The first class of Social Marketing definitely lived up to my expectations. I’m truly excited about this course and the Social Marketing Plan which I have to develop. I considered couple of social issues which are very close to my heart - ban cell phone while driving campaign, improve early childhood education in impoverished areas and provide safe drinking water in developing countries. While doing my preliminary research to pick the topic I really got astounded to realize the extent of drinking water shortage in developing countries. Approximately, 3.6 million people out of which 1.6 million are children, die every year because of water related diseases. It might be surprising for many of you to hear that one in eight people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water. There are many more similar statistics which made me realize that this is a worthy cause to invest my time and energy. You can check some facts related to this issue at this link http://bit.ly/RwUki .
Selecting the social issue was easy for me but I was really struggling to choose an organization for my marketing plan. There are so many non-profit organizations out there providing this service that it is difficult to differentiate one from another. This is consistent with Prof. Nordhielm observation that many non-profit organization struggle to build brand recognition. If you visit the websites of these non-profit organizations they all seem to have similar marketing strategy. They are trying to build awareness of this issue by providing statistics of water shortage and I believe this strategy is working. At least, they all were able to convince me about the severity of this issue. What they lack is an effective positioning strategy to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Why a donor should invest in you rather than someone else? This question is never answered effectively.
However, there is one organization which stood out for me and that is “Charity: Water” (http://www.charitywater.org/). They raised $7.5 M last year and funded around 1000 water projects in 13 countries. They appeared in most major press stories and seem to have a very effective online marketing strategy. Just from observation I felt they are doing well in search, blogs and social media marketing.
In terms of defining the Organizational Objective for this project I have to first define the fundamental entity. My fundamental entity for this project will be “Charity Water”, that part was easy. The goal is to raise funds and I’m still working on to quantify this objective. In terms of Charity Water’s core competence I feel they are good at PR campaigns and they are also leveraging digital marketing very effectively. I need to dig little bit more on the “core competencies” aspect.
I came from India and I saw how poor people struggle to find safe drinking water and access proper sanitation. Because of my background I was able to recognize the severity of this issue but I wonder how much people from developed world can relate to this issue. Here, we never have to worry about finding drinking water or accessing clean toilet; whatever may be our socio economic condition. One of my goals for this project would be to analyze the issue of geographical spread between the donor and the beneficiary and find ways to mitigate it. Prof. Nordhielm said that she will cover this issue in future classes and I look forward to that discussion. For now, I’m really excited about my project and I hope I can develop something very useful for Charity Water…
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