July 13, 2007 | Read Time: 9 minutes
Raising awareness of an issue is not enough by itself to build support for a cause, but many nonprofit groups and corporations mistakenly take that approach, a brand and marketing expert said at an American Marketing Association meeting this week in Washington D.C.
Bill Toliver, managing director of the Matale Line, in Seattle, explained how he believes nonprofit marketing can be used to create movements. “Your job is not to get people to act,” he said. “It is to get them to commit.”
He said that while nonprofit groups should use the tactics of brand building, marketing strategy, advertising, and public relations, the intention for charities should be different than for companies.
Nonprofit groups should not be focused on simple awareness or marketing to small segments of its intended audience, Mr. Toliver said, but rather focus on spurring collective community action.
“We owe our past and our future to those who understood the power of movements,” he said.
Another presenter, William A. Smith, an executive with the Academy for Educational Development, in Washington, D.C., agreed with the need for what he termed “social marketing.”
He said too many charity marketers are not in close communication with program decision makers in their organizations. He said this disconnect is problematic because the message is only a part of social marketing.
He pointed to several successful social campaigns that significantly changed popular behavior by combining messages with programs and advocacy for policy change, such as “click it or ticket,” the seat-belt enforcement program, as well as anti-smoking campaigns, and movements to get parents to use car seats for young children.
The least successful campaigns, according to Mr. Smith, are those that provide only a message and no program, such as the “Just Say No” anti-drug message.
The key to engaging people in causes, Mr. Toliver told conference participants, is not to appeal to the public’s “basest instincts and knee-jerk emotions” but rather to people’s morality.
He spoke about his work with Seattle’s Humane Society, which he said had historically used communication tactics that play on people’s fear of animals being euthanized. When the group changed its focus away from guilt-driven marketing and focused on people’s love of animals and the value of that companionship, he said the organization saw a 50 percent increase in donations.
“The American people are not stupid or indifferent,” he said, “They’ve just learned hopelessness.”
When asked how a charity can build a movement when there so many nonprofit groups competing for people’s time and attention, Mr. Toliver said the questioner had pointed out the “elephant” in the room of the more than 400 charity representatives.
Competition between groups that represent the same or similar causes, he says, has led to what he called “charity-on-charity violence.”
Mr. Toliver described the environmental movement as a good example of “stealing defeat from the jaws of victory” because so many groups are out promoting their own messages.
The answer, he said, is for organizations to start looking for ways to work in concert to promote collective goals and therefore achieve real social change.
“We are here for bigger reasons,” he said. “We should be able to get together around a table and collaborate to make a movement.”
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Charities attempting to use Internet social and other networks as part of their marketing strategies say such efforts are still a matter of trial and error.
“It is about listening to your community and not worrying that it will work perfectly,” said David Patterson, director of new media efforts with Heifer International, in Little Rock, Ark.
Last year Heifer tried two new forms of Internet marketing. Its most successful attempt was a video project that appeared on YouTube, a video-sharing Internet site.
Dan Zanes, a children’s musician, wrote a song entitled “Holiday Time in Brooklyn” and made a low-budget music video in which he did a pitch for Heifer. The charity, through its Web site and e-mail lists that it purchased, attempted to reach potential fans of Mr. Zanes to direct them to the video on YouTube. The group also benefited from a scheduling coincidence that allowed Mr. Zanes to debut the song at a pre-scheduled Carnegie Hall concert.
In the end, the venture made approximately $150,000, according to Mr. Patterson who admits this is not a lot of money for the charity. However, he said, the organization got considerably more out of the video than it paid for it. “It gave us great buzz and gave our PR department something to work with,” he said.
AARP also used a music video as part of its marketing plan to baby boomers entering retirement, said Julie Witsken, a senior manager with the membership organization.
In the end, the project wasn’t all that successful for AARP. The group was hoping the video would get passed along by viewers to their friends — a phenomenon sometimes referred to as viral marketing — but that didn’t happen, and the information the organization had hoped to collect from viewers was much less than expected.
Heifer’s other online marketing venture involved trying to reach people who knit and are readers of knitting blog sites. Mentions on blogs written by two women who support the charity’s work raised $64,000, without any effort on the part of Heifer. This led Mr. Patterson to believe knitting and weaving bloggers might be predisposed to raise money for his group’s cause.
The charity’s database of over 300,000 was used to send an e-mail message asking supporters if they had a hobby, if they had a blog, and if they were interested in helping Heifer. A few hundred willing bloggers were identified. Each was given a widget, a small piece of computer code to add to their Web page that allowed the blog visitors to donate directly to Heifer.
In the end the charity only broke even on the project, although Mr. Patterson said it provided some valuable lessons.
First, the charity learned that having a blog doesn’t make a person technologically advanced, and for many people the widget was too confusing to install.
Second, the message Heifer had bloggers post may not have been tailored enough to stimulate activity. Mr. Patterson said the charity is not out of the “blog-raising” business yet, and it is reworking the widget and will attempt the program again.
“The Web is all about testing,” said Joshua Peck, Internet director for the One Campaign, a Washington, D.C., charity working to combat global poverty. He said that for every 20 Internet marketing ideas he tries, one works.
Mr. Peck believes marketing through online social networks like MySpace, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, and others will require organizations to move away from traditional branding efforts and toward crafting an organizational identity.
He said groups need to have a strong internal feeling for what the charity’s identity is, and not to be so concerned with brand control. Entering online social networks means individuals outside the organization will take over branding and will add their own messages to those of the groups they are supporting, he said.
Mr. Peck admitted that this is probably difficult for organizations that have spent many years building a brand, but that the One Campaign, which is only two years old, is less worried about such concerns. Because his charity appeals to a younger audience, he says, it is important for his organization to remember that young people today tend to be media savvy and brand cynical.
The One Campaign has had success using Flickr technology to create a page called “Who is One” on which supporters can upload their headshots onto the charity’s Web page to create a kind of collage of faces.
The organization has also had thousands of pictures uploaded to the photo-sharing Web site showing people at One events or displaying the One brand in creative ways.
Mr. Peck says these photos have been an amazing resource for the organization’s public-relations department, and the popularity of the page has garnered significant news coverage.
The charity has also had great success on MySpace through an effort that was initiated by a supporter. An individual named Danny set up a support page for the charity on the social networking site. By the time the organization saw the page, there were already 25,000 “friends” associated with the site.
Mr. Peck contacted the supporter to tell him what a great job he had done, and now One works with Danny to maintain the page, which currently has more than 115,000 visitors signed on as friends. The site has not only succeeded in educating a large number of people about the organization’s mission, according to Mr. Peck, but it has provided an opportunity for news organizations to cover the charity as well.
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People who work in advocacy need to be effective at recruitment, and those recruited need to have something to do, said Richard Fawal, a grassroots campaign specialist with OnPoint Advocacy, in Alexandria, Va.
Mr. Fawal said it is as important to give a supporter a task as it is to ask him for a donation — and maybe even more important before asking for money.
“You are looking for people who will act,” he said, “And then, remember to thank them when they do.”
Simple ads online that lead to a page where a supporter can take an action such as signing a petition are an extremely effective tool for advocates, he said.
Online ads are particularly good because the cost tends to be low, Mr. Fawal said, and tracking responses is very simple.
He cautioned that not everyone who clicks on an ad will follow through and take an action, but giving a potential supporter something to do will help an organization gauge how committed someone is to the cause.
Over reliance on technology to mobilize supporters is a hazard, warned Holly Pitt Young, of Democracy Data and Communication, in Alexandria, Va. She said Web sites and generic e-mail communications can be too impersonal if not paired with other forms of communication.
The toughest challenge for any advocacy group, according to Mr. Fawal, is maintaining momentum.
He said the best advocacy campaigns he had been involved with had three key elements: a clearly defined problem, a solution, and a strategy for how supporters were going to help an organization make that solution happen.
