Bypassing Marketing

This option is something I am using at the moment due to the astronomical sums required to advertise in conventional ways. Internet advertising (pay-per-click) is a good method to advertise cheaply, but only if keywords are appropriate. If not, people may visit your site under the wrong impression and will often end up costing for nothing. The other difficulty with internet ads is that it is much more difficult to reach specific geographic population centers. That is where tv, radio, and print comes into play. These, however, are often insanely expensive for a growing organization.

MED-P (Mitigating Endemic Democratic Problems) is a semi-commercial international non-governmental organization, with the other half being not-for-profit. We do not sell any products (other than our annual journal, the IADI, in the development stage). What our commercial side does is sell a service. That service is simply the cost and participation of anyone with a practical idea on how to improve something about their country. We organize these people and their ideas into conferences where they then write a chapter (relevant ideas are grouped together). These chapters are then separately published as manuals and collectively published as volumes. The manuals are distributed strategically to relevant government bodies whilst the volumes go to universities, libraries, NGOs, the UN, foreign embassies, media bodies, etc., all pro bono. This is done to disperse our delegate's ideas into the "winds of society" so that discussion and the dissemination of ideas can begin the process of improving the human condition of those living in that country. Of course, our conferences have listeners and student observers from around the world who hear these ideas, speak with others about their country's problems, network, etc., and return to their countries with ideas that may be applicable for them. These can go into use so that when MED-P comes to hold a Summit (conference series) in their nation these ideas may have had time to mature and someone may offer a more advanced idea which can likewise be brought back to the country where the original idea was taken. This synthesis is the optimal case scenario. In overall, MED-P is helping the people of the world make their lives and the lives of their children better simply by facilitating their ideas and guaranteeing their strategic placement in society.

The not-for-profit side approaches the same goals except with targeted projects such as local community development, scholarships, the New Sophist's Society, etc. See www.med-p.org for further information.

The problem encountered thus for me as the CEO is: how to effectively make people aware of MED-P's conferences? MED-P used to be a fully not-for-profit body but I decided a more philanthropic route would lead to greater results for our objectives. The difficulty is that capital is not readily available and due to our 'international' status it is difficult to gain credit from banks or larger NGO such as the UN or NED. I'm thinking of simply bypassing marketing by focusing on rallying my web-development team to continue improving our website and simply going ahead with whatever we have no matter what. Just make it work, ensure that media bodies know about it before it happens to gain some coverage, and hit the distribution of our delegates' ideas hard. Perhaps our process will be the ultimate market tool. It's a risky venture, but when you've got no money to play with (and essentially little to lose) risk seems not to be as great. The only thing that I cannot stand to bear is the idea of failure or disappointment. MED-P, in my opinion, is a realistic and practical organization with massive implications for global humanity. How can I get people to know about our conferences?

- Jean-Paul