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.
Sundance and celebrity
Posted by katya on Wed, January 24, 2007
When I left for Sundance last week, I thought I’d have time to blog about it from Park City. But we were so busy running around asking celebs to join Six Degrees and getting them to sign swag for charity, that it didn’t happen. We were very pleased by the response (nothing like celebs to get the media to pay attention). I can report that Jeremy Sisto and Heather Graham are especially stunning in person, not just outside but inside, since they were supportive of Six Degrees! If you’re a Six Feet Under fan, you’ll be happy to hear Jeremy and Lili Taylor signed the same swag bag for charity. But of course I’m the biggest fan of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick for all they’ve done to call attention to charity. Here they are signing swag bags, which we’ll be auctioning off on eBay.
We spent the week in the EW Photo Studio, where Six Degrees partner Entertainment Weekly was taking photos of the casts of many of the Sundance films. They kindly let us set up in their green room, where we met with the celebs and talked about Six Degrees while they were waiting to get photographed. Tons of people were outside the studio hoping to get a glimpse of the action, and every time my colleagues and I stepped out on the balcony to check out the scene on the street, you could hear the collective sign of disappointment that we were not famous or glimpse-worthy. Clearly they weren’t Robin Hood Marketing fans. Here are the photogs mobbing the lovely Famke Janssen, (white beret) who signed a Six Degrees swag bag for us.
I also met P Diddy, who patiently agreed to my request to sign a bag for charity at the EW party. (That’s Kevin Bacon’s back.) When Diddy walked down Main Street earlier that day, he had a massive pack of fans and cameras tracking his every move.
All the celebs we approached were willing to sign bags—just goes to show you they’re just like us. If you make something easy and it has a reward, people will usually take action.
I find it interesting to have had this celeb-extravaganza experience the same day research came out showing celebrities don’t much influence giving, but that the word of friends and family makes a big difference. Our hope is the site will draw people because of the novelty of the celeb involvement, but that what will engage them is a chance to be a celebrity for their own cause, in their own circles, by asking people to support their own favorite charities. We’ll see - so far we have good traffic and donations steadily ticking up.
I invite comments and reactions from the smart folks out there. It’s all a work in progress and feedback is a good thing.
I’ve been remiss in blogging because at Network for Good, we’ve been working around the clock to launch SixDegrees.org with Kevin Bacon. It went live today, and USA Today covered the story.
The goal is to allow anyone to be a celebrity for their charity. As Kevin puts it,
“SixDegrees.org is about using the idea that we are all connected to accomplish something good. It is my hope that Six Degrees will soon be something more than a game or a gimmick. It will also be a force for good, by bringing a social conscience to social networking.”
Six Degrees harnesses two important online trends: the exponential growth of social networks and the increasing interest in using the web for raising money for charity among family and friends, which I’m always blogging about here. It also seeks to reward people for evangelizing for their cause by literally making them celebrities—putting their pictures and stories online next to the likes of Will Ferrell, Robert Duvall, Kyra Sedgwick, Jessica Simpson, Tyra Banks, and so on.
Check it out, and please post your own cause! And share your thoughts - is it better than floam?
Young kids who watch Nick Jr. loooove floam. My youngest screams “buy it!” whenever she sees the ad, which loudly features the 800 number for ordering via credit card - though you must be 18 years old to place the call, the advertisers caution. That only adds to the cache of floam, of course. My boss Bill’s daughter said to her babysitter, who had just turned 18, “You’re 18?! You’re so lucky! You can buy floam!” The ads start in black and white, showing a bored kid, who then acts shot through with adrenaline when floam comes into the picture and makes the world four-color, fun and fabulous. It’s shallow, it’s tacky, but it sure works for the audience.
I look at floam everyday because my daughter made a frame of floam just for me at a friend’s house, and it sits on my office desk. Floam, while energizing to her, sometimes makes me feel tired as a marketer. There’s just so much floam for grown-ups out there—so many well-funded, loud, tantalizing ad campaigns everywhere. In a world of floam, what’s an underfunded nonprofit to do?
Plenty, of course. Cut through floam with substance. Compete with completely unusual channels of communication. Connect to core audience values.
This week, I’m going to highlight some winners in a world of floam. For today, check out www.kiva.org. Great substance, incredible immediacy, personal connection.
I must use this phrase every other day—“the cobber’s children have no shoes.” I’m talking about myself. While I consider myself quite adept at doling out advice, I’m not always as talented at distancing myself from the daily grind enough to apply all that strategic counsel to my own work. I also spend a lot of time mumbling about how I am down in the weeds of my work. That’s one reason why I love blogging, reading blogs and doing workshops. I always learn something by being forced to step out of the weeds.
In that spirit, here are three big, out-of-the-weeds thoughts from other bloggers that are worth your time:
1.) You can be stickier, say Chip & Dan Heath and Guy Kawasaki (I will be reviewing this book - a review copy was sent to me - on this blog soon!)
2.) Your brand can be bigger. Donor Power blog asks, is it a) packaging or b) a movement? The right answer is …
3.) You can break the cliches. (Thanks for the link to the great blog, LifeHacker.) I guess this means I should stop saying things like “out of the weeds.” The cobbler’s children, indeed.
Relatedly, fellow blogger Nancy Schwartz has asked me to ask you to take her survey on your strategic concerns for the coming year. You might want want to take a few minutes to do it, because the questions are another out-of-the-weeds exercise. She promises to share the results so we can get some new ideas for the New Year.
Social proof is the powerful idea that if we think everyone else is acting in a certain way, we’re likely to act that way, too. People are conformists by nature, and we take cues about how to think and what to do from those around us. Social norms fuel entire industries. Would the fashion world be able to motivate us to buy a narrower tie or a longer skirt this year if we didn’t care what people think?
At Network for Good, we’ve tried using the principle of social norms to increase donations through our web site. We state that more than 325,000 people have given more than $112 million through our web site to show new users just how popular we are. In December 2006, when our traffic increases, we feature a real-time ticker of total donations so people can see just how many other people are taking action. In December 2006 and 2005, we partnered with Yahoo! on a “cybergiving week” to promote the idea that just as retail sales has black Friday, charities have “cybergiving week” – that end-of-year spike in online giving. The psychological subtext? Everyone’s doing it so you, should too! Fundraising thermometers and also send the message, “Other people are doing it, and you are part of something larger.”
Here are some ways you can generate social proof:
• Once you get some critical mass going, use fundraising tickers. Show how many people are giving, in real time.
• Count your community: Show how many people have taken action to create a sense of a growing community of like-minded people.
• Use testimonials: Quotes from people talking about why they support you are powerful. Other people are often your best messengers.
• In calls to action, choose wording that demonstrates that others are already participating, e.g. “join millions of other generous Americans” or “hundreds of other concerned members in your community”
My favorite economist recently told me a story about ordering furniture from Crate & Barrel. He had spent thousands of dollars on a sofa, armchair and ottoman, and he wanted to phone in to the store some additional, non living-room chairs to his order to save on shipping costs (Crate & Barrel charges one, flat delivery fee). It was a complete nightmare because the housewares department (home to the new chairs) had trouble interacting with the furniture department to consolidate the order. At least half a dozen phone calls were required as Crate & Barrel, which is apparently more siloed than an agribusiness empire, tried to internally interact sufficiently to accept money from a customer for a cross-departmental order.
Last night, the economist received a call from the housewares manager saying her chairs were ready to ship but was clueless about the other items. Her answer to complaints about the continuing lack of coordination made me nearly fall out of my (non Crate & Barrel) chair.
She said the departments were separate, and that she’d have to call back to find out the status of the other items. The economist said this was an irrational way to run a store, to which she responded, “Crate & Barrel actually considers it a convenience that we offer our customers the ability to buy housewares and furniture under one roof.”
(imbok 2000, flickr)
Say what? Did she seriously think we should be glad there are many siloes on the Crate & Barrel farm and willingly climb each to get what we want? Or, to mix metaphors, I guess we just need to deal with the fact that furniture is in a crate and housewares are in a barrel.
Here is the reason I’m sharing this story, in case you’re still with me: This is actually the way many organizations work. So many times, I’ve been asked to write a brochure or create a web site that is based on the way the organization is structured rather than how the customer - or donor - sees it. “First, explain our three program areas,” someone will say. But why? Do people need to know you’ve sorted something into three crates and barrels?
Make sure you don’t make a mastery of your various “parts” a prerequisite to interacting with your organization. Organize your organization according to how your clients and donors view you, rather than how you operate internally. And if you can’t do that, then at least organize your external operations that way.
Your brochure, web navigation, phone trees—if they are perfectly aligned with your departments, you’re in trouble.
Electable vs. Marketable. It’s easy to get the two confused, but if you do, you’ll probably regret it.
To be marketable, you must be remarkable. Marketing isn’t about getting more than 50% market share, it’s about spreading your idea to enough people to be glad you did it… 3% of a market may be more than enough, especially if you have a local business or an expensive service.
Or a nonprofit, I’d add.
People in our sector (myself included at times in my life, unfortunately) often try to get more donors by doing mass outreach that isn’t very targeted. That’s trying to get big, “get elected” numbers.
Try instead to get a committed, marketable base of passionate donors by focusing on likely supporters who already care about your issue - they are out on there on blogs, in support groups, at special events, etc. Then, and more important, make sure you are dutifully cultivating that market. You are creating an ever-widening circle of supporters through your marketing work every day—don’t forget to tend to them! How many times did you thank them? Have you told them the difference they are making? Have you asked them to tell their friends and family about you? Have you asked them to convince others and advocate for your issue? That’s thinking marketing campaign, not election campaign.
Blogger Beth Kanter helped raise nearly $50,000 in the past three weeks for her favorite cause, the Sharing Foundation, with a Network for Good charity badge. I could not be happier today, first, because Cambodia is a cause close to my heart (I covered it as a journalist in the late 1990s) and second, because it shows the power of personal fundraising. According to Beth:
There was lots of help from the Sharing Foundation family - board members, volunteers, and supporters—especially TSF’s founder, Dr. Hendrie, whose relentess attention to campaign made it successful. In addition, we received lots of support and help from the Cambodian adoptive parent community and their families, churches, synagogues, fellow employees, golf buddies, quilting clubs, book clubs, parents of their children’s school mates, high school and college friends, and beyond. The Cambodian American community also rallied for us too!
The beauty of people-to-people fundraising is that it is based in two-way communication; it is a conversation between individuals rather than a speech from an organization. It puts your message in the mouth of the person most likely to prompt a donation: someone the audience knows. There are two useful social psychology theories at work here: liking and reciprocation. In a great book on these theories, Influence: Science and Practice, author and social psychologist Robert Cialdini explains liking this way: “People prefer to say yes to individuals they know and like.” He says we like people who are similar to us, who praise us, who are in frequent contact with us, who share common connections to us and – shallow as it is - people who are physically attractive.
Pair this idea of liking with the principle of reciprocation, which states, “people give back to you the kind of treatment they have received from you.” It’s no mistake, says Cialdini, that a synonym for “thank you” is “much obliged.” When we like someone and perceive they’ve treated us well, we’re likely to return the favor.
Cialdini uses lots of examples from sales in his book, but liking and reciprocation are also integral to our own work as fundraisers. His work shows us that it is a fundamental part of human nature to want to help people close to us and close to our experience.
The fundraising work of the Sharing Foundation certainly shows what happens when liking and reciprocation are at work, when community members rally others, and when it’s easy and fast to make a difference.
Think about who could be your best messenger - it’s probably someone outside your office, in a community of their own. Ask them to spread your message in the new year. It’s a good resolution to keep.
Pursuant to my last post, I wanted to share some numbers. In the past two days, we’ve seen giving increase incredibly sharply. So if you haven’t done a last-minute ask to your donors, do it before you leave the office today! Network for Good sent a one-sentence reminder to our donors in an attractive html yesterday and got back what equates to a $50 donation for every email sent within hours. People are making their last-minute gifts as we speak, so you want to be top of their mind.
Today and tomorrow are the best days of the entire year to ask for donations online. So do it!
At Network for Good, we see our giving spike to incredible levels in the last week of every year. That’s because online giving is perfectly suited to philanthropic procrastinators who want to get in their donations by the end of the tax year. Our giving is expected to go from about $70,000 on December 1 to well over $1 million a day for the final days of the year.
Please send out a last-minute email appeal today and ask folks who have not given recently to make a year-end donation to your organization online. If you don’t have a way for them to give online, get a DonateNow button for free in five minutes at Network for Good. Or go to Network for Good, search for your charity, click on “donate” and then share that URL with your mailing list. Don’t delay - there is no better time to ask for support online.
As I start wrapping things like a pink iDog for my daughters this Christmas, I have been thinking about how to give my kids another gift that feels even better to experience—the gift of helping someone else. Here’s what I propose: this holiday, give your child—or someone else’s child—$25 to spend on charity. You can give them $25 to spend at Network for Good (which has every charity based in the US) or Global Giving (which has a bunch of international projects) or the charity you work for. Let them choose how to spend it, either by letting them pick the charity or by designating their donation to a special project. Spend it together online, checking out pictures and project descriptions.
This will do two amazing things, one for your soul and one (of course) for your marketing savvy.
1.) In watching a child make this decision, you’ll feel wonderful about the child, your work, the holidays and the world in general, as when I helped my daughter decide whether to give to a teacher of Sudanese refugees or playground equipment for Gulf Coast kids.
2.) In explaining to a child what your charity and other charities do, something strange and transformative may happen. The way I described various charities and projects to an 8-year-old, I realized, was far more compelling than anything I had said in weeks. Wow, I thought, there is no better way to boil down the essence and power of a good cause. Look at your web page, then listen to how you describe it to a young person. You might realize you’re not telling the story you could be telling.
Guest Star Blogger Mark Rovner: Getting Passionate
Posted by katya on Mon, December 18, 2006
Today’s guest star is the smart, savvy and charmingly snarky Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies. His blog is good reading, and this post (and DEFINITELY the white paper) is worth your attention.
When it comes to marketing, bulls*@t has seen better days. The evidence is coming in fast and furious that a new emphasis on authenticity is coming to dominate the public landscape — from reality shows to Youtube to anti-brands.
In the fundraising realm, declining donor loyalty may be a sign of revolt against much of the technique-driven garbage that is sent out in the name of small-dollar fundraising.
There is nothing about the Internet that makes communications inherently more authentic than TV or direct mail. There is no shortage of bullshit online. But the Internet does offer new opportunities to humanize fundraising in a genuine way.
Following is an excerpt to the first chapter to the whitepaper Sea Change just released, ostensibly on year-end fundraising. But what it’s really about — what Sea Change hopes to become known for — is changing the conversation with donors for the better.
[And by the way, authentic doesn’t mean boring, just as bulls@#t doesn’t necessarily mean fun.]
From “A Procrastinator’s Guide to Year-End Fundraising”—four ways to build donor passion
• Tell your organization’s founding story once a year. Communications guru Andy Goodman calls this one of the “sacred bundle” of stories – a profound reminder of the deep values and moral struggle that gave rise to your organization’s existence.
• Have a genuine cultivation strategy and calendar. Send emails to donors that thank them, that report back on how you’ve spent their money, and then offer an inspiring anecdote or factoid. You can’t thank donors enough, and chances are, you don’t. Make it a point not to ask for donations in these communications.
• Ask your donors for their feedback and opinions on a regular basis. Remind them that you know there are people behind those email addresses.
• Offer periodic live chats or phone-in briefings with your CEO. This is a staple of major donor fundraising, inexplicably absent from the online giving scene.
• Offer real-life glimpses into the life of your organization. We are entering an era when authenticity is arguably the paramount value in marketing communications – a potentially massive shift from the fakey-fake formula that still guides most direct mail. One recent example: a brief, affecting and heart-felt thank you video by Amnesty International staff.
Large American nonprofits spend at least $7.6 billion per year on marketing and public relations, and may in fact spend a great deal more, according to the Changing Our World analysis of 71 nonprofits with annual revenues of $10 million or more per year. Itemized examination of IRS Form 990 Line 43, where marketing and communications expenses reside, resulted in an extrapolated estimate of $7.6 billion for the sector.
With more than 100 nonprofits forming everyday, it’s becoming a very competitive world for donor dollars. That’s driving a lot of marketing spending. And since most of us don’t have a huge marketing budget to sling around, we have to work smarter than ever. Not a relaxing thought on a Friday afternoon in the heat of fundraising season.
One way to work smarter is to get your online fundraising up and running, because it’s cheap and competitive. Network for Good (my nonprofit) can really help you in this department. Get a Donate Now button, do email outreach, and use the long tail of the web to reach people where they cluster online.
And at least this study gives you another talking point for defending your marketing budget -- it’s a competitive world out there.
My daughter’s brownie troop gave a Build-a-Bear to a major in Afghanistan, and he has chronicled the bear’s life.
There are variations on this—Flat Stanley being a popular one—but the consistent, sound idea here is that people like to be able to picture themselves, or something personal of theirs, in places far away. It makes the world a little smaller, and their life experience a bit larger.
What is your nonprofit doing to take people into the world where you work? What personal ties are you helping them establish to the people you help? Are you blogging photos and stories from foreign countries, showing where their dollars went? Can you come up with a Flat Stanley donors can send and see in action, amid your work? Transport people with pictures or stories (thanks Beth) so they get the pleasure of seeing their mark in the world. It’s what we all want before we die - to know we made a difference and that someone, somewhere will remember.
Posted by katya on Wed, January 24, 2007
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(imbok 2000, flickr)
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