From Joanne Fritz,
Your Guide to Nonprofit Charitable Orgs.
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Nedra Kline Weinreich is the president and founder of Weinreich Communications and the author of Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide. Reach her at weinreich@social-marketing.com.

To many nonprofit managers, marketing equals fundraising. But your organization exists for more than just bringing in donations. By using social marketing methods, you can boost the effectiveness of programs and activities that are the reason your organization exists—to make a difference.

Social marketing uses the same tools and techniques of commercial marketing, but its purpose is to bring about positive health and social change. Social marketing's bottom line is behavior change.

Social marketing as described here is distinct from the more recent usage of the term by bloggers and social network marketers to label peer-to-peer or consumer-generated media. The field of social marketing has been around for over a quarter of a century, used to address issues around the world, from family planning to HIV/AIDS, to breast cancer screening.

When social marketers develop a program strategy, they consider the same elements of the marketing mix as commercial marketers. However, the social marketing mix has to be adjusted to take into account the unique nature of the products and environments with which they work.

What does the social marketing mix look like, and how is it different from the Four Ps that commercial marketers use?

1. Product

The social marketing product is not usually a tangible item, though it can be (e.g., condoms). Generally, social marketers are selling a particular behavior. While you may be promoting a life-saving or life-improving practice, quite often social marketing behaviors are things that people don't particularly want to do—eat more fiber, conserve water, exercise, get a colonoscopy. To address this issue, use the same tools as commercial marketing to promote the product's benefits based on the target audience's core values. Show them how using the product helps them become the person they want to be.

2. Price

While adopting the product may have a monetary cost, the more important price considerations are social and emotional costs. These include the hassle factor of performing the behavior, time, embarrassment, deprivation of something they enjoy, fear of finding a medical problem, or social disapproval. The strategic issue is to figure out how to reduce the price as much as possible and make it easy and stress-free to perform the behavior.

3. Place

How will you make the product available? In other words, how and where can people perform the behavior? The concept of aperture is relevant here; just like a camera's lens opens and shuts very quickly to let in the light when you take a picture, you have only a small window of opportunity to get your message through to the target audience at a time and place they can act on it. Your potential participants will not go out of their way to look for your messages—you need to go to them and provide the opportunity to easily learn about the product and perform the behavior.

4. Promotion

Promotional approaches for social marketing do not differ much from those used by commercial marketers. One key difference may lie in the types of target audiences addressed. Many are not the types of consumers that a for-profit business would even consider going after; they may be low-income, unable to speak English, difficult to find, and/or uninterested in making any changes in their lives. Social marketers must be creative in the ways they promote their products to these hard-to-reach populations.

And because of the inherent challenges faced by social marketing programs, I have added four more Ps to the social marketing mix