Welcome to my personal blog on Robin Hood Marketing—the concept of stealing corporate savvy to sell just causes—and my life as a marketer, from Washington DC to Madagascar to points in between.
Four parts of a great fundraising appeal (or any message!)
Posted by katya on Tue, November 21, 2006
There are four components to a great message - connecting with an audience based on their values (C), rewarding (R) your audience, asking for a specific action to get that reward, and making it memorable. Remember this with the mnemonic device, CRAM! This works for fundraising letters but also for any marketing message. We need a different message for each audience, complete with a unique connection, reward, action, and memory. Don’t be tempted to avoid the work of creating messages for individual audiences by generating one big message with a little CRAM for everyone.
Steps to CRAM:
1. Connect to things your audience cares about: saving time, feeling good about themselves, feeling powerful, etc.
2. Identify and offer a compelling reward for taking action. Remember, good rewards are immediate, personal, credible and reflective of audience values.
3. Have a clear call to action. Good actions are specific, feasible and filmable (in other words, easy to visualize doing). They should also measurably advance our mission.
4. Make it memorable. We don’t want simply to make an impression; we want to make a lasting impression. What makes something memorable? It’s memorable if it’s different, catchy, personal, tangible and desirable. But a word of caution: memorable elements should always be closely tied to our cause. Think of all the advertisements that were so funny or memorable that we told a friend about them, but when asked what product the ad was for, we were not sure. We don’t just need a memorable idea or picture; we need an idea or picture that makes our cause memorable.
Remember the “A” message in yesterday’s review of fundraising letters?
“Dear Friends, Let us help make your holiday shopping the best experience ever by choosing the gift that keeps on giving! Celebrate the holiday season by giving hope, mobility and freedom to someone who has none. You will change the life of a child, teen or adult with a physical disability, as well as the lives of every member of their family, with a $75 gift to the Wheelchair Foundation to sponsor a brand new wheelchair.”
Nice CRAMing because:
1. Connection to my desire to making holiday shopping and giving feel good
2. Rewards: Feeling good about myself right now by helping someone have a better life
3. Action: Give $75 and get a wheelchair for someone
4. Memorable? The letter came with a four-color flier with a smiling, happy photo of a girl in a wheelchair
Since it’s holiday appeals time, I’m posting about fundraising letters - and later, this week, emails. Today I’ll analyze the opening lines of three letters, graded by their strength.
Remember, an A+ letter grabs you from the first line by speaking to your values and presenting you with a compelling reason to act that is relevant to those values. It feels personal. An F letter is boring and has nothing to do with your values or much of anything. The following grades are based only on the first few lines because if someone actually opens your envelope, they aren’t going to keep reading unless you score an A at the get-go.
“Dear Friend, anticipation is in the air. The festive mood throughout our community is almost contagious. Feasts are being planned, last minute shopping is being done, greeting cards are being addressed. Here at the Humane Society of Greater Miami/Adopt-A-Pet, the anticipation is a little different.”
Grade: D-. Why? Generic, non-engaging first sentences that have nothing to do with me and nothing to do with the cause. Lack of a reason to pay attention or act. And by the way, I am not a “Friend,” I am a person with a name.
“Dear Friends, Let us help make your holiday shopping the best experience ever by choosing the gift that keeps on giving! Celebrate the holiday season by giving hope, mobility and freedom to someone who has none. You will change the life of a child, teen or adult with a physical disability, as well as the lives of every member of their family, with a $75 gift to the Wheelchair Foundation to sponsor a brand new wheelchair.”
Grade: A-. The first line was about helping me, the second made me feel I could feel good about myself by helping others. Clear call to action. It would be a solid A if they used my name instead of “friends.”
“Dear ALDF Member, Edgar’s learned how to play with dog toys. That may not seem like a big deal, but when this elderly Boston terrier first arrived at our house, he didn’t know what a dog toy was. So I put peanut butter into some rubber toys, and as I handed one each to his new “brothers,” Shadow and Koby, Edgar’s eyes grew very wide, and I could see he understood this was something really, really good!”
Grade: C- The first line is interesting and the second is personal, which is not bad. But it took to the eight paragraph to learn Edgar had been abused at an awful puppy mill (which is far more serious than lacking doggie toys), and they didn’t ask for money until page four. Meanwhile, I had been gone since the peanut butter and was only reading because I wanted to blog the letter. And if I gave them money (this letter is for people who have donated before), don’t I deserve to be called something other than “Member?”
Good marketers understand the values of your audience, not your own, should shape how you communicate. So I want to call your attention to someone who is letting their audience shape their creative work, turning their web redesign into a conversation with constituents. American Rivers is truly moving audience feedback upstream as the organization rethinks americanrivers.org, nationalrivercleanup.org, and healthyrivers.org.
First, check out their blog, which shows just how transparent and collaborative their redesign is. Also take a look at their Flickr contest, where they are asking river-lovers to upload their own photos.
My Network for Good colleague Stacie Mann who knows the clever guy behind this work and the blog, Chas Offutt, and asked him how goes the marketing conversation that he’s started. Here are his responses:
1) Was there any pushback within organization about being so transparent?
Nothing to date, but I’m not exactly sure how many people are aware of the blog. I’ve been rolling it out on an individual basis to generate feedback, greater review before I make a larger outward push. These small steps have worked out well as I’ve made a quite a few changes over the first 5 weeks that have greatly impacted the direction of my efforts. I’ve gotten some excellent feedback from co-workers, friends, and counterparts within the online advocacy community.
2) What results are you seeing with blogging?
Well, I’m seeing growth in traffic, comments, and general participation (Crazy Egg’s heat map is pretty cool, which btw that idea came from a visitor). And, internally, I’m getting a lot of support from folks who appreciate being involved in the process. Last month, I held a Web 2.0 Introduction that went over really well. It would be great to have del.icio.us, Flickr, and RSS on our site, but what good would it be if the staff had no idea what it means and more importantly, how it can benefit their work. I feel the blog, as well as my work within the organization, should contain an education (i.e. testing) component - hence some of the blog bling. The success of our efforts online will not be because of me or my team, but the organization as a whole.
3) What kinds of things surprised you? Good or bad…
Aside from folks actually reading it, I’ve been a little surprised with the number of paths that I’ve been able to pursue as a result of this online dialogue - I seem to be referred to some cool new thing everyday (e.g. Vizu from Katya). I know I’m not the first to experience these online changes and one reason I wanted to do start this blog was to learn more about what’s happening in my field and reach out to those who have gone, going, or thinking about going through a website redesign. Down the road, I’d love to see everyone in the organization blogging (but not like PhilTube) about their work - that would be awesome.
As for me, (Katya) I think this work is awesome - kudos to American Rivers for taking this plunge into new territory.
Getting Attention blog by way of Guy Kawasaki reminds us of the power of pictures. So good timing: TechSoup offers this incredibly long, great list of places you can get FREE visuals to use when marketing your cause.
Network for Good did a study (get it for free here with 10-second registration) that found:
Online givers are young (38-39 years old) and generous, giving several times more than offline donors on average.
Men and women give online in equal numbers.
Virtually all of online givers (96%) have given to charity before, but a sizable proportion (38%) is new to online philanthropy.
Online giving is tracking to the trends of online shopping and banking, and it is the avenue of choice for donors during disasters.
Most people give online during the week, during business hours – most commonly, between 10am and noon.
New York is the most generous state for online giving; Mississippi and North Dakota are the least generous.
Giving online follows the same “long tail” phenomenon seen in online sales of books and music.
Most online giving goes to disaster agencies, followed by animal-related causes.
Top searches are disaster related, plus “children,” “cancer,” and “homeless.”
Small organizations benefit from listings on aggregation sites; at network for good, half of dollars go to small-medium sized charities.
People say they give online because it’s easier than writing a check and a fast way to respond to disasters.
The highly recommended Blue Sky Collaborative blog posted the following interesting, provocative and funny comment on our research, and it’s worth sharing:
The growth of online giving is in fact not a surprise at all. Neither is the fact that online giving follows the same trends as online banking. Here we see the 10 year rule in effect. Results from a 1996 Booz Allen Hamilton Internet Banking survey showed the average cost of different types of bank transactions:
10 years later, which is about the lag-time for the nonprofit sector to adopt technology and innovation, NFG gives us data on average costs per type of donation.
Online Donation: $.05
Telephone Donation: $.63
Direct mail solicitation: $1.25
The 10 year gestation period for technology to enter the nonprofits sector may in fact be an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Think about it. If you’re at a startup in mobile technology or internet TV, or some other hot market right now and things don’t work out, YOU DON’T HAVE THROW EVERYTHING AWAY! Just zip it up and launch it again in 2016 targetting nonprofits. Coming in 2017 - Nano for Nonprofits, Mobile Donations, Nonprofit Robots that can fill out 990’s while shaking down major donors.
People aren’t signing up or giving money? Maybe your call to action isn’t prominent enough. Or maybe it’s not crystal clear. Or maybe you’re not asking for the right thing. Put your materials, web site or appeals in front of you and ask yourself:
1.) Specific: Ask for one concrete action. Telling people to click on a button to donate now is better than asking them to participate in a fundraising campaign. Asking parents to read to their children for 15 minutes every night is better than asking them to support reading readiness. Specific actions are easier to do – and harder to decline.
2.) Feasible: For most people, if the action doesn’t seem doable, they won’t do it. “Save the earth” does not sound like something any one person can do easily. Make the step you’re requesting small and easy, such as “put your plastic in your curbside recycling bin on Tuesdays”. You can build up to bigger requests once you have initial momentum of compliance.
3.) Filmable: A good test of whether your call to action is simple and specific enough is to ask if it would be possible to film the audience taking the action you desire. If you don’t have a simple visual, your audience won’t. I can’t picture myself as being against a legislative bill, but I can see myself writing to a member of Congress via an email form.
4.) First Priority: Make sure what you’re asking for is an action that, if people did it, would significantly and immediately advance your marketing goals and your mission. If your call to action will only “raise awareness,” take it one step further. We want people to DO something that will truly make a difference for your organization. Are you asking for the right thing? The Truth Campaign got teens to quit smoking by asking them to rebel and act out more than asking them not to smoke. Here’s an interesting guerrilla marketing campaign launched by YouthAIDS today that asks people to put “kick me” signs on each other. Check it out - it’s an unusual call to action and an intriguing application of these principles. Tell me what you think. Will it work?
Below is the first in an occasional series of guest-star blogs from smart people with something interesting to say. Beth is very clued in to all things technology and oft-cited on this blog. And we share a Cambodia connection - I worked for Reuters there from 1996-98. Here’s your chance to hear from her and give your opinion.
Photo: thanks to Flickr’s NCDD, a glimpse of the always-wired Beth Kanter.
I’m Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog and I’m honored and delighted for the opportunity to be a guest blogger on Katya’s awesome nonprofit marketing blog. I’ve worked as a nonprofit technology since 1993, mostly as a trainer, evaluator, and researcher and most recently as a blogger. My bio is here.
I’d like to share my widget fundraising experiment with you and get your advice on how to do this better. So, think of me as one of your organization’s supporters who has grabbed your organization’s widget and set it up on my blog. What advice would you give to your supporters so they are successful in a group fundraising campaign. What do I need to think about? What is the checklist? What should I try doing? What internal issues does this bring up for you? We had an interesting discussion at our board meeting about all this and I’ll share that shortly ...
What a deal! I’ll make all the mistakes, potentially look stupid, and we’ll reap the benefits of learning together!
Some Context
One comment that Katya made about fundraising widgets that struck in mind is that it is about the messenger, not the organization. So, let tell you why our family is passionate about supporting Leng Soparath, a young Cambodian woman, for her college education.
I’m the parent two wonderful children, Harry and Sara, who were adopted as orphans from Cambodia. My children have food everyday, clothing, go to school, have toys (probably too many), and many other necessities of life that we often take for granted. When we were in Cambodia, many Cambodian people came up to us and said “Your child is lucky!” We would reply, now we’re lucky parents. But in some respects, they were right. The infant mortality rate in Cambodia is very high, so my children are lucky to be alive.
When we adopted our beautiful children, we also adopted their birth country. We have embraced Khmer culture and we also feel a responsibility to give something back to the country, particularly to seriously disadvantaged children in Cambodia. Soon after coming home with our first child nearly seven years ago, I volunteered for the Sharing Foundation, an ngo that works directly with local officials, orphanages, and NGOs in Cambodia to identify and carry out projects which improve the lives of children. I now serve on the board.
There’s lots of could tell you about TSF and I encourage you to visit the web site so you can get an sense of the scope of the good work this organization does. One of its focus areas is education. Over 1,300 children in Cambodia receive educational support every day as a result of The Sharing Foundation initiatives. The Foundation has increasingly focused its efforts on ways to create and improve educational opportunities for Cambodian children of all ages, including public school projects, pre-school, Khmer literacy, English language instruction, high school and college sponsorships, and vocational training. These projects present what might be the only means for the most disadvantaged children to life themselves, as well as their families, out of poverty conditions, become self-reliant and lead more productive, hopeful lives.
The Foundation is now its second year of college sponsorships. Last year, our family stepped forward to sponsor Leng Soparath, an orphan from Kampong Speu orphanage. For a gift of $750 annually, TSF is able to cover her college fees and living expenses. (It is a stretch for us ... we’re not rich but this could make such a difference in the life of one young person) In addition to money, we provide emotional support and encouragement through regular letters and photographs that we exchange. Our letters are hand-carried to Cambodia by Sharing Foundation’s 76-year old founder, Dr. Nancy Hendrie. Watch the video for more information.
I’ve also documented our correspondence with Leng Sopharath in flickr (here, here, here, and here).
While TSF has paid staff, Cambodians, in Cambodia to manage all its programs, the work done in the US (primarily fundraising) is all volunteer-driven. Almost of the money raised comes from grassroots efforts and primarily done offline as well as some web fundraising. (See these wonderful examples.) So, when I saw the fundraising widget, it looked like a natural extension of the type of grassroots fundraising that we’ve been doing offline. And I might add that our family has made a commitment to sponsor Leng Soparath through graduation and we ask our friends, family, and colleagues to help us. Even my kids contribute money from their piggy banks and direct birthday money to the effort.
Now what? What are the ten things I need to do have in place to make this a success? Post your response as a comment or send me a track back. I’ll summarize the advice and share it back both here and at my blog.
As they say in Cambodia, ARKOON, which in Khmer means thanks.
PS If you want to read how important education is Leng Sopharath, read this letter from her.
Our esteemed colleague Nancy at Getting Attention has a terrific nonprofit marketing carnival today with everything you ever wanted to know about social networking. (A carnival just means a bunch of bloggers writing on a theme.) She says:
This traveling Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants brings you the best blog postings on nonprofit issues. For this week’s event, I asked bloggers to advise on how already over-taxed nonprofit communicators can handle the ever-expanding menu of communications channels, especially social networking tools, and what social media have the greatest potential for nonprofits.
My post of last week is featured, along with work by bloggers smarter than I am on the topic! Highly recommended reading.
I got some heated reaction to my last YouTube post, so I am ready for some more! Reader of this blog, Kelley has shared her new spot for 18-34-year-old YouTube viewers to encourage recycling. I really like it, because it’s entertaining (and you gotta be on YouTube). And it provides a reward for taking action. That’s my mantra - you have to give people an immediate, relevant, personal reward for taking the action you ask. This spot tells us we get the benefit of not looking like a lazy fool. I think it works—do you?
UPDATE 11/14
Wise Scott of Catalyst has such a good comment I’m elevating it to a PS to my post:
If a Great Environmental Ad Plays in the Forest and No One is There to Hear It.... Does it Really Matter?
This is a great ad - but like many non-profits if there is no marketing strategy you have wasted valuable time and resources.
While YouTube may seem like a phenomenon - it is not! People that have networking skills and list building skills thrive. And those that do not… do not!
I cannot emphasize this enough. Simply putting out an ad on YouTube does not drive traffic to the ad. Organizations need to drive traffic to the ad themselves… and people need to start forwarding the link to their friends in order to generate buzz.
I know this seems like obvious stuff… but shockingly few organizations spend money in marketing these campaigns or generating buzz about their new ad.
Organizations need to do more to get young voters engaged in their cause than simply put up an ad on YouTube.
I recently confessed on this blog that I had to throw out the first half of my book because it wasn’t very good and start over mid-way through my writing process. Here’s an analogy from the cutting room floor that I did like: a map of Sherwood Forest as the map for reaching our audiences. In the middle of it is the marketing territory we sometimes want to avoid but all must pass through.
If we are working for a good cause, Sherwood Forest is located on our mental map between somewhere between our mission statements or strategic plans and our outreach efforts. Most organizations or activists have mission statements and even strategic plans. These are the ideas and documents that tell us why we are in business and what we want to accomplish. Picture this as the west side of a map that shows how to reach our audiences.
At the other end of our mental map, to the east, is an outreach or communications plan. Most organizations have at least an informal version of this plan. It tells us how to get our message out – for example, press conferences, canvassing, printed matter and public service announcements.
Now visualize the empty space on our line between our strategic plan and our communications plan. This is the uncharted, dense, dark wood we’re calling Sherwood Forest. It is tempting to circumnavigate it, because it seems so much easier to bypass the wood and take our mission directly to the people.
We all like to figure out what we’re trying to accomplish and then go straight to promoting it. This is skipping the crucial path through the forest. It’s assuming that being right is the same thing as being convincing, and therefore giving people information will get them to take action. We start by saying “we need a brochure” rather than asking, “who are we trying to reach and what do they want?” Many marketing efforts stumble because information alone does not change hearts or minds.
We need to backtrack and determine how to translate, position and compellingly package our agenda for our audience before we start promoting. Taking time to do this ensures that when people hear our public service announcement or read our brochure, they will take action. Sherwood Forest is where we go from mission orientation to market orientation. It’s where our advocacy efforts either come together and gain power or fall apart, lost somewhere in the undergrowth.
OK, so it’s a little overblown. That’s why it did not end up in the book. But I revive it here to say, before we go east and decide how to communicate, we should make the journey into our audience’s world and figure out what they think, what they do and where they are. Then and only then can we figure out how to express our Western orientation - our mission - in terms that will travel well.
Wow I’m stuck on the travel analogy this week too. Maybe I need a vacation?
I’ve lived in several foreign countries, and each time the first weeks were an unnervingly rush of the unfamiliar. The parade of shuffling, singing men and women celebrating a newly circumcised boy in Madagascar or the electric shades of hair sported by pointy-booted Ukrainian beauties or the geckos swarming on my office walls in Cambodia were thoroughly strange, and they made me feel thoroughly a stranger. With each country, I worked harder and faster to become less of an outsider, to understand, and to fit in. I was weary of children, men, and old women pointing—endlessly pointing—and shrieking, “foreigner!” in their language. Wherever I was, it was inevitably the second word I learned, soon after “hello.”
One minute into my five-minute guide, I’d better make my point: to most of us (including me), social networking—using the web’s latest and greatest ways of connecting to people—feels akin to being a stranger in a strange land. People have their own customs online, they act differently, and it can be hard to find your way around. It seems so foreign and intimidating. At least it did to me, until I figured out I should simply apply the same skills of assimilation I’d apply anywhere else outside my experience.
So here is my survival guide to social networking, for those of us who feel out of place in this new world. All of these points lead to one conclusion, by the way: you will succeed if you seek to be a part of the culture. It’s less about the tools and more about how you use them to make strong connections with the people out there.
1.) Pack light
Don’t load yourself up with everything you own—ie, your mission statement, PSAs, brochures, etc. and think they’re going to travel well. Social networking is about reaching out to people on their terms, not “re-purposing” your marketing materials. That means unless your material for other outlets is really cool and loaded with celebs, it’s not going to look good on a place like YouTube. You have to think about audience and culture before you pack your bag.
2.) Observe before you act
Before my first day of work at Network for Good, my older daughter, who’s been to five schools in seven years, said, “Mom, don’t be nervous. Just watch what everyone else does and act like they do! You won’t be nervous anymore!” Exactly. Go spend a lot of time watching. It’s easy - watch YouTube. Read MySpace. It’s about the audience, not us, and it’s not the channel that matters so much as who is on it. Focus on the people, and where you feel a fit.
3.) Find the local hang-outs
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: go to where people predisposed to be your friends hang out. Get out of the house and hotel room! This blog is full of tips like going to Technorati to search which of the 57 million bloggers are talking about your issue. Find the Meetup groups talking about your issue. Don’t build a blog, create yet ANOTHER “MySpace for (fill in the blank with your issue),” or do anything until you’ve gone out and met the people already doing that. Why create something when you could co-opt someone who already has a constituency online? Get out there and befriend these folks, because…
4.) Don’t sit back and wait for visitors
...they aren’t going to come to your site like the welcome wagon. You have to help them find you. And you have to let them help you where they are, on their blog or wherever they live online.
5.) Don’t pick only one friend
I had a rule in foreign countries - for the first three months, I didn’t turn down any invitations, ever, even from people I wasn’t sure I liked. I met a surprising range a friends by being open-minded and not relying on one person to be my best buddy. The online corollary is that you SHOULD NOT rely on one “thing” to be the gateway to your social networking. Don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket. Who knows what will be hot in six months? No one! That’s why it’s so key to focus on people who care about your issue and follow them online, rather than worrying about the merits of the site they happen to be on today. Hedge your bets. Why not give people ways to support you on ANY blog or social networking site with a badge like you can get via Word of Blog? Or the incredibly compelling build-it-yourself badge Network for Good is launching at the end of this month? (Stay tuned!)
This is so funny, I can’t stop watching it. The Huffington Post loved it too.
Check out more at PhilTube. After immediately asking me on the phone today if I was blogging, Phil later let on that ”Hart + Larsson are the agency creative minds behind this PhilTube campaign and its brilliant execution.” That would be Phil himself.
I think that like most great things that go viral, it cleverly captures a latent but widespread phenomenon just waiting to be creatively expressed. In this case, it satirizes what’s popular, what’s contrived on YouTube and the general foaming-at-the-mouth for all things web 2.0—in a really original way. At least that’s what it means to me. And it’s funny.
By contrast, last night, I spent a good 60 minutes on YouTube looking at nonprofit videos, and it was like watching public access TV. Most were at least six minutes long and about as fresh as a canned PSA from the 1960s. They looked so tragically unhip amid Borat and shrimp on a treadmill. Most had been viewed by about 12 people—about the number of staff at the nonprofits in question.
I found only two I liked - one that wasn’t in English and this one:
I like it because it follows some basic rules of the YouTube world:
1.) Be authentic
2.) Be homemade
3.) Be original
4.) Let someone else have the camera—a supporter, a beneficiary, whatever
5.) Give up control—let that someone else say what they want
6.) Give people a reason to watch and something easy to do
In honor of election day, I’m going to run a poll here. Tomorrow, I’ll report on what percentage of visitors took the poll. (ANSWER: only about 8%) If you want to put a poll on your web site or blog, it’s fun and easy via Vizu. Thanks to blogger Beth Kanter for the tip. What did she find in her poll on widgets? People like these things!
I happen to like them because they do three things:
1.) They give your audience a way to talk to you
2.) They give you a way to listen to your audience
3.) When they talk and you listen, you get market research. That means when you talk, you’ll be speaking in the audience’s terms, and that’s good marketing.
At Network for Good, the charitable giving portal where I work, we recently undertook a study of $100 million in online giving to 23,000 charities. We found all kinds of cool things available here, but one of the most intriguing was that we were a long tail. As we said in our research:
The “long tail” phenomenon – a term devised by Wired Editor Chris Anderson to describe how the Internet creates and serves long-tailed distribution markets – is evident at Network for Good when numbers of donations are charted by organization. At Network for Good, 50% the donations go to 1% of charities (excluding crisis giving). The rest is spread out along the long tail. Just as Amazon and Google have enabled consumers to access products and information that meets their particular needs and interests by providing one-stop access to many, diverse choices, Network for Good has enabled donors to contribute to many, diverse nonprofits by putting a fragmented nonprofit “market” in one place.
In other words, there are supporters for every cause, no matter how small.
That’s great for Network for Good, but if you’re on the long tail, how else can you reach people than just waiting for them to find you on Network for Good? Here’s some good advice. In addition, try going to Meetup and type in your zip and focus. You’ll find people meeting in your area to talk about your issue. They are already hanging out on the long tail of Meetup, waiting to meet your organization, which also sits on the long tail.
Too bad we’re SO SLOW to do this in our sector (hence the “long snail,” the title of Network for Good CEO Bill Strathmann’s recent talk on the topic). Hurry and work your tail right now. It’s never been easier to find the people out there in the fragmented but limitless online “marketplace.”
We all know it when we hear it—the sound of the genuine. We hear it less and less these days, because marketing, politics and interpersonal communication often lacks honesty and authenticity. Stephen Colbert captured the erosion of genuine with the word “truthiness.” Here’s what he says in a new Rolling Stone interview by Maureen Dowd:
“I’m not a fan of facts,’’ he boasts. “Facts can change all the time, but my opinion will never change.” Truthiness, a word he made up just before going on air, has been hailed by New York magazine as “the summarizing concept of our age.”
Yep, it’s house of mirrors out there. I only feel worse after spending an afternoon at SeaWorld with my children. A lovely day and a great park, really, until we saw the Shamu show, which was themed “believe” with 20 minutes of video and speeches by the trainers filled with vapid platitudes about believing in anything/everything and an Anheuser-Busch salute to troops which had way too much beer logo to be authentic. My seven-year-old saw right through it in five minutes. She actually was laughing by the end. I could hardly glimpse Shamu amid all the truthiness.
Fortunately, I spent the morning here in Orlando leading a session at the Multiple Sclerosis Society national meeting and the honest, transparent and effective marketers there made me so inspired that even the saccharine-coated insincerity at the Shamu show couldn’t undo my faith in authenticity.
This is one place where we can and should claim our superiority as marketers: being genuine about our genuinely good causes.
I will leave my last thoughts on the topic to Diva Marketer Toby Bloomberg, who hit the nail on the head with her blog post this week:
Authenticity is difficult to mask… Meeting-up offline is one more reason for bloggers to stay true to the Blog Mantra of Honesty, Transparency, Authenticity and of course Passion. Honesty, Transparency, Authenticity are the building blocks of establishing trust. Sure is difficult to do business without it - online or off.
Posted by katya on Tue, November 21, 2006
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