Details for Marketing and Stakeholder Engagement

Christians are by definition communicators, ‘strategic marketers’ of ideas, and yet marketing is one of the permanent fixtures of modern life which provides continuing ethical and practical conundrums for Christians in the workplace. This unit offers an introduction to Christian engagement with two key marketing functions - building reputation and engaging target audiences - and their relevance to non-commercial organisations.   

The unit Marketing and Stakeholder Engagement is part of the subject area Leadership and is offered as a part of the following Awards: Master of Arts (Christian Studies) (Alphacrucis College (NSW Dept. of Education)).

Unit Content

Curriculum Objective

At the successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:

1. build a fundraising or donor-engagement strategy;
2. demonstrate a critical understanding of the challenges involved in building a sustainable and customer focussed organisation without compromising the organisation’s ideals and values;
3. develop successful applications around the key steps of the engagement process: market understanding, segmentation, positioning, branding, service- and service portfolio design and communication;
identify, critically assess and respond to ethical dilemmas in the context of  reputation building and stakeholder engagement Exhibit ability to critically evaluate relevant literature in the field and draw pragmatic applications from it. 

Subject Content

1. Strategic Marketing and commercial imperative
2. Ethical and industry approaches to customers, competitors, and context
3. Positioning and building reputation
4. Branding;
Communication advertising and ‘PR’ n the NGO 

Assessment Methods

Market research project, essay, workbook and reflection.

Representative References

Andreasen, A.R. Social Marketing in the 21^st Century. California: Sage Publications, 2006.

Barna, George. Grow your church from the outside in. Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 2002.

Bloom, P.N. andG.T. Gundlach (eds.). Handbook of Marketing and Society, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001.  

Brinckerhoff, Peter C. Mission-Based Marketing, 2^nd Edition. New Jersey: Pearson Education Australia, 2006.

Chan, Kim W. Mauborgne, Renee. BlueOceanStrategy: How to create uncontested market space and make the competitor irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005.

Davenport, T.H. and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: understanding the new currency of business. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.

Foster, W. and G. Fine. “How nonprofits get really big.” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2007).