CAPÍTULO II: RECOLECCIÓN DE DATOS
2.2 DIAGNÓSTICO DE LA EMPRESA: RECOLECCIÓN DE DATOS
In a market economy, non-profit organizations cannot ignore the market demands. Therefore, they are as much dependant on the market mechanisms as profit organizations, if not more dependent. The main concern of marketing of non-profit organizations is to identify what these organizations have to offer in exchange for their requests.
The entry and expansion of marketing in the non-profit sector emphasizes its multiple valences, the recognition of its main purpose, to efficiently satisfy the consumer’s needs. The reaching of this goal presupposes the deeper knowledge of the behavior of the consumer of goods and services. Therefore, it is noticed a tendency to increase the study of consumer behavior, because it has already been understood that marketing means the satisfying of people’s needs and, therefore, the reactions they have towards the goods and services offered must be understood.
For this purpose, one must know: how do consumers perceive the good or service, what do they think of it, what behavior they adopt, as well as which are the factors influencing the adopting of certain behavior.
Since this behavior is different from one person to the other and it modifies in time and space, because people have different preferences, antipathies, beliefs, attitudes, values, its analysis must be a constant preoccupation of those who aim to create and further maintain customers.
Therefore, it is required that managers notice everything from the consumer’s point of view, see the company and its products through the consumer’s perspective, and take into account his/her needs and aspirations (Blythe 1998: 10).
Because the exchange object of non-profit organizations cannot be specified in economic terms, the exchanges of this kind are performed through negotiations or persuasion, having as goal the awareness regarding the importance of the respective activity, the analysis of the exchange itself remaining secondary.
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Social marketing, is characteristic to non-lucrative fields, which do not presuppose trading and profit, or, differently said, non-profit activities (Kotler and Andreasen 1991).
Social marketing uses market segmentation, market studies, the valuing of the concepts of communication, facilities, stimuli, theory of changes, in order to obtain maximum of reaction from the groups targeted (Kotler 1976).
This complex process contains five steps (Kotler 1998): 1. Establishing the purposes of action and image;
2. Positioning the organization in order to establish its role and place in the community, made through the analysis of the mission, clients’ needs and prospective competitors so to define the ‘niche’ of action;
3. Developing a marketing-type inventory through which, based on the efforts’ analysis, the modifications necessary to reach the goals are being established and the marketing mix is done based on the 6 Ps: product, public, price, place, production and promotion; 4. Developing the marketing plans aiming at both their priority and their implementation;
5. Developing a promotional message.
Everything is completed by designing and applying the social services that ensure the optimum satisfaction of the clients’ social needs.
For the beginning of this millennium, confronted, on the one hand, with serious problems residing in the world economic crisis and the strengthening of « tensions » between the limited resources and increasing needs determined also by the unprecedented increase of the population, and, on the other hand, with the considerable development of the non-lucrative sector, which reflect the high degree of civilization and progress, the rational management of the social actions appears as a stringent need, to which social marketing struggles to find a solution.
It aims to ensure the knowledge of demands of a certain nature in the social environment, in order to find the best solutions.
We consider that social marketing comprises the design, implementation and control of the marketing activity, which has the goal of promoting the causes or social ideas of a target group of a society, a form of non-profit marketing.
At the same time, it is considered that the development of efficient social marketing strategies would create the possibility to harmonize or integrate the organization mission with the persons or groups served, to achieve in a more efficient manner the programmatic goals and to obtain financial stability.
Social marketing has an heterogeneous area, targeting very different fields, represented by public or private institutions of: education, culture, art, sport, religion, public health, free time, politics (the most important component being electoral marketing), ecology etc., or charitable organizations involving the development of programs destined to support and impose social causes or ideas, such as: donations for persons in need (philanthropy), fight against pollution, alcoholism, discrimination etc., causes generally supported by humanitarian, civic, ecologic, human rights protection a.s.o. non- governmental organizations (NGOs).
The importance that such fields of the human activity have in the modern society has lead to marketing diversification and specialization depending on the conditions specific to each field, on the experience accumulated and on the own problems that must be solved in order to experience natural development.
Thus, in the field of associations and foundations that activate in the sphere of social care, the objectives, methods and market investigation and action techniques were differentiated, being able to speak of a type of marketing specific to this field.
Any non-profit organization in the field of social security clearly defines its action purposes, thus conferring, on the one hand, the possibility to set specific objectives, measurable for the organization and, on the other hand, the goals of image through which it becomes known by the public, mass media, beneficiaries.
The associations and foundations in the field of social security in Romania must ensure a certain position within the community, which depends on the ability to create impact, especially through the clarification of their missions.
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For this purpose, the organization must identify the needs of the community where it wishes to perform its activity, to find solutions for solving them, to know the competitors, to elaborate the message by means of which to clearly express its position, which then to test, in order to find out if it will be supported.
The objectives of non-profit organizations are complex, given the wide variety of the activity fields, which target places, people, ideas, organizations.
Reaching the objectives of associations and foundations in the field of social security cannot be strictly measured in financial terms, since they materialize in: popularization of social causes, improvement of public attitude, encouragement of donations and contributions, highlighting and consolidation of social attitudes, distribution of ideas or information, communication of points of view, the attempt to change behavior, modification of beliefs, actions for changing convictions etc. In order to achieve the purpose of the social marketing activity, the objectives must be clearly defined from the beginning, in order to be correctly received by all categories of public involved: government, local public authorities, beneficiaries, donors, community, volunteers etc.
The associations and foundations existing in the field of social care, through the programs they run, identify with the organizations providing services in the benefit of the community. That is why there must be considered the four attributes that differentiate services of products and that impose service marketing a series of particularities, which are also found in social marketing: intangibility, variability, inseparability, perishability.
Specific to non-profit marketing is the fact that it addresses the two categories of persons: beneficiaries (organization’s customers) and financers. This involves, on the one hand, the identification and evaluation of the consumers’ needs, of the public in the community, in order to define the unique « niche » of the organization, and the interested target group, in view of defining, in the end, the generic objective of the organization, by establishing the services that best satisfy the customers’ needs, which contributes to the increase of social welfare within the community.
On the other hand, non-profit marketing aims at identifying the potential financers, at knowing their problems and intentions, at preserving special relations between the donors and non-profit organizations.
Associations and foundations in the field of social care are, more than any other type of association, in permanent contact with the mass-media, the community and the persons tied to the organization, such as: members of the boards of directors, of the executive committees, volunteers etc.
The correlation of the supply of social services of associations and foundations with the obtaining of the financial resources necessary to perform their activity imposes the use of specific means and instruments in order to raise funds and find sponsors, which non-profit marketing can identify in the person of interested individuals or groups (ex. economic organizations, religious groups, foundations, government).
The basis principle of elaborating the funds development strategies of a non-profit organization is that of complementarity of services, communitarian and/or individual needs and of resources, seen from a permanently constitutive dynamics.
Fund-raising initiated from the perspective of the idea that a set of services corresponds to pressing needs that must be satisfies is based on a rather simplistic conception with respect to the functioning manner of non-profit organizations. The implicit hypothesis of this simplistic approach is that, although the needs are pressing and the services supplied have the attributes of quality, the donors are fluctuant in their generosity. As a consequence, it is to be assumed that the appeals bearing the emotionality of solidarity would diminish the donors’ fluctuations, increasing, at the same time, the chances of preservation, even of strengthening and expansion, of the service- supplying organization. The multiplication of the emotional stimuli and/or the increase of their intensity reach a saturation threshold that immediately has effects contrary to those intended. A more profitable approach seems to be to focus the organization on the service-needs relation, concomitantly with the identification and expansion of a circle of donors and buyers who appreciate the quality of the respective relation. The fund-raising is subordinated to the broader fund- development strategy, which also includes the permanent innovation of the needs-services relation.
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In order to support social programs, it is very important that the public opinion to be informed on the respective social problems, on the consequences of ignoring them as well as with respect to the modalities through which one can contribute to the solving.
The essential objective of non-profit organizations marketing is constituted by the solving or improving the need of customers, who are used as justification for obtaining resources, these representing the reason to be non-profit organizations.
Because the success of the activities in these organizations cannot be appreciated by means of the profit obtained, the role of marketing consists of highlighting those characteristics, properties, qualities, which are representative for the organization, whose activity must be targeted towards the customer (beneficiary), because, in the competition for donations and scholarships, only the organizations that satisfy customers’ demands have chances of survival. As a consequence, marketing of non-profit organizations becomes increasingly sophisticated, more complex, since every market segment must be approached in specific terms.
Experience has demonstrated that, in the long-run, only organizations that adopted decisions depending on the customers’ desires and needs were successful.
4. CONCLUSION
Marketing, and especially the social marketing, is a concept more and more used by the nonprofit organizations in Romania. Therefore, we consider important the fact that these organizations must understand the market-entry more in-depth than its older meaning, namely that of selling or raising a donation.
The social marketing aims at influencing the social behavior in a benefic way both for the target group and for the society in general.
Reaching the goal of the social marketing creates benefits both for the nonprofit organization, and for the local public administration, which is relieved from the fulfillment of the social need provided by association and foundations.
The cooperation between the public administration and the nonprofit organizations represents the best way to develop the private-public partnership. In the social field, this type of partnership led to solving certain social needs very important for the Romanian society.
REFERENCES
Blythe Jim (1998) Comportamentul consumatorului. Teora Publishing House, Bucharest
Bruce Ian (1998) Successful Charity Marketing. ed. II, Prentice Hall Edition
Dimitriu Raluca, Sobolevschi-David Iulia (2010) Ghidul managerului de ONG, Bucharest, Rentrop and Straton
Douglas James (1987) Political Theories of Nonprofit Organizations, W.W. Powel (ed.)
Druker Peter (1992) Managing the Non-Profit Organization, New York, Collins Publishing House
Kotler Philip, Andreasen Alan (1991) Strategic Marketing for Non-Profit Organization, ed. IV – Englewood Cliffs N.J. Prentice – Hall
Kotler Philip (1976) Attendre des objectives sociaux ŕ travers un marketing social, Revue française du marketing, cahier, no. 60 Jan-Febr.
Kotler, Philip (1998) Principles of marketing, Teora Publishing House, Bucharest
Nikels W.G. (1994) Marketing Communication and Promotion, 3rd edition, J. Wiley and Sons
Government Emergency Ordinance no. 26/2000 on Associations and Foundations, published in the Official Gazette of Romania, no. 39, 31 January 2000