Marketing for personalisation at HCVS

To Hackney Council for Voluntary Service (HCVS) in Dalston, East London, for a one-day course on "Marketing your organisation for personalisation", presented by Jo Harvey of Helen Sanderson Associates.

The personalisation agenda:

The rationale behind personalisation is that potential service users are allocated a personal budget and are able to "shop around" for the care they want.

This means that local government funding will be directly allocated to people based on perceived need rather than given to voluntary sector organisations.

Personalisation is not a new idea, and in fact was developed thirty years ago by the disabled people's movement and the US Independent Living Movement, both based in America.

The implementation was supported by the previous Labour government, although to a slower timescale than that planned by the coalition.

One issue raised by our group was the possibility of exploitation, although so far there have been very few reported incidents among those already using personal budgets.

The main intention is to save money, but supporters of personalisation also hope that competition will drive up standards. Whether this will be the case remains to be seen.

All eyes in the third sector will be on the Public Spending Review on October 20th, when Chancellor George Osborne will reveal how much will be cut from government departments.

Marketing in the charity sector:

Marketing is about creating demand for a product, identifying customers with a specific need or needs and creation products which meet these needs.

We examined the four p's: Product, Promotion, Place and Price, as well as the 3-legged stool approach, where the three legs are intelligence, strategy and communication.

A marketing mindset is essential. No good dipping your toe in marketing, you need to dive straight in and become "customer centric" understanding every detail of who you are marketing to and what you market.

We then looked at the process model of marketing, which has four stages:

1. Understanding (Business and Market Evaluation, Customer Analysis, Competitor Evaluation and Macro Trends).

2. Development of product proposition.

3. Decision (marketing strategy).

4. Action.

We then worked through Stage one in small groups using real-life examples.

A good day, and I would recommend courses from HCVS.