Background
Civil society organisations get set up by people who feel concerned enough about an issue to want to do something about it. Actively promoting their organisation in a planned way is usually far from everyone’s mind as they work intently – and passionately – on getting work done and achieving their organisation’s objectives.
Promotion work is often left out. Yet it is vital. It helps deepen your organisation’s roots in the community or sector in which it works – be that local, regional, national or international. It gives your organisation a public profile. This helps strengthen your organisation in many ways. Your promotion plan and promotion strategies ideally should emerge from, and be guided by, your organisation’s overall strategic plan. Promotion work requires careful thought, creativity, detailed planning, and a budget.
The aim of the toolkit is to help organisations to achieve their aims and objectives using the active promotion of their work as one of their strategies.
What’s in the tool
This toolkit offers practical guidance on how to promote your organisation through the following sections:
Introduction
Here we look at why promotion work is important and what it means. We look at different reasons for doing promotion work. We give you a checklist to see whether you think you need to engage in promotion work.
Before developing a promotion plan
Here we alert you to important things to look at before you dive into a promotion plan. We emphasise the importance of your promotion work emerging out of your organisation’s strategic planning. We offer you guidelines and examples on how to go about establishing your organisation’s identity, and what its operating principles are. We give you some things to do as background work – your organisation’s homework!
When you reach out: developing and implementing a promotion plan
We go into developing a promotion plan. We offer steps and examples. From there we look at what a communication plan entails.
Emerging from this we look at relating to the media. We highlight the importance of identifying key messages and who your target audience is for different promotion work. Finally, we offer lots of suggestions for nervous speechmakers.
Promoting your organisation: when people reach in
A large part of an organisation’s work happens through telephone contact and with visitors coming to your office. If you put people off with a negative attitude when people phone in or visit, you will probably end up having an organisational image not to your liking. So, we look at promoting your organisation’s image in this context. We give ideas about your reception area, how you receive people, handling phone calls and e-mails. And we end off looking at how you can monitor and evaluate your organisation
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