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Associate Professor Tonya Williams Bradford of The UCI Paul Merage School of Business recently published the study “Help Me Help You!: Employing the Marketing Mix to Alleviate Experiences of Donor Sacrifice” in the Journal of Marketing.

The study examines roles for donors to help nonprofit organizations maximize their impact by learning to effectively employ specific marketing tactics in order to attract donors.

According to Bradford, the “marketing mix” –– a combination of six factors including product, place, price, promotion, people and process — can address each of the three types of sacrifice involved in the donation process. The three sacrifices are the following: psychic or mental effort, financial expenditures and physical effort. 

Additionally, the article defines three components that are essential for transforming individuals from potential to actual donor: the deliberation phase, the decision phase and the donation phase. The deliberation phase, when the opportunity to donate is being considered, is where individuals may become more involved by receiving insight from the organization. Next comes the decision phase –– where there is a balance of influence between individuals and organizations –– and eventually the donation phase, where the balance of influence shifts toward the organization. 

The element of impact through human connectivity was a point Bradford wanted to stress in the article. 

Bradford explained, “I’ve been on boards with nonprofits, and one of the things I realized is that often volunteers are better advocates for getting new volunteers than the organizations themselves. However, the organizations don’t turn to the volunteers to figure it out; they just try to do it themselves. So I was thinking, there’s an opportunity to really help these organizations leverage a resource that actually wants to participate and help them.” 

Ultimately, by employing the marketing mix, nonprofit organizations can gain necessary tools, including the use of internal resources, to increase their reach with forward-thinking data. 

“There are new ways that organizations can more fully engage donors if they just try,” she said. “Here are the opportunities for an organization to garner more support from donors.” 

Professor Bradford was drawn to this specific research due to a personal organ donation experience in 2006. 

“I donated a kidney in February 2006,” she explained. “I got involved with a lot of donors to just learn about it and figure it out. Through that process, I became passionate about saving a life, and learned how difficult it was for people who need an organ to get an organ. I just said, ‘there's more that we can do.’ That’s how I came to this research.” 

Professor Bradford continues exploring nonprofit research in another article, “We Can Fix This: Donor Activism for Non-profit Supply Generation,” published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.