Mission-Based Marketing: Positioning Your Not-for-Profit in an Increasingly Competitive World (Wiley Nonprofit Law, Finance and Management Series) [Hardcover]

Peter C. Brinckerhoff (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471237183 | ISBN-13: 978-0471237181 | Publication Date: December 17, 2002 | Edition: 2

A direct, practical guide that shows how you can lead your not-for-profit to success in a more competitive world. This book provides the knowledge and skills to build a market-driven organization that holds onto its core values, does a better job of providing mission, and successfully competes for funding, clients, referral sources, staff, and board members.

Other titles in the Mission-Based Management Series

Mission-Based Management: Leading Your Not-for-Profit into the 21st Century
Named "Best New Nonprofit Management Book" by the Nonprofit Management Association. The Association said, "The Nonprofit Management Association is pleased to spotlight the extraordinary work of Peter Brinckerhoff in his newest publication, Mission-Based Management: Leading Your Not-for-Profit into the 21st Century." The book was cited by the Nonprofit Management Association as "a great overall manager's and board member's guide to not-for-profits-quite laudable in that it's eminently readable and downright enjoyable."

Financial Empowerment: More Money for More Mission
Named "Best New Nonprofit Management Book" by the Nonprofit Management Association. This second volume of the widely respected Mission-Based Management Series outlines a not-for-profit organization's plan for financial success. It highlights the eight characteristics of financial empowerment, and provides the skills and concepts that a nonprofit organization and its managers will need to survive, including estimating cash needs, treating funders like valued customers, developing money-making businesses, determining the financial options that are available, and implementing an empowered budget process.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

As the government downsizes on the federal, state, and local level, nonprofits are, for the first time, experiencing competition: for government and private funding, for volunteers, and even for the substance of their stated mission and audience they serve. This book seeks to help nonprofits adapt to this market-driven economy and develop the skills needed to survive while still retaining the integrity of their core values. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Competition is a reality for most not-for-profits. Those organizations that become market-driven and develop marketing skills will thrive–and do a better job of providing mission.

Peter Brinckerhoff has worked with not-for-profits that are strong mission-based marketing organizations. He has seen what works and the leadership skills needed for success in a world where marketing matters.

Peter has also worked with organizations that are struggling to make the transition to a competitive environment.

From his experiences comes this sharply focused, practical guide to becoming a market-driven organization that will achieve its mission in a competitive world. Peter gives not-for-profit leaders the wisdom, experience, the successful strategies, and the needed skills. He also reveals the mistakes he has seen.

In the Second Edition, Peter appraises the trends that have dramatically affected the not-for-profit sector in the past several years, and explains how your organization can shape this shifting landscape to its ultimate benefit. Among other industry changes, he addresses:

• Greater acceptance of not-for-profit advertising, as well as the application of other traditional business skills
• Reduced costs from new technology, such as the capability to print your own marketing materials
• Increased costs from new technology, such as the time and money required to create an effective Web site
• Constantly increasing competition for good staff, good volunteers, donated dollars and goods, and, most importantly, for grants, contracts, and people to serve

Peter outlines the characteristics of a successful market-driven not-for-profit. You will learn how to become a market-driven organization and how to motivate board and staff to make the needed changes.

Peter shows how to respond to your markets while holding on to your core values. He outlines the three core customer service rules and shows how to turn your customers into your best referral network.

When you have finished this book, you will have an excellent hands-on understanding of marketing, competition, and your role in making your organization a successful survivor in the newly emerging competitive world.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 2 edition (December 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471237183
• ISBN-13: 978-0471237181
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #772,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter Brinckerhoff has spent his entire adult life working in, around, and for not-for-profits. He is dedicated to the concept that a not-for-profit organization is a mission-based business, in the business of doing its mission.

When Peter formed his firm, Corporate Alternatives, inc. in 1982 it was the first consulting and training company in the United States dedicated exclusively to the management concerns of 501(c) (3) organizations.

A former VISTA Volunteer, Peter knows how not-for-profits work from his experience as a volunteer, his work as a staff member and later as executive director of two regional not-for-profits, and from his service on numerous state, local, and national not-for-profit boards. He brings this understanding of the many perspectives in a not-for-profit organization to his work.

Peter is an award-winning author, with eight books and two workbooks in print, and over 60 articles published in the not-for-profit press. Three of his books, Mission-Based Management, Financial Empowerment and his newest, Generations, The Challenge of a Lifetime for Your Nonprofit, each won the prestigious Terry McAdam Award from the Alliance for Nonprofit Management. The award is given for "The Best New Nonprofit Book" each year. He is the only author to win the award multiple times. Peter's books are used as texts in courses at the undergraduate and graduate nonprofit management programs in over 100 colleges and universities worldwide.

Peter is also a highly acclaimed speaker and lecturer, presenting his ideas on how to make not-for-profits more effective to dozens of audiences across the United States as well as overseas each year.

From 2003-2007, Peter was an Adjunct Professor of Nonprofit Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He taught the core graduate course in the Nonprofit Management program at Kellogg. In addition, Peter has guest lectured at the graduate level at Boston University, University of Colorado, University of Illinois, and Vanderbilt University.

Peter received his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Master's Degree in Public Health Administration from Tulane University. Raised in Connecticut, Peter and his family lived in Springfield, IL from 1977-2007. Peter and his wife now call Union Hall, VA home.

Peter can be contacted by email at [e-mail]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excited again!, April 6, 2000

By 

Thomas A. Mackey (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mission-Based Marketing: How Your Not-For-Profit Can Succeed in a More Competitive World (Wiley Nonprofit Law, Finance and Management Series) (Hardcover)

Mission-Based Marketing by Peter Brinckerhoff is a terrific example of one of those "helper" books. It does more than "help" me. It helps organizations look at their marketing programs, their missions, their customers and their staffs. It is very easy to read and very well organized with plenty of concrete examples and case histories. In fact, the examples were the biggest aspect of the book from which I was able to learn principles that Brinckerhoff was trying to teach. After reading this book the reader will have basic principles and concrete ways to write a marketing plan and to carry it out for a successful business. Although it is intended for not-for-profits it can easily be utilized by any business.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I wish that I had written Mission-Based Marketing, July 25, 2005

By 

Paul Jones "Nonprofit Marketing Consultant" (Salt Lake City, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mission-Based Marketing: Positioning Your Not-for-Profit in an Increasingly Competitive World (Wiley Nonprofit Law, Finance and Management Series) (Hardcover)

I wish that I had written "Mission-Based Marketing," Consultant Peter Brinckerhoff's smart, well-written book. Certainly the title is terrific, underscoring as it does that the only effective marketing a nonprofit can do is mission-based. But more than that Brinckerhoff has written a basic book on marketing that nonetheless propounds some very advanced views.

"Mission-Based Marketing," along with its companion workbook "Mission-Based Marketing: An Organizational Development Workbook," is largely a book for the reluctant and the novice nonprofit marketer, his board or staff. There's a lot of handholding here, including lengthy treatises on the subjects of `competition' (it's ultimately good, he says) and `flexibility' (it's even better). By the same token, "Mission-Based" is conspicuously free of basic marketing concepts like "four Ps." There's little of substance on pricing theory, and nothing much on branding, a pet subject of most for-profit marketing mavens.

Instead, Brinckerhoff starts by laying out in plain-spoken English why nonprofits who may have thought of marketing as `sales' and thereby unsavory, have to get past that idea. He calls such thinking the "non-profit marketing disability." It stems, he says, from knowing what your constituents "need" and caring little about what they "want;" filling wants being the defining and thereby unsavory element of for-profit marketing. But Brinckerhoff easily dispatches the non-profit marketing disability before the twentieth page. For that matter, he takes the starch out of the taint of sales while he's at it.

Imagine a would-be client at a treatment facility dangerous to herself or others, he suggests. The client needs treatment, but she doesn't want it. Since she's an adult, you can't force her into treatment. But you can market to her, in this case `sell' her on treatment. "The job of the mission-based marketer is to make the person want what they need," he says. Ergo, "good marketing is good mission." Nice!

Even with all the handholding, there's still plenty relevant here for more sophisticated mission-based marketers, especially the chapters on customer service and marketing planning.

But it's a testament to the value and validity of this book that I finished "Mission-Based Marketing" along the same time I was reading an issue of "Marketing Management," a magazine published by the American Marketing Association, and I found them markedly similar. Several scholar-members of the AMA have proposed changing the product-centric four Ps marketing mix to the customer-centric "SIVA," [solutions, information, value and access]. This is cutting-edge thinking from the leading lights of world's largest marketing membership group, and it mirrors in broad strokes Brinckerhoff's central themes.

I have quibbles, but they're minor. In chapter five on the marketing cycle, he takes his 6-part customer-centric approach, so similar to SIVA, out for a trot. The second stage "market inquiry" or "what do your markets really want?" presumes that you can actually discover what your markets really want. While Brinckerhoff soundly recommends "asking, asking, listening" it's not necessarily a given that you can discover what your customer wants simply by asking them. The customer may not know, or be able to articulate what he wants. And not all marketers or market researchers are capable of parsing out those hidden wants, either.

Plus, any customer-centric approach in not-for-profit or for-profit marketing runs the risk of being merely reactive; of not innovating. No focus group ever suggested the original Sony Walkman, for instance. Instead, it was birthed from the minds of engineers who knew what was possible, and sold by marketers who knew how to make people want something they never conceived of.

Mission-Based Marketing is well-wrought book, an excellent resource, and a terrific addition to any mission-based marketer's library.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Wide and shallow, January 9, 2007

By 

AJT "Kiwi That Flys" (California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Mission-Based Marketing: Positioning Your Not-for-Profit in an Increasingly Competitive World (Wiley Nonprofit Law, Finance and Management Series) (Hardcover)

This book is I suspect a really good introduction to what marketing is really all about for an individual or organisation who haven't had significant access to marketing experience or education. Of course it would be fair to say that this lack of knowledge seems to be more highly concentrated in the non-profit sector - so this book definitely has its role.

However if you have even a small amount of genuine non-profit marketing know-how this book might be a tad frustrating. The book covers everything in the traditional marketing portfolio but in no great depth and then attempts to cover other disciplines such as change management. Too much with no real depth.

While "branding" can be misunderstood and a bit trendy at times, this book does not mention it - except with a reference to brand loyalty in a case study on page 56. A genuinely useful marketing book has to at least take a look at branding - if only to define "brand" and dispel rumours.

The assertion that you can print your own high quality marketing materials in-house is highly debatable - in colour, sure, to a commercial standard in large cost-effective volumes - not normally! Again a fairly light over easy approach to something that is a bit more complex than the author gives credit for.

So if you want a book to make you really think and make you wrestle with ideas do not buy this book. Instead it is a broad brush, relatively simplistic approach by an author who seems able to be able to write numerous non-profit books but doesn't appear to have the requisite depth and expertise to really challenge the discerning marketing practitioner.