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John Burnett's Nonprofit Marketing: Best Practices is a valuable book and unless you are an experienced marketing professional, it probably belongs on your shelf. It covers every major aspect of mainstream marketing practice, including positioning, branding, research, product management, marketing services, and so on. It's a superb introduction to most of the traditional fields of marketing, with a decent sprinkling of nonprofit examples throughout.
Without in any way taking away from this recommendation, I want to describe how this was not the book I hoped it would be. First, although the book acknowledges the existance of interactive media, it is nevertheless fully steeped in the classic one-to-many approach to marketing. There is nothing in the book about the inspiring potential to scale up listening. Thus, despite its 2007 publication date, it's still very much a late twentieth century manual. (Of course, if you don't know the classic practices, then it might be good to learn them.) Second, as with many such texts, the book bolts nonprofit missions and circumstances onto a mainstream business school model of marketing. That's fine, but given that fact, I would have preferred the title not to lead with the word 'nonprofit'. Third, because of its frame of reference, it encourages nonprofits to look at its stakeholders as consumers (or at best customers), rather than as citizens. The author is not alone in this, by any means, but it's deeply pernicious and damaging to civil society.
The book's strong points for nonprofits includes its analysis of competition (which every nonprofit should consider), it's description of the characteristics of service products (which is what most nonprofits "produce", if you follow the business paradigm), its exploration of the concept of "servicescapes", and its extremely clear exploration of the concept of "channels" of distribution. Although I don't think the book has nonprofits as its starting point, any one of these strengths is enough for me to recommend it.
Posted: 8/15/07; 5:43:48 PM # |