Systemic Marketing

Systemic Marketing

"To my mind, the ideal model is one in which the relationship between organization and community is at the center of the organization’s identity and all of its decision-making processes. This is what I mean by “systemic marketing.” (As a reminder, my operating definition of marketing is “communication with external constituencies about the work of the organization.”) When the relationship is central, the message is consistent and each point of contact reinforces every other one."

I found this blog post from Doug Borwick and was really surprised that this had to be said. Of course Marketing, Fundraising, and Programming should intermingle at certain points. How does one function without the other? All the departments need to know the audience and need to know how the community connects with the organization in order to serve, reach, and gain donations from it.

I thought this would be common knowledge. Is this not part of why CRM software exists? All allowed staff having access to the audiences behaviors (tickets purchased, donations made, likes and dislikes, or whatever else seems important about the individual) just provides a perfect tool for different departments to feed into one another. No organization should give out different messages to the community. The beauty of programs like PatronManager and Tessitura is how easy it makes linking departments that should be influencing one another anyway.

Personally, I liked PatronManager better. Tessitura seemed annoying to navigate and like it would take longer to understand how to use because everything was in so many different sections. I did like the sliding scale payment system and that it is member owned, but if I had to choose I would go with PatronManager.