Marketing Volunteers the Unsung Heroes

EDV's scholarship programme provides a primary school education for 50 children in Port au Prince, Haiti.

Guest post by Emma Taylor, Media and Marketing Director, European Disaster Volunteers

Our charity recently went through a very sad day – the completion of our marketing coordinator Roberta Fusco’s Vodafone World of Difference Placement. Roberta first became involved with European Disaster Volunteers through Pimp My Cause (to learn about Roberta's initial help with EDV's holiday appeal read Making Christmas Count for Haiti). By allowing charities to get in touch with professionals on their own terms, Pimp My Cause helps allows non-profit leaders to work through questions both large and small.

EDV left Haiti because our growth was out-stripping our organisational capacity. We felt we needed to take some time off deployment to update our systems and create a plan for the coming years to ensure that our growth would be sustainable. Today, six months later we are nearly finished writing our business plan, rebuilding our financial systems, and completing a marketing plan. We had no idea how challenging the planning process would be when we started.

We’re used to being based overseas working with disaster survivors, not working in the office full time. Our move from front line to back office has been simultaneously enlightening and challenging. It’s also been incredibly rewarding to take stock and look hard at all of our systems to create a road map for the next three years.

Roberta’s task was to help us with the marketing section of that road map. Before working with Roberta, we had a strong sense of our target audiences, brand identity, and an intuitive understand of what we wanted to do, but without any formal training in marketing we were unable to articulate our needs and goals.

Without any kind of clear statement of our aims, we struggled to attract the kind of help we needed. Like many causes we were in a catch-22. We needed help, but we didn’t know enough to ask for the right help or look for the right resources.

This is where individuals like Roberta come in handy. In our case, Roberta’s first volunteer role through Pimp My Cause led her to apply for the Vodafone World of Difference Placement. In her placement, she’s worked with us to develop a marketing plan which would clearly define our needs and allow us to recruit the volunteers and pro-bono support we’ll need to continue growing.

Roberta’s work with EDV doesn’t write up very well in our newsletter – her planning work can't compete with photos of scholarship recipients with their report cards. In that way it’s much the same as our long planning process. Without these investments in our infrastructure our projects would grind to a halt, yet donors don’t want to fund central costs and supporters are less likely to engage with “stories from the office.”

Back office work on systems and infrastructure seems to be all of the guts but none of the glory. And so it comes as no surprise that volunteers like Roberta are hard to come by. Volunteers are less likely to put themselves forward for strategic planning work than to join us on deployment and get their hands dirty.

That’s a shame, because when professionals connect with charities, their impacts are far reaching and hugely effective. Thanks to Roberta’s work and the connections made possible by Pimp My Cause we have a series of well-defined aims and the knowhow to target specific opportunities and recruit the right volunteers to reach those goals. As we help survivors help themselves, so can professionals help charities help themselves – and that is surely a worthy aim.

Some key findings from our work with Roberta include:

1) While there are other organsiations like EDV, no other direct competitor combines our combination of professionalism, low cost, and inclusive volunteerism. However, our key differences are a bit complex, and represent a communications challenge. We are going to use more case studies, which will be better integrated throughout the website, to draw attention to our key strengths and how we're different from our competitors.

2) EDV doesn't currently collect enough demographic information with its donors and such and, as a result, struggles to send appropriately targeted communications. Improving this is a key priority which underpins all future activities.We plan to improve our database and collect more data when people sign up to volunteer or receive communications.

3) From what data we do have, EDV's core supporters are in the 16 - 20 age group. This is interesting, as this is the group least likely to give. We consider this both a strength - that we are engaging with a disengaged group - and a weakness - that we are not engaging enough with other donor groups. We plan to deepen our relationship with our young supports through encouraging advocacy on the part of EDV and work on attracting new supporters through advertising.

4) Our communications are limited by cost to online. This is not necessarily the end of the world, but as our website is hugely under-performing presents a key risk. Improvements to the website are another key priority.

We have greatly appreciated having Roberta's help during this key phase in our charity's development and we hope that more marketers feel inspired to use their talent to make a meaningful difference to a cause they can believe in.