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Marketing Your Program

Your public relations/marketing efforts should be ongoing and designed to send a message about the need for mentoring and the value of your program 365 days a year. Consequently, you need a public relations/communications plan for the long-term, reviewing it on a regular basis to reflect your program's changing needs.

Marketing Your Mentoring Program

Establishing and implementing an effective public relations/communications plan is important to assure that you can effectively recruit and retain mentors, increase public awareness of and support for mentoring and raise sufficient funds to keep your program running. Funders, policy makers, community leaders and the general public all need to know about your program's mission goals and successes.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan is an organized program of activities that promotes your organization for one or more purposes, usually to build community recognition, recruit volunteers and/or obtain funding. Generally a plan incorporates several marketing elements such as printed promotional materials, advertisements, radio announcements, public speaking, and/or various types of events. The thread holding these activities together is a common goal with common communication messages.

A marketing plan builds awareness and informs your target audience of what your program is about, what you are trying to do and why. Importantly, it asks them to do something: be a mentor, donate time or money for your organization's cause or participate in an event. The publication, Developing Media Messages for Volunteer Programs by the Points of Light Foundation is a great resource for additional information on marketing.

What are the elements of a good marketing plan?

Effective marketing planning is one of the most critical activities your mentoring program can do to ensure its success. In practical terms, basic marketing includes:

Defining and understanding each audience you want to reach;
Defining the "offer" you want to make--i.e., what it is you want from each audience and what they can expect in return?;
Communicating the offer to each audience;
Creating the mechanisms for making the "transaction"; and
Implementing procedures and practices that foster positive relationships and build loyalty.

Two key components to effective planning are the annual plan and quarterly planning reviews, which enable you to incorporate input from key staff, board members, and other stakeholders:

An annual plan that includes: goals and objectives of the overall program and its various program components (i.e., number of calls received asking for information; number of new volunteers; number of invitations to speak; number of current volunteers who stay active after the first year, number of new donors, increased average gift amounts, etc.); strategies to achieve those goals; a timeline of activities; and an allocation of people and dollar resources to achieve the plan. Don't forget to plan high-profile marketing efforts around National Mentoring Month in January.
Quarterly planning reviews incorporate input from key staff, board members, and other stakeholders, and provide an opportunity to make adjustments to your plan based on evaluation of recent activities, new opportunities in your local community, and current resources.

Marketing Your Mentoring Program Online

More and more people are spending more of their lives online. They access Web sites to find information, use automated tools to find products and services, and use the Internet to research organizations to donate time and money. All of these people are potential customers. The true measure of a successful Web site is the number of people who use it: how many sign up for your e-mail newsletter; who participates in your advocacy program; who donates online, etc. So to be successful, you need people to visit your site more than once.

What are the Key elements to building online traffic?

Targets - People come to your site for two main reasons: to take action or get information. The trick is to make sure you don't put any roadblocks in their way. The goals and objectives that you decided beforehand (who your audience is, what you want them to do when they get there) should guide how you design your site.
Content - Without fresh content, visitors have no reason to return. When faced with limited resources, focus on keeping your content current and relevant to your target visitors.
Techniques - As much as possible, combine your offline efforts with your online efforts. For your offline efforts, always make sure your Web site address is visible on all of your mailings and advertisements. Talk up your site as much as possible.

Let people know what is there. If they find it interesting, they will share it with others. Word of mouth is a strong advertisement. For online efforts, you can use your e-mail newsletters to drive interest by highlighting new articles on your site or letting donors know about the challenges and successes of your mentoring program. Partner with other organizations or swap links or banners with a partnering business. And make sure you are listed in the search engines. Billions of web pages exist and more are being created each day. Current estimates show that 90% of users start their web surfing with engines and hundreds of millions of searches are logged daily. But even more importantly, additional research on user habits shows that users rarely look past the third page of results. So, if you want your customers to find you, your site needs to be listed and listed near the top.
Timing - Keeping your marketing efforts consistent will be better than one huge campaign. Take the time to plan ahead and make small steps monthly.

(These sections are excerpted from How to Build a Successful Mentoring Program Using the Elements of Effective Practice, Section V. How to Manage a Program for Success.)

Marketing Resources

Additional information, resources and tools are available in the Find Resources section and in the How to Build a Successful Mentoring Program Using the Elements of Effective Practice Tool Kit.