4 Nifty Tips for Building a List

Katya’s note: This guest post is by my talented colleague Rebecca Ruby at Network for Good.  I want to share it because I often get asked, how do I build an email list?

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By Rebecca Ruby

A philosophical question: If an e-newsletter is powerful enough to move someone to action, but no one’s around to read it, does it make an impact? 

If not particularly mind-bending, this inquiry does bring up a valuable (seemingly obvious) point: You can craft a fabulous e-newsletter, send it out just the right number of times per year and impart some really powerful information, but you need to create an email contact list (an audience) at your organization to be effective. 

Here are four tips to get you started on the road to contact-information glory:

1.  Make it easy, compelling and cool for your website visitors to give you their email addresses (yes, it can be cool). The majority of people visiting your organization’s website is there on purpose-they may have been searching for your organization in particular or simply shopping around for a nonprofit with your mission. Make the sign-up button easy-to-spot, put it “above the fold,” and make your form brief yet informative (you risk form abandonment if you require or ask for too many pieces of information).

2.  Include “join our email list” everywhere you can. Once you have your online form, send people there from all directions: your homepage, the signature at the bottom of your email (your everyday contacts may opt in), and other places you have content sprinkled around the Internet such as blogs and social networking pages.

3.  Use the “people love free stuff” principle. Incentivize. You’re asking people to give you something (information), and they’re going to wonder what’s in it for them:
•Set up a drawing.
•Offer prizes to the first X people who sign up for your new e-newsletter or who sign up by Y date.
•Show people that they’re making a difference and/or joining a community.

4. Make it easy for your current subscribers to hook their friends. Promote your newsletter and gain new subscribers by asking current subscribers to forward your message along; consider including a “forward to a friend” link in your message. Keep in mind that you should always include a subscribe link in your newsletter so people who do receive a forwarded copy have an easy way to get their own copy in the future.

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What’s your appeal—fear, hope or love?

Seth Godin has a superlative blog entry today.  In the unlikely event you haven’t heard of Seth, he’s author of the classic Purple Cow, the new Meatball Sundae and one of my favorite writers on marketing.  He says:

People take action (mostly) based on one of three emotions:

Fear
Hope
Love

Every successful marketer (including politicians) takes advantage of at least one of these basic needs.

Forbes Magazine, for example, is for people who hope to make more money.

Rudy Giuliani was the fear candidate. He tried to turn fear into love, but failed.

Few products or services succeed out of love. People are too selfish for an emotion that selfless, most of the time.

It’s interesting to think about the way certain categories gravitate to various emotions. Doctors selling check ups, of course, are in the fear business (while oncologists certainly sell hope). Restaurants have had a hard time selling fear (healthy places don’t do so well). Singles bars certainly thrive on selling hope.

Google, amazingly quickly, became a beloved brand, something many people see as bigger than themselves, something bigger than hope. Apple lives in this arena as well. I think if you deliver hope for a long time (and deliver on it sometimes) you can graduate to love.

Very interesting.

I think fear is not a great motivator for good causes, unless you can also pair fear with a way to resolve the situation that is terrifying.  This is why health scares often work to get people to change their health behaviors.  Too much fear and negativity will make people feel helpless or perceive that your issue is intractable.  Fear often prompts a person to cower or take cover.  Give people the feeling that they have the power to help or change a situation. 

By contrast, hope can make you commit.  Hope is a big winner for us.  Everyone wants to feel hope, and we are all about hope in our field.  I hope you are making hope a big part of the way you talk about your programs.

Love is possible for us.  If Google - a search engine - evokes that kind of emotion, we damn well can too.  IF we do a good job fulfilling our mission.  IF we do a great job telling our story.  IF we do a better job reporting back to donors what they’ve done for others.  IF we build lasting, two-way relationships with the people who support us.  Do people love your organization?  They will if you do these things.  I hope you do!

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What does this have to do with marketing?

  • Sun, February 03 2008
  • Filed under: Fun stuff

Not a whole lot.  But it’s amusing.  This is my cousin Justin’s band’s video.  Give me an excuse for having displayed it!  I pledge a free copy of Robin Hood Marketing to the first person who can connect this video to the topic of nonprofit marketing.  No astroturfing from pickle or hotdog companies, please.

UPDATE:  Wow, well done, readers!  You were SO inspired that I’m awarding two books—one for the first entry below by Cindi AND everyone else who replies by midnight tonight gets entered into a lottery for an additional book.  I’ll announce the winner tomorrow.

UPDATE #2: The lottery winner is Jennifer!

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A scarcity mentality leads to scarcity

I was having lunch with some of my favorite web designers the other day, and we got to talking about the scarcity mentality. They were especially irritated with unethical web designers that create websites that nonprofits can’t access themselves, so they could generate more business for their firms in perpetuity. They told the story of one nonprofit that hired them saying their last designer wouldn’t even give them high-resolution electronic files of the logo they’d designed—so the firm could charge the nonprofit each time it needed to do something with their logo. It had never occurred to that nonprofit to beware of that in their contract. While this made the firm money in the short term, the nonprofit was so irate they hired a new designer (my friends) and doubtlessly spread lots of bad word of mouth about that awful firm.

Hoarding, secrecy and a spirit of scarcity are not good strategies.

Then I saw this excellent point made by blogger Terri:

The non-profit universe is set up so that everyone must compete for the same money. This prevents a lot of networking, partnering and coalition-building. I think this is a shame. Just as it is possible for me to invite you over for dinner without giving you my house, it must be possible for agencies and others to connect and interact in ways that increase the visibility, credibility and effectiveness of everyone.

I love the dinner/house analogy, Terri. Well said.

In addition to funding fears curtailing collaboration in our sector, I see information-hoarding as another bad phenomenon. I’m appalled by some funders, nonprofits and companies that serve our sector refusing to freely share what they know and learn.

They don’t get that scarcity mentalities lead to more scarcity.

I believe in giving away everything you can, in sharing information freely and in collaborating openly with others. While this sounds scary in a competitive world, it actually gets you more resources at the end of the day. When you’re generous with others, they usually end up reciprocating. You get absolutely amazing word of mouth and massive amounts of goodwill. When you join forces with worthy partners, you usually get more visibility and resources for both parties. When you act with integrity, you get more business. Really.

I’m not saying there isn’t competition in this world. I’m saying how we react to it is critical to our success. We can fight over the same small patches of territory or we can try to band together for a bigger land grab. The rare disease organizations have done this with great success with federal funding. Newspapers have done this to great success, making online content free - they then get more traffic and therefore more ad revenue. Network for Good does this too with our Learning Center and free calls - we share everything we know about fundraising. And we’ve ended up with more nonprofits using our services, which has led to more revenue.

Generosity has an excellent ROI.

Parsimony pays back accordingly.

 

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5 Tips for Diving into Social Networking

Today at Network for Good’s Six Degrees site, we wrapped up our part of America’s Giving Challenge, a campaign by Parade and the Case Foundation.  We saw amazing performances by our wired fundraisers, and though the results aren’t yet final we can say they were incredible - many individuals raised tens of thousands of dollars for their causes.

To celebrate their achievements, I want to share this week’s tips from Network for Good on this topic, authored by my talented colleague Rebecca Ruby.  Here’s what she says:

If you’re sitting at your computer hugging your organization’s mission statement, branding guide and/or special event brochure (the one that was approved by everyone in your office, your board, your babysitter, etc. etc.), it’s time to take a deep breath-this idea might scare you.

It’s time to turn your message over to your constituents.

That’s right: let your fundraisers spread the word for you, outside of your direct reach. People are most likely to donate to a cause if asked by someone they know. Unless you personally know everyone in your town, city, state, country, etc., you need to call in the big guns: your wired fundraisers.

Wired fundraisers come in two varieties: passionate fundraisers who happen to use social networking (also known as Web 2.0) tools and people who use these tools who have turned into fundraisers. In order to take full advantage of social networking opportunities, you need to develop a plan to find your wired fundraisers (and capture their email addresses), empower them with your message and let them use their social networking tools to fly solo.

Here are a few steps to get you started:

Pick one social networking channel in which to get involved. Try Change.org, Facebook or MySpace. Or set up a blog. But most importantly, don’t try to tackle everything that’s out there. It’s better to have a strong presence in one network than to spread your organization too thin across Web 2.0.
Search for potential supporters. Search the Change.org network, Facebook Causes or MySpace pages for a nonprofit with a similar mission as yours. See who their “friends” are and invite them to your cause once you’re up and running. Here are some examples:

TransFair USA on Change.org
Grassroots International on MySpace
Campaign for Cancer Prevention on Facebook

Make it easy for supporters to find you. As proactive as you’ll want to be in terms of reigning in new supporters, they’re going to look for you-make it easy for them to do so! Name your social networking page exactly as your organization is named. Again, have a strong presence in one channel rather than all of them. (Better a potential volunteer or donor can find your blog than miss your pages scattered across many networks.)

Build your house file. Once supporters of your cause have found you, make sure you give them a strong call to action to supply their email address to you so you can contact them later.

Encourage your new supporters to do your work for you (you know what I mean). Having Facebook friends isn’t enough. Now that you’ve started to cultivate relationships with these Internet superstars, empower them to share your charity with others: ask them to recruit friends to volunteer for you, create a charity badge and invite them to post it on their own blogs and social networking sites.

Learn more about wired fundraisers by reading Network for Good’s white paper The Wired Fundraiser: How Technology is Making Fundraising “Good to Go.”
For more information about social networking, check out transcripts from the two Nonprofit 911 conference calls on Network for Good’s Learning Center - many of these tips come from them!

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The Piggy-Back Principle

What a Ham, by Mostlysunny1 via flickr

A great nonprofit leader I know recently saw a cool online quiz that he could appropropriate for his own work, and his reaction was “Great.  I love piggy backing.”

It occured to me how rarely I hear this.

In our sector, we tend to focus on how little we have and how much more we need.  But we would need less if we got more creative about piggy backing - for example, aligning with an issue or news already getting a lot of attention, or riding a demographic trend, or using (with permission, of course) great content developed by other entities.  Not much money for audience research?  Read other research - or as my buddy Craig LeFebvre says, look at campaigns directed at your audience that work.  (Not just those in your issue area—but those that target your audience.  The underlying values and messaging could be piggy back material.)

In other words, never build when you can borrow.

Before you start from scratch on anything, spend an hour seeing what’s already there, what can help you and what stands in your way.  Act accordingly.

Here are some marketplace forces - aka potential piggies - to get you started:

1. Is there a demographic, lifestyle, social, health, natural or economic trend that we can ride?  What trends might bring attention to our cause?
2. Are laws or regs in place that could help us succeed?
3. Is there research being released that is attracting publicity and bolsters our case?
4. What’s got the eye of the media?  Can we play off that story?
5. What companies benefit if we succeed?  Can we co-opt them?
6. Who else is talking about our issue and how could they help influence our audiences?
7. What content or material has already been developed that we can use?

An example of piggy backing in my book is the Five a Day campaign.  That highly successful campaign to get us eating more fruits and veggies piggy backed onto the increasing number of people overwhelmed by their busy lifestyles by packaging fruits and veggies so they were more easy and convenient to consume - the original fast food.

Another example is Network for Good’s own Learning Center.  We didn’t start from scratch in creating a site with original articles - we feature the work of the many smart writers and bloggers who’ve already written great material.

The lesson?  Piggy backing often makes us more effective.  It’s not about scrimping and stealing.  It’s about riding on the back of what has already been built and has momentum in the marketplace.

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The three things we all forget

1. We’re not our audience
Check that appeal/letter/message before you send it.  Is it focused on you or your audience?  The correct approach: focus on, respect and engage the audience first.

2. Our audience doesn’t think like us
Check how you make your organization/services/information accessible to people.  Is it presented to match your org chart or the mindframe of your audience?  Correct approach: you guessed it, the latter.

3. Our audience doesn’t take action without guidance
Check every communication with your audience.  Does it make it clear what you’re asking them to do and why?  Is your “ask” unmistakable?  Make sure it is.

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Get the candidates talking about YOU

v3

We’ve heard a lot from the presidential candidates about hope, change and the economy.  That’s all important.  But there’s another thing we need to hear.  Let’s get them to talk about us.  Our sector.  Our causes.  Our concerns.  We’re all about hope and change and a better life, right?

Sound impossible?  It’s not.  All of us nonprofit folks, standing together, are a force to be reckoned with—bigger than any union or corporation or other entity grabbing headlines for its influence.  There are 14 million nonprofits employees out there and 60 million volunteers. We generate billions in revenue and put billions more into county and state coffers through payroll taxes.  So let’s get the candidates - and the next president - to take our sector—and ourselves and our issue—seriously.  We can do it.

How?

Robert Egger, one of the great leaders in our sector and a wonderful friend and colleague, has been at this for quite some time.  Robert is Founder and President of the DC Central Kitchen, the Co-Convener of the first Nonprofit Congress and, most recently, the Founder and Director of the Nonprofit Primary Project, which developed presidential candidate forums in New Hampshire. And today, he has created an easy way for this to happen in every election, national or local.  V3 is his new website that shows how we can get all of this to happen.  Check out V3, which he funded with money from his speaking engagements.  It’s great to see such a beautiful piece of marketing for a such a great cause: us.  (Full disclosure: In addition to knowing/admiring Robert and weighing in on the V3 site, I know and have in the past hired the creative folks behind the site design - I think their work is excellent.)  Finally - an easy way for us to do something tangible to advance our cause and our sector as part of the political process.  Robert got me very charged up about this effort when I saw him last week to discuss his message, and I hope he’ll get you charged up, too. (Read this.)

In Robert’s words, here’s what V3 does:

1. The V3 Campaign website – From the site, we will list EVERY election in America (mayor, state legislator, congress, senate, president), and provide links to each of the candidates, allowing any nonprofit employee to send a questionnaire that will ask three things: 1) Describe your personal or professional connection with a nonprofit. 2) How would you partner with nonprofits? 3) How would you strengthen the sector to be a good partner with you?

2. The V3 Site will record all written or recorded responses. If a candidate proposes a staff position, an office to work directly with nonprofits, or a bold new vision for managing community resources–BANG—it’s on V3 and other nonprofits can use it to challenge candidates in their community. If they do not respond, it’s on V3, and all of their constituents who work or volunteer with a nonprofit will know that they do not understand or value their work enough to suggest a detailed plan of action. Then, nonprofits and their supporters can vote according to their own personal convictions. Cause and effect—totally legal—only we drive the car.

I hope you’ll go onto V3 and sign up to ask any candidate what they’re doing to commit to working with nonprofits.  In just a few minutes, you can feel you did something substantive to get seen and heard.  If you care about your cause and want it to get noticed by your government, this is a great way to get started.  Do it, and ask one other person to do it, too. 

And here’s proof it’s working already.

 

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Duckbilled Platypus vs. BeefSnakStik

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Last night my older daughter read me this excellent and hilarious story from the fabulous Squids Will Be Squids : Fresh Morals/Beastly Tales by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith.  It’s about the best (nonprofit) marketing metaphor I’ve heard in years.  I suppose I should be disturbed that I find marketing meaning even in bedtime stories, but instead I’m going to tell you about the story.

Duckbilled Platypus vs. BeefSnakStik(R)

“I have a bill like a duck and a tail like a beaver,” bragged Duckbilled Platypus.

“So what?” said BeefSnakStik.  “I have beef, soy protein concentrate, and dextrose.”

“I also have webbed feet and fur,” said Duckbilled Platypus.

“Who cares?” said BeefSnakStik.  “I also have smoke flavoring, sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite.”

“I am one of only two mammals in the world that lays eggs,” said Duckbilled Platypus.

“Big deal,” said BeefSnakStik.  “I have beef lips.”

Moral: Just because you have a lot of stuff, don’t think you’re special.

Exactly.  If you’re bragging about all the nuances of your work as an outreach strategy, you’re probably sounding about as relevant (and convincing) to your audience as Duckbilled Platypus and BeefSnakStik.

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The unbelievably simple missing part of great speeches

The other night, I heard a speech by Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system.  I was blown away.  This young woman has grabbed the DC schools bureaucracy by the (insert colorful term here), and she’s taking courageous, bold steps to cure the ailing system - including firing incompetent people.  When she spoke of her work, her intelligence and passion had me completely spellbound. 

By the end of her speech, I was ready to quit my job and volunteer for her full time.  I was willing to do anything, yet there wasn’t anything to do. 

Then the next speaker came up (who was also great), and moved us all.  But then, again, while still contemplating what to do with my inspiration, the evening moved on.

This happens to me too often: I hear an amazing speech at an event, I’m inspired, and yet there’s no where to put that energy.

I’m about to give you such and wonderful piece of advice that NO ONES DOES, so do it!  The next time you have or host an event, if you have a great speaker, get them to issue a CALL TO ACTION that people can heed in the next five minutes.  Make it something people can do right away to translate their emotion and support into tangible help.  Like text an email on their handhelds to a policymaker.  Or sign a pledge to help you.  Or give you their email address.  Or write a check. 

People want to help.  Help them help you.  Help them translate inspiration into action.  They want to.

So many people ask me how to build an email list.  How about by asking people tearing up at that speech?

I have never been to an event that has taken a single one of those simple steps. 

Try it.  If I’m there, I swear I’ll do whatever you ask.

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Best Practices for Social Networking Nonprofits

Katya’s note: This month at Network for Good, we’re focusing on social networking with our Nonprofit 911 calls.  If you want to put social networking to work for you, check them out.  Also, check out the terrific Social Signal blog.  For a sampling of the great information there, I turn to Alexandra Samuel for this guest post from her blog at Social Signal.  This is great advice.  Thanks Alexandra for letting me re-run your thoughts here!

By Alexandra Samuel

We work with a wide range of non-profit and change-oriented for-profit organizations who are using the web to deliver their message, but more crucially, to engage audiences in a conversation. Some of the best practices we note:

1. Focus your site on a particular goal or conversation, rather than a general mandate. For example, the UN Foundation has had a dazzling success with its Nothing But Nets site, which focuses specifically on providing malaria nets to kids in the developing world.

2. Invite your community to make contributions other than money. Non-profits often experience “donor fatigue” because so much of their public interactions hinge on asking for money. The web is a great place to ask for other kinds of contributions—whether that means connecting people directly with people who need their expertise or services (as in Nabuur) or asking them to share their personal experiences (as with the March of Dimes’ Share your Story project).

3. Play nicely with other non-profit (and for-profit) organizations. The web is just that: a web of interconnections. Succeeding in an internetworked environment means working effectively with others, colllaborating, and interacting—it’s not just about getting your own message out there. So being a good 2.0 non-profit means engaging with conversations and ideas on other blogs. Change Everything, a project of the Vancity credit union, is in the middle of a contest that will award $1,000 to a non-profit organization—and the contest has fueled a great deal of interest and awareness of non-profit activities in British Columbia.

4. Don not feel that web 2.0 means building your own online community. In fact, it’s a lot easier to ease into the web 2.0 culture by making effective use of existing web tools—whether that means fostering internal collaboration by choosing a common del.icio.us tag to use when storing your favorite web sites, or creating an iGoogle page that lets you constantly see the latest news in your key issue areas, or creating a photo-based petition on Flickr (check out the Oxfam example). Or try setting up a Facebook group—we attracted 1300 people to a Flickr group within 3 weeks of launch. Once you’re comfortable with the idea of web 2.0, you can starting thinking about whether it makes sense to build some community features into your own site.

5. Be gentle with yourself, and your colleagues. It’s a big challenge for most non-profits to shift from message delivery to conversation, or from approaching your members as donors to seeing them as content contributors. For organizations that have been all about the message, and have approached that for decades from a paradigm of message control and careful rollout, it is a genuine (and at times frightening) adventure to bring your audience into the conversation in public, and before you’ve got everybody lined up to stay “on message”. Be patient with colleagues who need to get comfortable with this new approach.

6. Stay current with how other non-profits are using web 2.0, and learn from their experiences. A great way of doing that is to track the “nptech” tag on del.ici.ous, where people from all across the nonprofit sector share the latest resources on nonprofit technology activities; it’s a great place to find blog posts or tech developments to comment on. And Compumentor’s NetSquared project is dedicated to helping non-profits make the most of web 2.0.

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No excuses!

I recently gave a presentation and was floored by the response.  And not in a good way.  I heard the following after I talked about ways to tweak a message to make it work far better - just by focusing on the audience perspective and speaking to audience priorities.  Here’s the reason why this is “not possible”:

1. I don’t have the budget to do that.
2. I don’t have the staff to do that.
3. I don’t have the time to do that.
4. I don’t have the internal support to do that.
5. I don’t have the expertise to do that.
6. The dog ate my homework.

Okay I didn’t hear #6 but I did hear the rest.

It all reminded me of the same kind of excuses that keep us out of shape:

If you hear yourself saying any of the above, stop yourself and think differently.

Think like this:

1. My budget is so small I’d better invest the time to have the right message so I get bang for my buck.
2. My staff is so small I need to focus them on working smarter.
3. My time is better spent fixing a bad message than sending out more bad messages.
4. I need to market internally what I want to do by showing how it helps my colleagues meet their goals—that time spent will mean far less time overall on internal politicking, resistance and drama.
5. I do have the expertise to do a better job - there are great blogs and resources (like my organization’s free http://www.fundraising123.org learning center) to help me.

DO NOT THINK IN TERMS OF CONSTRAINTS.  Think in terms of possibility. It’s not about what you can’t do.  It’s about what you must do.  Just do it!

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Mission statements that work, email that doesn’t

  • Fri, January 11 2008
  • Filed under:

There were two gems in other blogs over the past week, and I want to pass them on. 

1.  THE 15-MINUTE MISSION STATEMENT: If you know me, you know I think nonprofits spend way too much time crafting mission statements in an exercise that too often degenerates into navel-gazing neurosis.  Yet they can be useful to focusing programs if they are done right.  Here’s a neat solution from Kelly Kleiman on her blog The Nonprofiteer, which was picked up on the Give and Take blog: Simplify the process by spending an hour — or even just 15 minutes — drafting a single sentence that outlines their mission”  “We do [activity] so that [result will occur].” I like it.

2. THE FUTURE OF FUNDRAISING:  Mark Rovner says this: “Here is the current online fundraising model: build your prospect list however you can and then bombard them relentlessly with email solicitations. If you’re clever, maybe throw in mail and phone solicitations as well. Repeat, repeat, repeat…”  The problem? It works less and less effectively, it drives people away and it’s not sustainable.  If you’re doing this, stop.  Focus on growing a list of new prospects that want to hear from you and treat them well.  There’s a lot at stake.  Mark says:

EVERYTHING is going to change. In his latest book, Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin makes the point that organizations and companies are generally built around the mode of marketing available to them. If your organization began its life between 1970 and 2000, chances are it was built around cheap mail and high response rates. The first victim of expensive mail and low response rates is your fundraising efficiency. And in this era of CharityNavigator, your fundraising efficiency is no secret.

I agree.

PS I’m still scratching my head over how I could post on the perils of AstroTurfing one day and be AstroTurfed on my blog the next day (see comments). The irony!

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4 Essentials of Cause-Related Marketing

Photo by sadalit, flickr.

If you are a company or nonprofit teaming up to do cause-related marketing in 2008, take heed: slapping charitable branding on a product is not enough.  Today’s consumers are socially conscious but they are also savvy—and skeptical.  Cause-related ventures are held to high standards, and vague claims of social good are scrutinized.  So, in support of Cone’s What Do You Stand For? project, here are the four things all cause-related ventures should stand for:

1. Suitability
Does the partnership pass the sniff test for suitability? For example, even if the company donated all of its profits, Hummer would never be a good partner for Greenpeace.  Sounds obvious, right?  But I’ve seen some partners that seemed poorly suited this year, including Trident promoting Save the Children nutrition and literacy programs.  Gum doesn’t fit with nutrition—or literacy, since it’s not even allowed in libraries or schools.  Operation Smile would have made more sense as a partner.  You want a fit that makes sense to the consumer - it’s stickier that way (pun intended).  You also want a fit that makes sense to the partners, who should look for a deeper win-win.  An ideal partnership is one where the cause and company’s objectives reinforce each other. 

2. Authenticity
A close cousin of suitability, authenticity is about the company walking the talk of the cause.  A nice example is the Pure Prevention campaign, which my organization helped plan and support (so I’m biased).  Luna Bar walks the talk of health concerns and nutrition, so it makes sense for them to support a cause that focuses on the environmental causes of breast cancer.  Check it out here.

3. Transparency
This is HUGE.  It’s not enough to say, we’re partners and a portion of proceeds benefits xyz charity.  Both the company and the charity need to say what amount of money is going where to do what.  Very, very clearly - on everything.  Put it on price tags, marketing materials, everywhere.  Err on the side of openness.  The RED controversy shows there are people out there watching! (PS: RED has done a good job on reporting - check out their site.)

4. Selling Point
Lots of research, including from Cone, shows consumers will buy cause-related products over those that don’t have a charitable tie-in, PRICE AND QUALITY BEING EQUAL.  So don’t think alignment with a cause is a unique value proposition, unless you have the same price and quality.  If you don’t, you need other selling points.  The Susan G. Komen partnerships make things pink, which believe it or not, is a selling point—people went crazy for Campbell’s cans in pink because they looked neat (and were different and unexpected).  So color can actually be a selling point.  What value can you add to you add to the product in question that extends and supplements the charitable merits it presents?  Figure it out.  You want people to buy into this!

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to follow these principles - and don’t just take my word for it.  From Cause-Related Marketing Blog, here’s a great analysis of what happens when you don’t.

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AstroTurfing burns.  Be authentic or else.

If you’ve ever taken a dive on AstroTurf, you know it hurts - like the worst kind of carpet burn.  It also hurts to AstroTurf online - which is an expression for seeding fake, faux-grassroots material that’s disingenously disguised self-promotion.  For example, posing as a fan of your employer and posting comments to a blog as if you’re a third party.  AstroTurfing hurts your organization.  It hurts you.  And it hurts the people you deceive.  And the burn is the fifth-degree kind.

There was a sad case of this over the past few days.  Holden Karnofsky of GiveWell, an organization that’s been pushing for greater transparency in grantmaking and results from nonprofits, was found to have been AstroTurfing for his organization.  AstroTurfing is always bad, as I’ve noted on this blog in the Whole Foods case.  It saddens me so much in this case, because Holden’s actions flew in the face of what he called for: namely, honesty and transparency.  Here’s what the Chronicle of Philanthropy described today:

On Metafilter, an online message board, Mr. Karnofsky promoted GiveWell without identifying himself. In one message he asked for ideas on how to choose a charity to support and then “answered” as another writer by touting GiveWell’s evaluations of nonprofit groups.

A Metafilter member uncovered the self-promotion, which violated the Web site’s rules, and announced the discovery on the message board.

Mr. Karnofsky quickly apologized and said that he had a “horrible lapse of judgment” by hiding his identity. He also offered to make a contribution to Metafilter to compensate for his mistake – an offer that was derided by Metafilter contributors as a bribe.

Metafilter members found other examples of Mr. Karnofsky’s praising GiveWell as an anonymous source, including instances where he criticized other nonprofit groups.

I met Holden when he minced no words in criticizing Network for Good (my organization) on his blog, and I responded.  We ended up having a productive conversation and ultimately a collegial professional relationship.  I’ve followed and blogged what he’s doing.  He’s committed a lot of energy to what he believes, and while we haven’t always agreed (including on this blog), I respected his energy and the end result of what he wanted—motivated donors and the most effective nonprofit sector possible.  But it seems his energy has gone terribly awry, and it’s a real shame.  He’s apologized, but he lost his job [clarification: he was demoted] and a lot of people are furious, particularly because Holden (often harshly) demanded such honesty and transparency of others.  Bloggers and commenters have written literally hundreds of posts and comments on this turn of events—read them here. 

I hope some good comes of this - for the [very worthy] work Holden wanted to do and for anyone observing the situation.  I’d like to use this sad tale as a reminder to all of us that you MUST be honest and authentic online, or else.  In the Web 2.0 world, no matter how good your intentions, you pay a big price for misrepresenting yourself.  In your job, please never be tempted to AstroTurf.  Don’t anonymously post good things about your organization or bad things about others without identifying yourself, because it’s unethical in my view.  And if that’s not incentive enough, know that those tricks tend to get discovered.  They will estrange and enrage the very people you set out to influence.  You and your cause will get burned.

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