Our guest blog comes from Rob Martin, Marketing Associate to Result CIC 

How do you market a Community Interest Company? What does that even mean?

For some, marketing is a dirty word. It implies selling, convincing, coercing… And depending on what it is you’re marketing and how you’re doing it, that’s fair enough. 

I started working with Result CIC several years ago having noticed that there was a need to apply some marketing principles to the way that this young but successful company was communicating.

It started as some advice. I’m a freelance marketing consultant mainly working in the arts and culture and I know both Hormoz and Jane, Result CIC's Directors, personally. At that stage it was as simple as suggesting that a new, more professional looking, accessible website might project a better image, that engaging on social media would support them and that a subscription for newsletters would be a good idea.

Talk about a can of worms! Because once you start working on a new website, you have to consider its content - the words, the photographs, its structure, its look! Where to start?

And why?

Because the work that Result CIC does can be life changing. Marketing is simply a way of bringing attention to something, in this case coaching and training, to people who will get some benefit from it. I had been, and continue to be, so impressed by Result CIC’s work, that I wanted more people to know about it and be able to access it.

So we built a website, wrote the words on it, took the photos, made some short videos, started a newsletter, conversed on social media. Then I started to show Hormoz and Jane the benefit and efficiency of a consistent and coordinated approach to what is said, how it’s said, who it is said to and how to say it to more people.

From such seemingly innocuous beginnings, I now find myself managing Result CIC’s marketing and communications. Sounds lofty, but in fact it means that we have a meeting once a month and go through what Result CIC has been doing, what it’s about to do, what it would like to do and who it would like to do it with.

At its core, marketing is about making connections, but more informed marketing practice makes the connections matter. I’ve had a very lucky career, trying to connect people to art, music, dance, theatre, films, the stuff I find life enhancing. I know that the arts can change lives - they changed mine and led to a career working with the likes of The Lowry, Manchester International Festival and Time Out. It’s fulfilling when you succeed of course, when you feel that those connections have made a difference in some way.

How much more so in the work that Result CIC does? Two years ago I asked Hormoz and Jane if they’d work with me on producing a Social Impact Report. Whereas most companies put their profits above all else as a measure of success, an account of an organisation’s social impact is much more revealing of who they are, what they do and, crucially, their real purpose and values. And as those reports show, Result CIC really has made a difference.

And that’s because, as people, Hormoz and Jane know the value of kindness and empathy, of listening and understanding, of the importance of the collective and the integrity of the individual. They’ve taken their lived experiences of potentially isolating conditions and situations and turned them into positives, positives with which they now inform, support, nurture, develop and change lives.

It’s my happy role to let people know about it, to market it. And when that’s what you’re connecting people to, marketing doesn’t feel so dirty after all.

Visit Rob's website at Rob Martin Marketing.