Several weeks ago, the Executive Director and several members of the Board of Directors of a Pregnancy Help Center located in a large city, asked to meet with me and one of their key benefactors who has a strong marketing background in sales and marketing.
Although they had specific issues they wanted to talk about, I would say the overarching request this PHC’s leadership team had was to discuss ideas on how to compete more effectively against the local abortion facility near them.
And when I say “near them,” the abortion facility is literally less than a one-minute walk across from them, and clients of both facilities use the same parking lot.
Talk about staring into the eyes of your enemy.
I give kudos to the leadership of this PHC for acknowledging that they have a competitive problem.
Last year, their facility “saved” 100 preborn babies from abortion.
But the abortion facility across the parking lot conducted approximately 10,000 abortions.
From a market share perspective: Abortion Facility: 99% PHC: 1%
That is not winning.
We had a very productive meeting that resulted in specific action items the PHC said it would pursue in order to become more competitive, as measured by market share.
In this article, and in the articles for the remainder of this week, I will cover specific competitive challenges this PHC faces because these same issues tend to plague PHCs across the country, in general.
What’s In a Name?
Let’s start with the organization’s name.
I want to protect the PHCs privacy, so I won’t give the organization’s name, but I will say that within their name is a word that projects that the service they offer is related to a woman having a baby.
Do you see the problem from a branding perspective?
That’s right. The clients it wants to attract – abortion-determined women – want to be un-pregnant.
In marketing, if you want to attract clients to your services, everything that you project with your brand must be congruent with your client’s mindset.
Subconsciously, prospective clients are looking for reasons to not do business with you.
During the process of initially engaging your brand, if anything feels “out of tune” with what the prospective client thinks she wants, then she will toss your brand out of the ring of possibilities she will consider.
Of course, we don’t know exactly how many times this has been the case with this PHC, but I think it’s fair to say that the negative impact on their results from having an “off tune” client-facing brand name is not insignificant.
The Right Name for the Right Client
My recommendation to the leaders of this PHC was that they change their organization’s name to something that matched their target client’s mindset.
I know, not exactly genius, right?
But wait. Not so fast.
Like all nonprofit PHCs, this PHC’s revenue stream comes from generous pro-life benefactors.
And those benefactors love the PHC’s current name!
So if the PHC changes its name, won’t that risk upsetting those benefactors?
The answer to that question: YES
What this PHC had failed to consider is that any organization can have multiple business names.
Yes, the government requires an organization to have an official business name of record, but then it also allows businesses to list so-called “dba”s – doing business as.
The resolution to this PHC’s naming problem was rather simple: 1) keep the current name in all marketing directed toward pro-life benefactors; and 2) change the name (a dba!) toward all marketing directed toward abortion-determined women.
We’ll see where the PHC takes this, but I believe that the name change idea was well-received by the leadership.
Assuming they make the name change, there is still the issue of how to “get their name out there” so that women know about the PHC and what they offer.
In other words, MARKETING!
Tomorrow, I will talk about a comment that was made about marketing by a member of the PHC’s leadership team that points to another “mindset” challenge that PHCs face.
Regards,
Brett