By Sarah Blanchard
Yes, These Words Belong in the Same Sentence
If you work in a public sector organization and are thinking that you may need some marketing skills don’t feel depraved. Marketing is not a profit-driving force aimed at manipulating the populace. For the purposes of our work as public administrators, marketing is no more than having an industry recognized set of tools for conducting stakeholder outreach, disseminating public information, and ensuring the efficient and effective distribution of public benefits.
The type of marketing skills I’m referencing are not those related to campaigning and public relations for political candidates, but rather those needed by federal, state, and local officials aiming to better serve the public good.
Public administrators should not be faulted for lacking important marketing skills when the agencies that employ them are not recruiting professionals with these skills and when the discipline of marketing does not immediately connect with public sector professionals to demonstrate the applicability of these skills to their work.
There are several challenges to integrating marketing principles into public sector professions. One is 
speed. Historically, governments do not operate in a particularly time-sensitive environment and often do not have the freedom to act quickly within bureaucratic systems.
Another challenging aspect of public sector outreach is the desire of political leaders to apply ‘spin’ to otherwise a-political marketing messages. This not only dilutes the value of otherwise informative messages for the public, but also diminishes the motivation of administrators to even pursue outreach.
Additionally, the public is a vast and infinitely diverse target market. Developing marketing and outreach approaches for individual target segments may seem daunting, but that’s part of the skill set needed by public administrators. Training in marketing can yield capabilities for identifying who your primary stakeholder types are, where to “find them”, and how to develop pathways for interacting with them that lead to desired outcomes.
Lastly, justifying the costs of marketing activities in government is challenging, though no more or less so than in the private sector. The important thing to do is to track outcomes through whatever measures are most meaningful to key decision-makers.
Successful marketing in the public sector does not, of course, result in increased profits, but it offers us the ability to:
- Expand engagement with the communities we serve;
- Increase support for and participation in important government initiatives;
- Build partnerships that leverage resources and boost economic development; and
- Demonstrate the effective use of taxpayer dollars.
Even with these projected benefits, marketing skills are still undervalued by government employers; but public administrators looking to expand their impact in our profession should seek opportunities to flex their marketing skills and continue bring our government into the 21st century (let’s not pretend that we’re fully there yet!)
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