Make-A-Wish America has a world-renowned reputation as one of the best nonprofits in the world, and is widely known amongst many individuals looking to support or donate to nonprofits. Their work is not only a fundamental part of human services care within the nonprofit world, but their unique online platform and social media presence is a differentiating factor among many other nonprofits and for-profit businesses alike. The purpose of this study is to research Make-A-Wish America’s brand management and marketing strategies as a nonprofit, including secondary research on the brand itself, analyze all environmental factors that affect its marketing strategy, assess their market segmentation, targeting, and positioning, and evaluate their integrated marketing communications strategy. Additionally, I conducted interviews with Make-A-Wish America professionals working within the brand management department at the national office. The individuals were interviewed with various marketing backgrounds within the brand department to gain a deeper insight into their individual experiences and assessments of Make-A-Wish America’s brand management and marketing strategy. My specific thesis goals include utilizing my marketing recommendations to grow Make-A-Wish America’s profits, specifically in actions to increase fundraising. Also, my thesis goal is to find recommendations to outperform competition in gaining supporters and donors as well as, more recently, analyzing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and making recommendations on how they can grow despite this economic tragedy. The results suggest that there are common themes amongst my secondary research and primary research, resulting in marketing recommendations that Make-A-Wish America can utilize to better market to donors and supporters in the future, giving them competitive advantage over other nonprofits and combatting the effects of COVID-19. Recommendations for Make-A-Wish America include investing in their own research and development in terms of customer relationship management tools, online fundraising campaigns, and technology to better inform donors of their mission, vision, and values, diversifying their donor profile and targeted communities, and taking advantage of their point of parity within their social media online platform.

As Clive Humby said, “Data is the new oil” and is becoming ever more important to every industry, profession, and business with incredible applications like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Looking specifically at the Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) market segment, there is a significant gap in the use of data analytics. Only 15% of SMBs have a “data-driven” culture. Companies that leverage data to drive decision-making have seen increased revenue, profit, and employee output. Despite the benefits, SMB owners run into three main issues. First, a lack of bandwidth as time and human capital are stretched thin. Second, technical expertise as many analytics tools require coding expertise or knowledge of systems and tools which many SMBs do not possess. Lastly, many SMBs lack the finances to invest in costly tools or subject matter experts. Enterprise-level organizations will continue to invest in analytics leaving SMBs behind and increasing economic inequality. Our solution is DataMate, a Data as a Service (DaaS) no-code, low-cost, and low-time intensive platform designed to provide end-to-end analytics solutions for SMB owners. The platform allows users to automatically pull data from sources (ex. point of sale, customer relationship management, etc.), store data in a centralized location, and lastly, visualize data through dashboards to enable SMBs with data-driven decision-making capabilities. Once at scale, we will be able to create models and deliver advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics. The global data-as-a-service industry market was valued at $5.5B in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 36.9% until 2030. SMBs account for a minority of global revenue share but are expected to grow faster than large enterprises. The Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the data-as-a-service industry of small and medium-sized businesses in the United States is roughly $1.02B and the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is roughly $2.6M. The DaaS industry is highly competitive with high customer bargaining power and large growth potential. Some direct competitors to DataMate are FiveTran, Looker, Domo, and Alteryx. While offering similar data infrastructure services, no solution can achieve DataMate’s unique product value proposition. A fully operational platform will require considerable technical investment. Our go-to-market strategy consists of a manual and automated phase. To start, leveraging the expertise of data/business analysts to manually build end-to-end analytics solutions. Concurrently, we plan to build an automated platform. By starting to manually build, we can bring revenue on day one while solidifying template dashboards and ETL flows. Additionally, DataMate will start building data solutions only in the restaurant vertical given its large market segment and homogeneity of tools. Given the numerous variations in data needs between SMB industries, a step-by-step rollout allows for quality integration. Eventually, the platform will expand to all industries.