The Nonprofit Marketing Ideas Blog

If you want to start a social change effort, launch a nonprofit, or plan for your organization's future direction, you are doing some strategic planning. Whether you call it that or have formal planning sessions is beside the point. You can use an informal process or a formal one. The more important the plan, the important it is to follow a system and take your time. With those thoughts in mind, this post is an introduction to SWOT analysis for nonprofits. I also want to introduce a new tool that can make SWOT analysis more helpful to a nonprofit team or a group of activists. SWOT for Nonprofits: Strategic planning should be standard for all nonprofit organizations. SWOT analysis is a method of looking at an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Many business students, and some managers and executives, undoubtedly know how to do a SWOT analysis for their business. In case that lesson came a long time ago, here is a summary of SWOT. Strengths ...

This short article outlines a technique you can use to focus your efforts to solve social problems through advocacy, public education, program design, or social marketing. What follows is a framework for thinking about how best to attack a given social problem This process should be helpful whether you know what your options are or not. You'll answer a series of questions about the issue starting with the most obvious question of all.  What is the problem? What is the challenge or problem you want to tackle? This is the broad social problem, like domestic violence or climate change, or something a bit narrower. Avoid stating that the lack of a specific thing is a problem - no playground in the neighborhood, no soup kitchen in the neighborhood, and so on.  There are a few reasons for not including a solution in your problem statement. First, you were probably assuming too much about the social problem in question. You will never look at other, better ways to address...