1. Mission and marketing

Choose a problem the mission can justify

Marketing is a set of choices about people, value, access and relationships. It does not start with a channel. For an organisation that does good, the test is whether those choices help the mission without treating people merely as a means to income or visibility. A campaign can generate attention and still fail if it creates demand for an unavailable service, misrepresents eligibility or pressures people into an unsuitable offer.

Start with a decision rather than an ambition. 'Raise awareness' names a broad intention. 'Decide whether to improve enquiry handling before increasing service-page traffic during the next 90 days' identifies a choice. It invites competing explanations, a resource limit and a way to learn. You do not need perfect information to choose, but you must distinguish what you know from what you hope.

Map interests before selecting an audience

In a charity, the user, payer and beneficiary may be different people. An advice client wants useful, respectful help. A funder wants evidence that money serves a purpose. A volunteer wants a manageable role. A referral partner wants to know who is eligible and how quickly someone will be seen. A commissioner may need dependable reporting. Improving one relationship can worsen another: more detailed reporting can consume time that would otherwise support clients.

Make a stakeholder map with four columns: role, desired value, possible burden and influence over the decision. Include people who never reach the organisation. Someone unable to use an online booking form is absent from your website conversion report, not absent from the mission. People with little institutional influence may face the greatest consequences. Do not mistake the loudest stakeholder for the most important one.

Resolve conflicts explicitly. If a proposed fundraising story would disclose a service user's circumstances, projected income cannot substitute for their agency. If a donor wants more appointments than staff can support, write the capacity constraint into the objective. A map is useful only when it changes a choice, identifies an unanswered question or assigns responsibility for a trade-off.

Trace a credible route to benefit

A simple mission chain connects resources, activities, responses, service use and intended benefit. Staff time enables clearer eligibility information; people understand whether the service suits them; eligible enquiries reach booking; appointments happen; useful advice may help people take a next step. Each arrow is an assumption that deserves evidence. Attendance is closer to service use than website visits, but it is still not proof that advice improved someone's situation.

Choose an objective at a point the team can influence while keeping the later mission outcome visible. For the fictional advice service, a provisional objective could be to reduce avoidable booking difficulty without exceeding safe capacity. A later measure might ask whether people understood and could act on advice, if the organisation can gather that information appropriately. The course does not require collecting such information from real clients.

Avoid an objective that rewards harmful shortcuts. Counting bookings alone could encourage staff to book ineligible people. Counting attended appointments alone could favour easier-to-reach clients and exclude people who need adjustments. Add a balancing question: whose access gets worse, what work is displaced and what happens when the service is full?

Read the cohort without inventing a diagnosis

The fictional case supplies 600 unique service-page visitors, 72 enquiries, 24 bookings and 15 attended appointments in one month. These are a tracked cohort, so the stage calculations belong together for this exercise. Enquiry among visitors is 12%; booking among enquirers is approximately 33.3%; attendance among bookings is 62.5%; attendance among visitors is 2.5%. Monthly capacity is 40 attended appointments.

The largest numerical loss is not automatically the best intervention point. There are 528 visitors who did not enquire, but some may be checking details for someone else or correctly deciding they are ineligible. There are 48 enquiries without bookings, but some may have received a useful answer without needing an appointment. There are nine bookings without attendance; transport, changed circumstances, cancellation or recording error are possible explanations. None is established by the counts.

Unused monthly capacity is 25 appointments relative to the observed 15. This is not a forecast of demand or permission to fill every place. The team has at most £1,000 and 20 staff hours over 90 days. A large campaign could consume the hours before handling the enquiries it generates. Diagnose the bottleneck before buying attention, even when the attention itself is free.

Compare explanations that lead to different actions

Consider awareness, access, trust and capacity as competing starting explanations. An awareness explanation predicts that eligible people who could use the service do not know it exists. An access explanation predicts that interested people encounter practical difficulty. A trust explanation predicts reluctance even when access is practical. A capacity explanation predicts that the organisation cannot respond at the right time or provide the right kind of help.

The same symptom can fit several explanations. A delayed booking might follow slow response, difficulty arranging childcare or uncertainty about confidentiality. Choose evidence that distinguishes explanations rather than collecting general satisfaction comments. Inspecting response intervals could test an organisational delay explanation. A voluntary account of what happened between enquiry and booking could identify practical barriers. Both methods have limits and neither requires pretending that a few comments represent everyone.

Write a provisional problem definition with a revision trigger. For example: 'The enquiry-to-booking stage deserves investigation because 48 of 72 enquiries did not become bookings; we do not know how many were eligible or wanted an appointment. Inspect handling and eligibility before selecting a change. Reconsider if most non-bookings were appropriate resolutions.' This is more useful than 'people are not engaged' because another person can challenge it.

Set boundaries that make action possible

A brief should name a decision owner, an operational owner and someone responsible for checking effects on affected people. In the fictional case, these are proposed roles, not claims that people have accepted them. Specify what is outside scope: no live client recruitment, no new spending commitment, no publication and no uploading internal material to AI during this course. For a real project, obtain the relevant organisational permissions separately.

Your first portfolio entry is a working diagnosis, not a final strategy. Keep alternatives visible and include one fact that would make you change direction. The discipline is to make a small, defensible next decision. Marketing becomes more useful when it narrows an uncertainty that matters to the mission, not when it produces a confident list of activities.

Work a decision through to its consequence

Suppose a colleague argues that 600 visitors is too few and proposes doubling traffic. The immediate question is not whether more traffic is desirable in the abstract. If the same fictional stage rates held, 1,200 visitors would imply 144 enquiries, 48 bookings and 30 attendances. That arithmetic is a conditional scenario, not a forecast. It assumes the additional visitors resemble the original cohort, the rates remain stable and staff can handle twice the enquiries. None of those conditions is established.

Now compare a different scenario: keep 72 enquiries, but suppose 36 become bookings and 75% of those attend. This would imply 27 attendances. Again, the assumed improvements are not evidence. The comparison shows why a smaller upstream audience could produce more useful service use through a different journey, and why the team should investigate mechanisms before selecting a channel. Neither scenario tells us which intervention would cause the assumed rates.

Write the consequence for the mission as well as the arithmetic. More attendance could be welcome if the service is suitable and useful; it could be harmful if unsuitable bookings crowd out people with greater need. Add an eligibility and usefulness question rather than treating the higher number as an automatic win. Ask what staff work each scenario creates and whether it fits routine capacity. The point of scenario calculation is to expose assumptions that change the decision, not to give speculative precision a professional appearance. In your brief, put those assumptions beside the scenario so a reader cannot mistake them for predicted results.

Study allocation and completion

Allocate 1.5 hours to this lesson and worked example, 1.5 to critical reading, 2 to the lab, 3 to the assignment, 1 to critique and 1 to reflection and revision: 10 hours in total. These are planning allocations, not measured duration or a timed assessment. Read in short sessions if helpful. All resources are plain text; a notebook, calculator or optional free spreadsheet is sufficient. No video, AI account or paid service is needed.

For critical reading, use the linked selection if accessible and the internal reading comparison. Record its question, argument, evidence type, assumptions and one reason it might not transfer to your organisation. A missing external reading does not prevent completion: compare the two original internal positions and state that you have not appraised the external source. Keep a source log with title, URL, access date if accessed, claim supported and limitation. Links are references, not permission to copy or upload readings to AI.

Complete the lab manually first. The supplied simulated AI output is authored teaching material, not a transcript, real research or verified model performance. Mark each claim supported, unsupported or contradicted. Optional live AI may generate alternatives from these fictional inputs only; record tool, date, instructions, checks and revisions. Never supply personal, confidential or unauthorised material. If not using AI, compare the supplied output against your manual work and label that route accurately.

For critique, use the rubric and annotated example, alone or with a consenting peer; no peer is required. For reflection, revise one consequential decision and record the old choice, new choice, evidence and unresolved uncertainty. Keep work locally. Self-completion records learning activity, not professional competence or an independently assessed award. Version: 1 November 2026; report suspected errors through the course host's available contact route, or retain a correction note if no route exists.

Practical lab — 2 hours

Calculate the four cohort rates and unused capacity. Draw a text-only mission chain. Compare awareness, access, trust and capacity explanations in four rows, each with a prediction, a discriminating observation and a possible harm from acting too soon. Use the simulated AI recommendation as a fifth row and identify its unsupported assumptions.

Portfolio assignment — 3 hours

Produce a stakeholder map and a one-page problem definition, approximately 600 words plus tables. Include the decision, baseline, three competing explanations, scope, budget/time ceilings, ownership roles, balancing measure and revision trigger. Save this as the opening of the later 1,500-word evidence-and-diagnosis assessment; it is not an additional separately weighted assessment.

Critique — 1 hour

Apply the rubric to your work and the annotated example. Identify the strongest contrary explanation, one unsupported claim and one feasibility problem. If studying alone, write the objections before consulting the example.

Reflection and revision — 1 hour

Revise the weakest consequential decision. Keep both versions and a change note. State what further evidence would change your position; do not invent it.

Use these self-review weights: evidence and source appraisal 25%; critical reasoning 25%; contextual fit 20%; feasibility and evaluation 20%; clarity and reflective judgement 10%. Score each criterion from 0 to 4 and calculate sum(weight × score / 4), out of 100. These are illustrative learning criteria, not validated academic grades.

Evidence: preserve all denominators and label the case fictional. Reasoning: compare explanations that would change action. Context: distinguish service users from funders and include excluded people. Feasibility: stay within £1,000 and 20 hours over 90 days. Reflection: show a genuine change in the problem definition.

Across criteria: 0 means missing or misleading; 1 asserts a choice without support; 2 offers relevant but incomplete support; 3 connects evidence, alternatives and a feasible action; 4 tests a strong contrary account, quantifies limits where possible and specifies evidence that would reverse the choice. Do not reward length, fluent AI prose or an expensive tactic. A privacy breach, invented evidence or an unsupported public promise must be corrected before self-completion, regardless of the arithmetic.

Weak: 'Double posting because demand is low.' It confuses low attendance with low demand and gives no capacity check. Competent: 'Investigate booking because 24 of 72 enquiries became bookings.' This identifies a useful question but overlooks appropriate non-bookings. Strong: 'Inspect a bounded set of fictional enquiry records for response delay and eligibility, then compare access explanations before promotion. If most non-bookings were useful resolutions or ineligible enquiries, do not optimise the booking rate blindly.' The stronger answer can still choose promotion later; its strength is the explicit reversal condition. Illustrative criterion scores for the strong extract might be 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, giving 81.25/100; a complete submission would need its own evidence to justify those scores.