July 26, 2007 | Read Time: 8 minutes
When it comes to marketing, nonprofit groups should not simply try to raise awareness or reach small segments of their intended audience, but rather focus on spurring collective action, a brand and marketing expert said at an American Marketing Association meeting here this month. To do that, charity marketers need to work closely with people running the charitable programs of their organizations, he said.
Bill Toliver, a Seattle consultant, said nonprofit officials should use marketing techniques to create social 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 companies use to promote their brands, the goals are very different.
“We owe our past and our future to those who understood the power of movements,” he said.
Another speaker, William A. Smith, executive vice president of the Academy for Educational Development, in Washington, said too many charity marketers are not in close communication with the people who carry out the mission of their organizations. This disconnect, he said, is problematic, because the message is only a part of social marketing.
Mr. Smith pointed to several successful social campaigns that significantly changed popular behavior and led to public-policy changes, such as “click it or ticket,” the seat-belt enforcement program, as well as antismoking campaigns and movements to get parents to use car seats for young children.
Opinion polls and statistics showed that public behavior in each of those areas changed significantly after many nonprofit groups rallied around a common message that required people to take a specific action — and when law-enforcement officers stepped up their efforts to check that people were taking those safety measures, he said.
The least successful campaigns, according to Mr. Smith, are those that provide only a message but no specific action to take, such as the “Just Say No” antidrug message, which emphasizes what not to do but offer no concrete alternative.
The key to engaging people in causes, Mr. Toliver told conference participants, is to appeal not 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 appealed to people’s concern that animals would be euthanized.
When the group, he said, shifted its focus away from marketing that played on guilt about animal deaths and toward the value of animal companionship, it achieved 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 are 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 more than 400 charity representatives.
Competition between groups that represent the same or similar causes, he said, 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 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.”
Charities attempting to use social and other networks on the Internet 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 at Heifer International, in Little Rock, Ark.
Last year the charity 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 perform the song for the first time at a Carnegie Hall concert.
In the end, the venture made approximately $150,000, according to Mr. Patterson, who admits that that is not a lot of money for the charity. However, he said, the organization got considerable publicity for the effort.
AARP also used a music video as part of its appeal to baby boomers who are about to retire, said Julie Witsken, a senior manager at 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, an effort that evolved after two women who write knitting blogs raised $64,000 for the charity without any effort on the part of Heifer.
The charity saw a natural connection with knitters since they often use wool in their work, much like the farmers and entrepreneurs in develping countries who benefit from the animals Heifer provides.
The charity used its database of 300,000 e-mail addresses to send a 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 asked bloggers to 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 at the One Campaign, a Washington charity that tries to reduce 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, and Facebook will require organizations to move away from traditional efforts to promote a group’s name and toward crafting an organizational identity.
He says that charities like his, which seek to appeal to young people, must keep in mind that many potential supporters tend to be media savvy and cynical about organizations and their images.
The group has encouraged supporters to post thousands of pictures on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site, showing people at One events or displaying the One logo in creative ways.
The One Campaign also has had success using photo-sharing technology to create a Web page called “Who is One,” on which supporters can upload their photographs to the charity’s Web page to create a kind of collage of faces.
Mr. Peck says these photos have been a low-cost and powerful resource for the organization’s public-relations department, and the popularity of the page has garnered significant news coverage.
The charity has also had success on MySpace, through an effort that was started 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, 25,000 “friends” were already 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.
People who work in advocacy need to be effective at recruiting volunteers, and those recruited need to have something to do, said Richard Fawal, a grass-roots campaign specialist at OnPoint Advocacy, a consulting group in Alexandria, Va., that helps organizations run advocacy campaigns.
Mr. Fawal said it is as important to give a supporter a task as it is to ask him or her 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 Web 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.
Overreliance on technology to mobilize supporters is a hazard, warned Holly Pitt Young, of Democracy Data and Communication, a political consulting firm also in Alexandria.
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.
