Social Marketing And Community Self-supporting Agency In Development Program

Marketing is a series of activities that are used to gain attention from potential buyers, motivate prospective buyers to buy, get them to actually buy and try to encourage them to buy and buy again. In principle, marketing is something very simple, namely the art of selling yourself or organization.

In business world, marketing is defined as business activity - the phenomenon of trafficking, the products sold can be either goods or services related to economic activity and is profit. While social marketing, is the strategy of selling idea to change thoughts, attitudes, behaviors of society or certain groups, for the issue or idea offered.

Developing social marketing has been done by various agencies to market their ideas related to social changes to society and also various other parties. The aim is that people want change in attitudes and behaviors for development. In conjunction with community self-supporting agencies, social ideas are in fact already done by the society, which needs to be done is to market the changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviors that have been done by the society in poverty reduction to the outside parties.

It is expected that through the promotion and campaign for what has been done by community self-supporting agencies and community to the outsiders, whether in form of medium-term planning for poverty reduction programs and processes undertaken, the outside parties such as already mentioned will care and support to community self-supporting agency for implement the ideas that are constructed by society.

Based on experience, implementation of marketing strategies in social world proven to empower organizations in obtaining support for human resources (in form of technical assistance) as well as potential funding sources originating from the various stakeholders (communities, government and private sectors).

Furthermore, social marketing is closely related to partnerships and policy. Efforts to encourage changes in behavior among decision makers, whether government or private institutions, is expected to encourage the drafting of a policy. When the government buy social ideas offered by the community self-supporting agency, for example, involve the community in development program, the government is expected to adopt it and make participatory planning policies for development programs.