I was approached by the Head of Marketing for a UK charity to help review their existing marketing plan and make recommendations based on my findings.

To focused on digital

I do like taking on slightly different projects and it’s nice to be able to provide constructive feedback on marketing plans as I see so many. This charity was struggling, they recently had a CMO who had focused too heavily on digital and not enough on local relationships and the numbers were suffering.

The Head of Marketing wanted my advice on whether their marketing plan was structured correctly, what they needed to do differently and whether they required a whole shake-up.

Some non-specific specifics

It was interesting to see how they pulled everything together. Unfortunately, as part of this case study I can’t go into specifics but what I can say is that there felt like there was death by stats – they were almost being overwhelmed with information. Not all staff were marketing qualified which was proving an issue, there wasn’t enough focus on building relationships at a local level and the Head of Marketing needed to delegate more so she could concentrate on the higher-level strategy rather than signing off a £25 invoice.

Implementing recommendations

At the end of the review and a session to talk through it with the head I was asked to put together a marketing recommendations document to be presented to the board so that she could persuade them to implement their marketing in a different way. Feedback was that it went down well and they are now looking at ways to implement my recommendations, which is great news.