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Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes
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 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...
- GenresNonfiction
271 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2006
9 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 28, 2013
You care passionately about something. You want other people to get involved. You want their time, money, ideas, commitment. How do you reach them? Do you send out mail? Work on your website? Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram? Sometimes it seems as if there's a new way to reach out to people every day. How do you figure out what will really work for you?
Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen's Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.
Andresen, chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive. She doesn't let the latest fad distract her. She gets right to the point. And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves--we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.
Read the book for the "Robin Hood rules" she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits. Chief among those rules are "focus on getting people to do something specific" and "appeal to your audience's values, not your own."
Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take? And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step. Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance). They'll be more likely to listen to your reasons later. But even if they don't, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?
Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications. Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.
Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews. Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:
*What can we ask people to do that will be "fun, easy, popular, and rewarding"? (for supporters)
*"Who wins when we win?" (for partners)
*How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists--they are a target audience too!)
I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review. It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself. And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter. I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date. That's what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.
My one reservation about this book is the same one that's been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately--even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers' Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine's The Networked Nonprofit. These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual's behavior, or even a lot of individuals' behavior. But that is not the same thing as social change.
Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power. Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody's lives. You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.
Perhaps it's just that social change is outside the scope of these books. But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone. That's selling their books too hard. They are worthwhile to read on their own merits. People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.
Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen's Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.
Andresen, chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive. She doesn't let the latest fad distract her. She gets right to the point. And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves--we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.
Read the book for the "Robin Hood rules" she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits. Chief among those rules are "focus on getting people to do something specific" and "appeal to your audience's values, not your own."
Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take? And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step. Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance). They'll be more likely to listen to your reasons later. But even if they don't, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?
Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications. Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.
Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews. Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:
*What can we ask people to do that will be "fun, easy, popular, and rewarding"? (for supporters)
*"Who wins when we win?" (for partners)
*How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists--they are a target audience too!)
I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review. It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself. And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter. I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date. That's what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.
My one reservation about this book is the same one that's been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately--even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers' Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine's The Networked Nonprofit. These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual's behavior, or even a lot of individuals' behavior. But that is not the same thing as social change.
Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power. Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody's lives. You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.
Perhaps it's just that social change is outside the scope of these books. But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone. That's selling their books too hard. They are worthwhile to read on their own merits. People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.
March 1, 2016
Good - not great - picked up a few good ideas but a little repetitive and "fluffy".
Currently reading
September 7, 2007Work-related book. It's geared towards nonprofit workers who are hesitant to adopt corporate learnings- I'm trying to pick through for good ideas on incorporating my experience into my new gig.
Read
March 24, 2008This book is a must for those that have struggled with organizing for community action. It provides a terrific formula for build a message that is directed to the audience you want to take action.
September 24, 2008
i'm not sure what i expected - i thought it had something to do with the Foundation, but it's actually put together really well, and there's so much you can take from it.
June 17, 2011
was assigned for class. Didn't finish it. Wasn't thrilled by it.
April 29, 2013
Must read...
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews