Nonprofit Marketing Research Journal - worth 25 percent of your final grade:

Includes Course Outcome:

#4 Evaluate the history of nonprofits, how they have evolved over time and where they are headed in order to anticipate future trends and create marketing programs with local and global reach.

Open Source Material - Encompasses Discussion Topics 1, 2 & 3

Bloom's learning goals for the marketing journal:

Creating - reorganizing acquired information.

Evaluating - collaborating, critiquing and networking, interacting with internal and external environments.

For this assignment you will spend five days researching and documenting the nonprofit of your choice. You will assume the role of a nonprofit marketing manager who monitors and impacts (by your decisions) both the internal and external marketing environments. I would like you to complete this assignment during the third week of the course for each of five consecutive days. You should include discussions of: the competitive environment (think SWOT), examples of target audiences and stakeholders, how social media impacts your nonprofit, if your nonprofit is in the news, how your chosen nonprofit might impact an emergency situation - be it man-made or natural disasters and finally where your nonprofit operates - locally, globally or both?

Using a journal format is actually a great way to lay a foundation for a marketing plan, because you are looking at your organization relative to a time frame. You are collecting and organizing information all in one place which is always useful. And a journal is a great tool to use prior to any marketing endeavor, because the research and observations you document will support the marketing strategies you devise. Your writing style should be similar to a diary or field notes, with observations taken, and your thoughts about how you think or feel about something, in combination with the required elements. After completing this six-page, (including title or cover page) assignment you may even decide that a journal is a powerful and useful tool for a nonprofit marketing manager to keep!

Multimedia/Social Media: Choose one of these sites and suggest how your chosen nonprofit might benefit from using one of these sites. The purpose here is to introduce you to sites you may not be familiar with and to apply them in the context of a specified learning outcome, in this case, your journal.

Wordle - create word-specific marketing

http://www.wordle.net/create

Feedly - news delivered to you

http://www.feedly.com/

Tag Galaxy - an interactive and mnemonic way for your target audience to communicate with you

http://www.taggalaxy.de/

Wevideo - create an online video

http://www.wevideo.com/

Suggested Format:

I am going to suggest using a much simplified bullet journal for the format. Perhaps you have heard of this tool, or are currently using one personally. Here is the link to this concept of logging and organizing information for your reference Bullet Journal. The idea here is being to capture more information with less effort. For our purposes I would like you title each day with a heading using one of the discussion points - it does not have to be in the order I list. Please do not confuse the idea of a "bullet journal" with just using bullet points for this assignment. Think in terms of sentences and paragraphs where appropriate, using bullet points as titles or headers to your content.

Discussion points - work the required elements into these headings:

1. Competitive environment - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.

2. Target audiences - individuals or groups you are serving, volunteers, donors, general public, local community, government, foundations, board members, etc.

3. Social media - how social media impacts your nonprofit (does it cost less, give better reach, etc.)

4. My nonprofit in the news -if you cannot find them in the news, suggest how they could make themselves newsworthy, or an emergency situation - how your chosen nonprofit might impact an emergency situation - describe a real or hypothetical situation and how they reacted or you think they should react.

5. Geographic impact and history - brief history of the organization including where they operate and the geographic areas they impact.

Required elements - integrate into discussion points:

• Use and explanation of the marketing mix
• The value proposition offered by your nonprofit
• The mission statement of your nonprofit
• Types of multi/social media and other communication mediums your nonprofit uses, or you think they should be using.
• Research and source at least five references (please list these within the body of the journal)

I would like you to include a key on the first page only that you will use throughout the journal to indicate action items. These action items should be organized into three categories tasks, events, and notes. Events are things such as meetings, public speaking, fundraisers, travel, etc. Notes are the heart of this journal assignment they are the facts, ideas, thoughts and observations you make integrating the required elements into the pages of your assignment. The notes are where you are going to do all of your writing to fill up the pages. Okay, this is doable, let me give you a sample page to work with. One other caveat - there is no right or wrong here as long as you include the required elements within the framework of the discussion points AND select one new media/social media site to include.

Page 1 - name of nonprofit - competitive environment

Key -

tasks - for tasks I am using the *
events - for events I am using the $
notes - for notes I am using the #

*research the competitive environment (discuss how you will approach this, such as sources for research or information. This could also include the use of first-hand observation, questionnaires, and surveys.)

$ attend meeting on how to use Wordle (then describe how your nonprofit might use this in the notes section).
# Today I learned my nonprofit has 30,000 members and its mission statement is.