Benefit exchange week - immediate rewards

Times are tough.  How do you get people’s attention right now?  How do you get them to act?

The answer, of course, is the benefit exchange.  That’s marketing jargon for what you need to offer to get someone to act.  It is how you get someone to want to pay the price for what you’re selling, whether you’re selling membership, the act of making a donation, or a change in a behavior.  It provides a reward in exchange for action.  It answers the question, “What’s in it for me?”

This week, I’m going to post on how to craft a great benefit exchange, pulling some content from my chapter on the topic in Robin Hood Marketing.  Why?  Because I’m seeing too few compelling benefit exchanges in nonprofit marketing these days.

The first attribute of a great benefit exchange is IMMEDIACY.  What will people get right away in exchange for doing what you ask, whether you want them to give money, volunteer or quit smoking?

Here’s what I’m talking about:

When I was a journalist in Cambodia in the mid-1990s, I interviewed young people for a story on HIV and AIDS.  Teen boys and young men in the Southeast Asian country rarely used condoms despite one of the fastest growing epidemics of HIV and AIDS in the region.  When I asked them why, young men told me they knew which girlfriends or prostitutes had HIV by the temperature of their skin.  The prostitutes I met in shed-like brothels said they felt powerless to insist on condoms, and anyway, many believed douching with toothpaste would kill HIV.  These misconceptions were clearly a challenge for organizations battling HIV and AIDS, but the real problem became clear when I spoke to a teen boy in Phnom Penh.  He was wearing a red checked sarong and sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette when I approached him, and he regarded me with withering skepticism when I asked him about AIDS.  “Why would I care about something that might kill me in ten years?” he asked.  “I will die from something else before then.” In a country plagued by landmines, poor water, infectious disease and (at the time) a guerrilla army, he may have been right.  A cultural and religious sense of fatalism only reinforced the view.  Where was the sense of immediacy?

Across town, in a pagoda surrounded by banana trees, people sick with AIDS had a different sense of immediacy.  A monk clad in saffron robes was mixing a medicinal drink made of bark chips and served in old Sprite bottles.  The monk said the elixir cured AIDS, and ill people from throughout the country traveled to Phnom Penh for the drink and his blessing.  I spent an afternoon watching him receive visitors on a straw mat in the temple, and some of them spoke with me.  In our conversations, it became clear what they wanted.  They were there because they needed hope, and the monk had that reward ready for them in a green plastic bottle. 

Since a sense of immediacy is essential to a good reward, we have to create it if we don’t have it.  It doesn’t work to tell a fatalistic young man in Cambodia that using a condom will prevent a disease far down the road.  The nonprofit PSI brought a sense of immediacy to condom use in Cambodia by putting a desirable brand – the alluringly English-named Number One Condom - in the hands of people right at one moment they might use the product - in a brothel.  The audience wasn’t told to think of a deadly disease while seeking physical gratification (which surely would have led them to dismiss thoughts of the disease), but rather asked to do use an appealing product that provided an instant boost to the ego. 

Some good causes deal with the immediacy challenge with a gift like a t-shirt, hat or wristband.  These offerings provide the person that donated money or took some action with an instant benefit, for example, recognition.  Or the cause might offer rewards before the audience takes action.  Have you ever received address labels in the mail from a good cause?  They create a sense of obligation in the recipient, and so you probably felt some pressure to send money.  Other options?  Show how someone can save a life RIGHT NOW.  Demonstrate they can feel good by making a difference THIS SECOND.  And above all, make it incredibly EASY to act, so people will believe they will get the benefit exchange pronto.