Market like your mission depends on it
- Wed, May 04 2011
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
I work for an unusual nonprofit. When we fall short of our mission, it hits our personal pocketbooks. All staff get paid less if we raise less money than goal, help fewer nonprofits or fail to achieve both excellence and efficiency in our work. I love this about my job: At the end of the day, we’re all about results, right down to our compensation. The stakes are high, which brings out the best in people. It’s especially good on the marketing front: We have to deliver on real metrics, not just “raise awareness.”
These days, we complain a lot about executive pay. But we don’t turn the scrutiny on our own sector when it comes to how we structure salaries. Maybe we should. Sure we don’t get the big bucks, but the quality of our work has life and death stakes. If your job is to fight diabetes, what if you earned less money if diabetes rates went up? If you are a fundraiser, what if you exceeded your goals? Shouldn’t there be an upside?
When our livelihoods are on the line, we work harder, take risks and focus on what works (and doesn’t). I know we’re in it for the mission, not the money, but reward structures say a lot about our expectations. They send a powerful message. What do you reward at your organization? Is it consensus and effort? Or is it creativity and results? You get what you pay for, in my view.
The marketing profession (of which I am a part) is rife with branding mumbo-jumbo, mushy metrics and vague ROI. There’s no better way to get serious about our work than to hold ourselves accountable for real results. What if you knew your next paycheck would be smaller if your e-news fell flat or people didn’t take action? How would you do things differently? If you’d change how you’d work, then maybe that change is worth making - for the mission if not the money.
Comments
This surprised me. I’m not a fundraising professional, but my understanding is that compensation based on performance is generally considered unethical in the financial development sector. The argument is that such a compensation scheme could skew performance toward short-term rewards, rather than the best long-term interest of the organization. A fundraiser might be tempted to go for the quick return, rather than patiently cultivating the larger (but possibly much later) donation.
Are you intending to challenge this view, or have I misunderstood?
Thanks for your comment. I’m trying to be provocative, yes, to make a point about focusing on results, especially in marketing. We too often create soft goals, and we don’t always have sufficient accountability for outcomes that truly matter. As for your question, there are plenty of fundraisers (like telemarketers) who do take a cut of what is raised. That’s pay for performance. But the main point of my post is to challenge our thinking in general. I’m getting lots of email about it—split 50-50 on people who agree we need to challenge themselves vs. people who strongly disagree!
Recently, I toured NBC’s headquarters in NYC. On every floor, is posted the NBCUniversal credo. One line really stuck me: “We like to keep score and win.”
If you walked into the HQ of your local nonprofit and saw that posted in the elevator, how would you react?
I’d get out my check book.