The Case for Organizational Change Marketing

Most for-profit and non-profit organizations understand the value of marketing to external customers and donors and do not hesitate to invest significant time and money on it. However, very few organizations understand how valuable similar marketing efforts can be to winning staff and stakeholder support for internal organizational change initiatives.

Publication Date:  8 January 2024

Most for-profit organizations put a fair amount of effort into marketing their products and services to potential customers. Many non-profit organizations put the same amount of effort into marketing their mission to donors in support of fundraising. However, very few organizations, for-profit or non-profit, put very much effort into marketing important internal change initiatives to staff and stakeholders. This is unfortunate because high-quality marketing can impact the success of internal organizational change projects just as much as it does external sales and fundraising efforts.

When an organization sells a product or service, or asks for donations in support of its mission, it is in essence asking its customers or donors to make a change. In the case of an organization selling a product or service, the change is to using the organization’s product or service instead of that of a competitor. And in the case of an organization asking for donations to support its mission, the change is to donating a sum of money to the organization instead of using or saving this money for something else. In both of these instances, marketing plays a pivotal role in getting the customer or donor to make the organization’s desired change.

The role marketing plays in getting customers to purchase an organization’s products or services and getting donors to support an organization’s fundraising efforts is that of creating awareness and desire. Successful marketing lets people know that an organization’s product, service, or mission exists and creates a desire in people to purchase the product or service or donate in support of the mission.

Creating awareness and desire in customers and donors is fundamental to the success of sales and fundraising efforts. It is also of crucial importance to the success of organizational change initiatives. In order for most organizational change initiatives to be successful, they need to be supported by staff and stakeholders, and in order for staff and stakeholders to support organizational change initiatives, they need to be aware of the change initiative and its benefits and desire to support the initiative being successful. Successful internal change marketing can create this awareness and desire in staff and stakeholders in much the same way that successful external marketing efforts create awareness and desire in customers and donors.

The recent rise of organizational change management as a professional discipline has helped many organizations begin to understand the importance of creating awareness and desire in staff and stakeholders in support of successful change initiatives. Yet very few organizations market their internal changes to staff and stakeholders in a way that is likely to successfully bring about the levels of awareness and desire required to make a change initiative successful. Instead, most organizations rely on existing regular communication channels to communicate information about organizational change initiatives to staff and stakeholders, and these channels are rarely, if ever, up to the task of creating real excitement for a project.

It is time for organizations to abandon using regular communication channels to create awareness and desire for organizational change initiatives and start using traditional marketing practices instead. These practices have more than proved their worth in creating awareness and desire in external customers and donors. Given the chance, they will do the same for creating awareness and desire in staff and stakeholders.