A thought on the Practicality of all of this Research

A fundamental theme found throughout the readings of the first two weeks seems to be that research, particularly a strong focus on target audience research, is the most fundamental building block to a successful marketing campaign. Whether an awareness campaign, an issue campaign or a fundraising campaign, it all seems to start at this same place. This idea is kind of a no-brainer, and is a consistent message across any textbook, marketing, PR or relevant journalism class I have ever taken. I am not doubting this idea in any way, but the question I want to consider is whether it is really practical for most organizations, particularly nonprofits, to fund all of this needed research on their target groups.



I found the "Segmenting the Market" article particulary interesting, talking about the relevance of knowing demographics and psychographics. A thought I had after thinking about this reading as well as the others, "Nonprofit Marketing with a Purpose" and "Introducing Marketing to Nonprofits," was that the majority of these materials spend a great deal of time on what info about the audiences is needed and why. From my limited experience in PR, and granted it is mostly with smaller corporate clients, is that while all of this info would be great to have, most organizations don't have either the time or the money or both to gather it.



I feel like in most of the efforts I have worked on, companies kind of think with a go-from-the-gut mentality about what their targets think about and what messages will work best, and the main reason that they operate this way is because of the time and funding issues involved with this research. I know we talked about this briefly in class when Dr. Waters was talking from his personal experiences with PR agency work, and I have found a similar sentiment to be true with some of my clients - "research would be great, but we don't really have the resources available to do it."



Again, I am not trying to undermine the points of any of these readings, because they are consistent and make a lot of sense, but I think that making the research sell to lots of nonprofits and lower budget companies is a tough one. If I was operating on a limited budget, even knowing what we know about the value of in-depth research, I would probably try to do a bare-bones audience profile and use the rest of my money for something else with a little more glitz and glamor. I guess what I am trying to say is that I would probably put more of an emphasis on the Programming part of the ROPES process than I would with the research - simply from a financial standpoint.