The Tension between Marketing and Campaigning

Abstract

This chapter will focus on how the tensions within the coalition identified at the end of the previous chapter — between the campaigners/radicals and the marketeers/moderates — had an impact on the negotiation of the campaign’s communications. Both of these perspectives reflected different understandings of the communications techniques to be used for the campaign as well as differing approaches to relationship with government. I will start by putting this in the context of the charity sector’s unease with business techniques and branding. I will then contend that Make Poverty History brought together two different and separate areas — marketing and campaigning — that had little understanding of the concepts and practices used by the other, even though they often co-exist in the same organizations. All the major charities and many of the smaller ones that were part of Make Poverty History have professional fundraising staff who use a wide variety of marketing and branding techniques, yet I found little indication of their involvement in the campaign. Instead, most leading member organizations populated the MPH Working Groups with their campaigning, policy, new media and media staff. By contrast, Comic Relief and AMV provided much of the marketing and advertising skills, yet they had less experience of campaigning. This tension came into the open during discussions over the level of complexity of the campaign’s mass communications.KeywordsMember OrganizationMass CommunicationVoluntary SectorCoordination TeamDirty WaterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.