can be deep, instead of wide, affecting many within a targeted segment.

Each segment is a community, with leaders, followers, networks, concerns, and a culture all their own. In each segment, the leaders and influencers must be identified. The marketer must learn whom the leader influences-who the leader's network is. The leaders may be social leaders, community leaders, faith-based organization leaders, business leaders and many others. Their networks must be understood and penetrated.

Identifying the segments, their leaders and their networks is the community map. The marketing efforts then follow the community map.

In the business world, as media changes, the Internet grows and budgets are cut, community mapping becomes essential to business marketing.

In the business world, most marketing ideas are connected to traditional communications - advertising and public relations - that require significant budgets.

In the Nonprofit/NGO world, the budgets do not allow for extensive expenditures. Therefore, the marketing must be idea based.

When the DNA partnership and the intersections are established, when community mapping is done and the segmentation understood, they must be driven by big ideas, rather than just communications. More and more people are inundated with communications and do not pay attention. But they will pay attention to the communication when it is based upon a breakthrough set of ideas.

In the business world, as marketplaces become more jaded and cynical about business communications and their self-promotion, as well as inundated with messages, idea-based marketing will have the potential to re-invigorate interest in their products and services. It will also revive their creativity and vibrancy.

While business occasionally does co-op marketing, it rarely does collaborative marketing.

Nonprofits/NGOs must create multiple collaborations, internally and externally, in order to produce results. Internally, they must collaborate between the board and staff and between departments. Externally, they must collaborate with other similar organizations with shared missions to help reach their goals.

A collaborative plan with collaborative ideas and sometimes even shared budgets is essential.

In the business world collaboration could become a key marketing strategy. Collaborative marketing opportunities abound, whether they are with businesses that share similar vision or through the growing field of cause-related marketing, through community groups, faith-based organizations, schools, researchers and media.

Business marketing often works upon immediate gratification, based on tangible products and services and the information that describes them.

In the Nonprofit/NGO world inspiration must be in the lead, followed by information. Nonprofits/NGOs represent the soul of a society. They tackle the issues that improve the human condition. They more often work upon the long term intangible. The intangible is fueled by inspiration more than information. Inspiration moves people to give their money away, to change their opinions, to participate and to volunteer their time.

On the tangible level, you ask people to fund pots and pans, tables, silverware and the cost of food when marketing a food kitchen. On the intangible level, you are asking people to fund the prevention of hunger, combating the ills of homelessness, the right of every person to have food on their plate, the concern for one another, love of our fellow human being, and a host of other issues.

In Nonprofit/NGO marketing, the inspiration moves people to seek out information. Exploring how Nonprofits/NGOs achieve their inspirational, soul messages could be a breakthrough in image creation for the business world.