The Vibha
marketing team is
responsible for the creation of marketing material and managing media
relationships. This group consists of the Director of Marketing and
team
members from different action centers who fulfill various roles and
responsibilities. The marketing team supports the fund-raising and
programs
teams by creating and distributing appropriate marketing materials. The
group
is also responsible for marketing the Vibha brand as a whole.
For
the benefit of the volunteer
community, the marketing team publishes several documents on an annual
basis.
The Volunteer FAQ document is an example of such a document. These
materials
are readily available at the Vibha share server at functional
teams/marketing.
A volunteer could easily procure these documents by sending an e-mail
to
marketing@vibha.org. The
marketing team
also oversees the content on the organization’s website and the
publication of
the monthly patron newsletter,
Xpressions.
The marketing team has also assisted the newly formed fundraising team
in
putting together revised sponsorship documents. These documents can be
found at
fundraising/Sponsorship-brochures in the Vibha share server.
The Vibha marketing team creates
a wide variety of print publicity materials and distributes them to the
action
centers. These materials include banners, posters, generic and
program-specific
fliers, magnets and balloons. The designs for all these materials are
reviewed
and updated on an annual basis. To keep costs down, many design and
production
activities are performed in
India.
For instance, the banners are printed in Chennai and then shipped to
the
Bay Area Action
Center
from where they are distributed to various action centers within the
United States.
For the last several years, the
Bay Area
Action Center has shouldered the
responsibility of mass-producing the various print materials and
shipping these
to all action centers. This is a huge undertaking and the size of the
task has
grown over the years because of an increase in the number of action
centers.
Says Baheerathan Anandharengan,
the
Bay Area Action
Center
coordinator and a
long-time member of the marketing team, “In 2003, we had to start from
scratch.
A tremendous amount of effort has gone into creating common templates,
a
unified and cohesive web page, copyrighting images etc. And Mathangi
Srinivasan, the former Director was driving force behind most of it. We
have
come a long way”
In 2007, the Vibha marketing team
conducted a nationwide contest among volunteers for a catchy name and
tag line
for the organizations’ marquee event, the 5K/10K Walk/Run. Balaji Rajam
from
Bay Area won the contest. The winning entry was ‘
The Dream
Mile- a few miles for a million dreams’. The marketing
team undertook a national branding effort for The Dream Mile. Today,
the team
has achieved uniformity in the way Dream Mile is publicized across
action
centers. Poster templates,
registration
three- fold designs and T-shirt designs approved by the marketing team
for The
Dream Mile in 2008 are available on the Vibha share drive at functional
teams/
marketing/TheDreamMile/2008.
The Dream
Mile web pages received a fresh new look in 2008. One of the volunteers
who was
instrumental in adapting the poster designs for the web pages is Ashish
Gaikwad
of the
Twin
Cities Action Center.
He also led the
launch of the Vibha YouTube channel in 2008. The Vibha YouTube channel
at
http://www.youtube.com/helpthemgrow
serves as video share location where volunteers can post videos of
events and
watch stories of Vibha beneficiaries from our projects. Says Ashish,
“If a
picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million words.
Communicating through videos has become the norm. We cannot rely on
print
materials for all of our marketing. A significant portion of one’s time
is
spent on the internet. We need to take advantage of that.” Venkata
Rajaram,
another member of the marketing team from MN totally agrees with Ashish
and
adds, “I enjoy being part of the marketing team. Yes, it involves a
whole lot
of design and document reviews but it is extremely satisfying to see
the final
product in the end.”
There
are several new
initiatives
that the marketing team has identified for the remainder of 2008.
Increased
web-based marketing and the creation and use of more video
advertisements are
examples. Some more initiatives were identified at the recent volunteer
conference in
Atlanta.
Says Sreekanth Bhaskaran, the Director of Marketing, “We should be
doing a lot
more. Creating radio and TV advertisements for the Dream Mile is a
priority.
Larger action centers should also be supporting smaller ones by
printing fliers
and posters for them. All these need volunteer power, a group that is
enthusiastic about performing these tasks. We are not short of ideas,
what we
need is execution. We need more volunteers to help with this effort. ”
And you
can help in this effort. Currently, the marketing team is actively
looking to
fill two positions. Is there a graphic designer in you? Or would you
rather be
a media relations expert?
Write to
marketing@vibha.org to find out
how you
can help.
