Nonprofit Marketing's Unfair Advantage

(or: How Halara is Trying to Sell me Pants)

All marketing is storytelling.

The best marketing makes the audience the hero of that story. It outlines a problem they’re facing, and paints a picture of the transformation they’ll experience once they overcome it.

Donald Miller’s “Storybrand Framework” might be the most prominent example of this theory, but marketing experts from Ann Handley to Seth Godin will tell you the same thing, because it works: make your customer the hero of your story. Show how connecting with you will transform them for the better.

For example, Halara is determined to sell me pants. They haven’t succeeded yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

Because the ads Halara is serving me aren’t telling me about their pants, not really. Halara is making me imagine how much better my life would be if I had these amazing, magical leg-wrapping objects in my closet. I’d have the perfect outfit every single day. My waist would look that snatched. My hair would look that perfect. Gosh, even my room would probably look that photogenic.

I can picture that future me. The one with comfortable, effortless style and bags of confidence. She’s everything I want to be, and I can almost believe all it would take is the right pair of pants to get me there.

Make the audience the hero. Show them a transformation.

Yes, even if you're a nonprofit.

Your donor (or volunteer) is the hero of your story. Not your organization, not the great work you do or the lives you improve. Your donor.

Their values, their time, their money. That’s what makes the transformation possible. Your organization is just the vehicle to help them do their good work.

So how does that give nonprofits an unfair advantage?

The transformation we’re selling isn’t bunk.

Those Halara pants wouldn’t actually change my life, no matter how much I want them to. Best case scenario, I end up with a comfortable, good-looking pair of pants to add to my wardrobe, but they won’t automatically make me more fashionable, do my hair, or tidy my bedroom. They’re selling a future they can’t really deliver on. And on some level, we all know this.

But the future nonprofits are selling? Oh, that is very, truly real.

We actually can feed more people who need food. We can conduct research that changes the trajectory of debilitating diseases. We can save the whales, or help the homeless, or send aid after a natural disaster. Nonprofits can and do do these things every day because of donors.

Our transformation is truly, demonstrably not bunk.

Do you see what a superpower that is? To be able to tell your audience, unequivocally, that their actions can and do make the world a better, kinder, fuller, richer place?

A lot of nonprofits I work with feel like they’re always 2 (or 20) steps behind for-profit businesses when it comes to marketing. They’re trying to reach people with smaller budgets, less expertise, less resources.

But let us never forget: we may be the underdogs, but we have an unfair advantage that for-profit businesses would kill for.

The transformation we’re selling is real.