Copyright 2005 by The Aspen Institute

Participants from the six-year National Community-Based Forestry Demonstration Program designed the toolkit to offer broad lessons on marketing and the range of possible roles to nonprofit organizations along with step-by step guidelines for assessing the market viability of your product and developing a full-fledged marketing plan.

"Successful community-based natural resource management programs focus on expanding markets or creating new ones rather than on production alone. Markets change constantly. Knowing what to produce, when to produce it, how much to produce, and how toprocess it for the highest prices are important issuesfor any producer. Producers need to go beyond what they want to produce and sell and begin to think more about what the market wants to buy. Very few NGOs have the expertise to offer such assistance.”

This workshop could be a tool to help unify a community, as community members learn how to market their products. People can explore ideas about marketing collaboratively rather than always seeing marketing as a competition to get to a customer. Weneed to think about how we can get people to comea long distance to get our products. I have found that people will drive to my business if they know I havewhat they want. It makes sense to have them come to more than one business when they get here.”

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