Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes [Hardcover]

Katya Andresen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 28, 2006

Katya Andresen, a veteran marketer and nonprofit professional, demystifies winning marketing campaigns by reducing them to ten essential rules and provides entertaining examples and simple steps for applying the rules ethically and effectively to good causes of all kinds. The Robin Hood rules steal from the winning formulas for selling socks, cigarettes, and even mattresses, with good advice for appealing to your audiences’ values, not your own; developing a strong, competitive stance; and injecting into every message four key elements that compel people to take notice. Andresen, who is also a former journalist, also reveals the best route to courting her former colleagues in the media and getting your message into their reporting.

Katya Andresen is Vice President of Marketing at the charitable giving portal Network for Good, which was founded by AOL, Yahoo! and Cisco. Before joining Network for Good, she was Senior Vice President of Sutton Group, a marketing and communications firm supporting non-profits, government agencies, and foundations working for the social good. Previously she was a marketing consultant overseas, promoting causes ranging from civil society in Ukraine to ecotourism in Madagascar. She also worked for CARE International. She has trained hundreds of causes in effective marketing and media relations, and her marketing materials for non-profits have won national and international awards. In addition to writing Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes, Katya was featured in the e-book, Nine Minds of Marketing. She is also a co-author of a chapter in the book, People to People Fundraising - Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities. Fundraising Success Magazine named her Fundraising Professional of the Year in 2007.

Katya traces her passion for good causes to the enormous social need she witnessed as a journalist prior to her work in the non-profit sector. She was a foreign correspondent for Reuters News and Television in Asia and for Associated Press, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News in Africa. She has a bachelor's degree in history from Haverford College.

Visit her blog to learn more...http://www.nonprofitmarketingblog.com/

Editorial Reviews

Review

"What a great book. I love it." The blogger goes on to say how great this book is for marketing ministries. (SamLuce.com,10/19/2007)

From the Inside Flap

How do you motivate people to give money, take action, or otherwise advance your worthy cause? The answer is marketing, and whether you're a nonprofit executive or a PTA volunteer, Robin Hood Marketing shows you how to sell your mission as successfully as the great marketing minds of corporate America sell their products.

Katya Andresen, a veteran marketer and nonprofit professional, demystifies winning marketing campaigns by reducing them to ten essential rules and provides entertaining examples and simple steps for applying the rules ethically and effectively to good causes of all kinds. The Robin Hood rules steal from the winning formulas for selling socks, cigarettes, and even mattresses, with good advice for appealing to your audiences' values, not your own; developing a strong, competitive stance; and injecting into every message four key elements that compel people to take notice. Andresen, who is a former journalist, also reveals the best route to courting her former colleagues in the media and getting your message into their reporting.

Whether you have a big marketing budget or none at all, Robin Hood Marketing will help send your message straight as an arrow into people's hearts and minds. They'll be convinced to act—and your cause will be poised for unprecedented success.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (April 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0787981486
• ISBN-13: 978-0787981488
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #143,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am profoundly impatient. I spent seven years living in developing countries, and the poverty and tragedy I saw on a daily basis left me with an acute sense of how important it is not just to help people, but to do it really well and really quickly. The child in Cambodia or the cyclone victim in Madagascar doesn't have time for us to wordsmith our mission statements or waste time with lackluster fundraising efforts. We have a moral obligation to be extremely efficient and effective at what we do, right this minute. What gets me motivated and energized is to help well-intentioned people to do that every day, through innovative marketing. I strive to do this at Network for Good, where I work, and I sure tried to do it in my book as well.

In addition to being impatient to do good, I am impatient to find the next great shoe, the latest post on every single celebrity-obsessed blog and the secret to being the uber-mom that makes perfect cupcakes for the class Halloween party instead of rushing to Giant bakery department at 10 pm the night before. My greatest joys are my two extraordinary young daughters and one extraordinary economist.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lifesaver for nonprofit professionals!, April 20, 2006

By 

Dolly (Burlington, VT USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes (Hardcover)

All of us who work in fundraising and marketing in the nonprofit sector struggle with how to sell our cause and win support for it. I started my career in a meals program for people with AIDS - an easy sell - but since then I have moved on to nonprofits with missions that are much more complicated and harder to describe. An outdoor education program that unites people with and without disabilities? An international nonprofit that is helping Ukrainians better advocate for themselves? It gets harder and harder to briefly, concisely, and compellingly describe what we do.

Enter Robin Hood Marketing, which helps you let go of the urge to describe every nuance of every project in painful to your constituents and instead helps you focus on creating clear, concise messages that will compel your donors to give, your volunteers to get involved, your champions to go to bat for you. The book guides you step-by-step through the message development process, how to make a compelling case for your organization - and encouraging you not to worry about whether your constituents understand all the various nuances of what you do, but instead to sell the soul of the cause itself.

Best of all, it is a great, interesting read that I literally could not put down - it was riveting, both for the style of writing and the content, and for the fact that it carries the solution to problems I have struggled with for years. I can't recommend it enough for anyone involved in fundraising, marketing, or proposal writing of any kind.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential part of your toolkit, April 18, 2006

By 

Mark Dessauer (Durham NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes (Hardcover)

If you wanted to take over the world MacGyver-style you would need several critical items: bailing wire, electrician's tape, a sharpie and Leatherman. Katya has pulled together several key concepts and strategies into a simple guide to getting your message across and as a result Robin Hood Marketing is the Leatherman of marketing tools. Katya goes beyond the simple `ten steps to get to know your audience' or `qualitative/quantitative research 101' to alerting readers (and nonprofits) about the power of partnerships, messaging and branding. Working with community organizations has made me realize that the keys to their communication success are literally in their backyard and office. We are purchasing this book for each of our grantees to assist in their communication efforts. Robin Hood Marketing will allow the reader to understand simple low cost steps they can take to bring their cause the recognition or action it needs.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clever mnemonic device makes this a very useful book, February 26, 2009

By 

B. McEwan "yellokat" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes (Hardcover)

Although this certainly isn't a textbook, I use it in one of the graduate courses I teach on nonprofit marketing. Robin Hood Marketing is very straightforward and its author, Katya Andresen, employs a clever mnemonic device -- an arrow -- to help students remember how the strategic marketing process works.

At the tip of "Robin Hood's" arrow is the ACTION that you, the marketer, want to instigate. Once you have defined precisely what action you seek, you move on to considering what target audience (aka group of people) is able to make that action happen. The next step is to think through what message(s) will motivate the audience to act. After formulating the message, you move on to considering the various avenues (or channels) that you can use to relay that message, and so forth.

The bottom line is that Andresen teaches her readers to begin with the desired outcome of a campaign and then work backward to figure out how to realize the goal. It's a very good way to help nonprofit executives who are not marketing pros think through a project, as well as assess the results of their work.

There are some portions of the book that stretch the arrow metaphor a bit, but those lapses are minor and I don't view them as serious stumbling blocks to the learning process. Overall this is an excellent guide to help nonprofit organizations move beyond just getting visibility to creating a campaign that is measurable and has a far better chance of delivering specific results.