Marketing is an essential part of our activities with three distinct objectives:
The first and most important one is to increase readership and dissemination of our editorial output. As our mission makes clear, one of our goals is to act as an information bridge linking together as many civil society, international institutions, policy-makers, donors and individual readers as we can reach. For this reason, we put a lot of effort into creating, communicating and delivering content in such a way as to ensure the widest possible dissemination of our products and services. Second, our marketing efforts are aimed at generating income from the market. This allows us to tap into diverse sources of financing, an essential prerequisite for preserving our journalistic integrity and editorial independence. Last but not least, marketing activities are closely related to the viability of our projects. While most IPS projects have dedicated financing, their success (and hence the possibility of securing resources for future activities) depends on our ability to involve all relevant audiences in their actual implementation.
Given the diversity of many of our markets, most marketing activities are undertaken at the regional level. This approach reflects two distinct sets of considerations:
Given that IPS regional entities are autonomous non-profit organisations, it is natural that each of them undertakes its own marketing efforts to raise income for activities and projects Such a “local” approach is essential to ensure that actual offers are targeted to the specific needs and realities of regional markets and audiences.
While we have reaped the benefits of such a decentralised marketing strategy, there is a lot to be gained from ensuring a certain degree of global consistency in our marketing policies. For this reason, in the last few years we have been working towards establishing a common set of practices and global products to generate positive synergies from regional marketing activities. For example in 2003 we revamped our logo and offered common templates for all web and paper-based IPS products, in 2005 we produced a set of promotional products (T-shirts, baseball caps, pens, tote bags and mouse pads) to use at our events, and also in 2005 we produced the first IPS institutional video in English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, which can be seen at our Home page and on the page dedicated to multimedia production.
A bi-annual global clients survey offers invaluable data for our marketing efforts. The most recent survey (2007) was analysed by Professor Giffard of the School of Communications, Seattle. A summary of his report will be available shortly.
