Consumer-marketing practices have a place in fundraising. You just need to know how to translate them.

By Debbie Merlino

The unique selling proposition
Take “mission” for example. Many committed development professionals would have you believe that the only mission in the commercial sector is to separate consumers from their hard-earned dollars. They’d be surprised to discover that in the commercial world, before any advertising is crafted, there’s lots of discussion about mission — they just call it something else. Commercial advertisers talk about the product’s unique selling proposition: what makes the product they’re promoting different from all the others. Their product must fill a need or help their customer solve a problem; in essence this is their “mission.”