Assignment: Marketing Plan
As a final paper for this course, students are asked to prepare a marketing plan for a nonprofit or private-for-profit organization. This assignment must be completed individually. The marketing plan should include text, graphs, figures, and illustrations. The plan should be 15 pages (appendices are optional and will not count towards this limit). There are two options available for this project. Feel free to choose one that fits your interests, background, and skills.
Option 1
You will come up with an idea for a new human services organization. Think of a young and growing organization dealing with an important societal need you particularly care about. Examples include organizations helping immigrant or minority groups, increasing awareness for human trafficking, services for adolescents or runaway youth, providing various types of health care and information, protecting our aging seniors, and so on. Your imaginary organization was incorporated six months ago and you received a large grant (in the amount of $100,000, unrestricted) from a government agency, if it is a non-profit agency. If it is a private-for-profit agency, you received the start-up funds of $100,000 from a local investor. You have decided to establish an organization that would permanently pursue the mission you had outlined in the grant proposal. You began your operations with an aggressive fundraising campaign and raised an additional $150,000. Since its inception, your organization has provided only a few basic services without a specific marketing plan. As the Executive Director, your task is to develop a Marketing Plan in order to facilitate its ambitious expansion and growth.
I recommend that you begin your project by looking at the web sites and annual reports of similar human services organizations to understand their organizational design, offerings and target audiences. This does not mean that you should create a clone of an existing organization. Instead, try proposing something innovative, unique and valuable for your new organization.
In your Marketing Plan, you should:
1. Establish a Mission Statement and a Vision Statement for your new organization.
2. Briefly describe basic services it has been providing during the first six months of operation.
3. Analyze its organizational environments.
a. Internal environments
i. Review organizational goals and objectives
ii. Describe the organizational culture you seek to establish
b. External analysis
i. List and briefly describe all organizational publics including its clients, donors, volunteers, board members and others.
ii. Describe the competition faced by your organization (please, do research on similar local nonprofit and for-profit organizations operating in the same service area).
iii. Point out various aspects of the current macroeconomic situation and how they may affect your organization.
4. Formulate your core marketing strategy (e.g., new markets? new offerings?)
5. Describe marketing research you plan to undertake to gain an understanding of how your target audience makes decisions about changing their behavior according to your organizational desires. Based on common sense and any online information you can find, make preliminary assumptions about the character of their decision-making (e.g., who are the decision-makers? How, when, where, and why do these potential consumers use or may use your services?), latest trends in demand (is the demand for services growing or declining?) and social, cultural, and economic characteristics of consumers.
6. Based on your research, provide some ideas and a rationale for market segmentation.
7. Develop a brand for your organization (name, logo, detailed positioning message).
8. Describe your marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion).
a. Are you planning on developing a new product or improving the style, or packaging of your current product? What sources of data will you consider guiding your ideas for a new product?
b. Price - what pricing techniques will you use?
c. Based on the character of your offering and the traits of your target audiences, how will you be reaching your audiences?
d. Promotion: what messages would you want to send and what media would you use?
9. How will you assess the effectiveness of marketing activities?
10. Describe your implementation plan (responsibilities, tasks, and timeline).
11. How does the Saint Leo core value of Community relate to your project?
Option 2
As a second option, students may prepare a Marketing Plan for an existing nonprofit or private-for profit organization (future employer, existing employer, or an organization that the student is familiar with), focusing on a start-up organization that lacks resources for developing a formal Marketing Plan. Once an organization has been selected, please follow the structure outlined under Option 1. However, rather than assuming the role of the Executive Director, students should approach this task as a consultant. Students must use actual budget figures, and work with the existing organizational mission (if necessary, students may consider revising the existing missions). Students are also encouraged to share their Marketing Plan with their selected client-organization.
Additionally, whether you select Option 1 or 2, this paper must address and discuss the Human Services values relevant to the topic and the Saint Leo Core Value that best informs an understanding of the analysis.
This paper must be 15 pages, typed and double-spaced. Correct spelling, grammar, sentence structure is imperative. References must be cited correctly in text, and a detailed reference list must be included. The paper must follow the American Psychological Association (APA) format.