Going viral for Earth Day
- Tue, April 24 2007
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
Last week, I heard the best presentation on marketing that I’ve ever heard in recent memory. I was listening to Frank Luntz, the famous former Republican message strategist who brought us terms like the “death tax.” He talked about how nonprofits can express themselves in more compellng terms, drawing heavily from his book, Words that Work. He was presenting right after me at Spitfire’s Communications Leadership Institute. Thank goodness I went first—following that session would have been like being a grad student sharing the stage with Stephen Hawking.
I’m going to blog about what Luntz said all this week, because he understands better than anyone how to cut through the communications clutter, speak to an audience’s values, and seize people’s attention.
One of the questions posed to Luntz was how to get young people interested in environmental causes. He said if they were not paying attention with awareness of global warming at such a high, they probably wouldn’t ever care. What is needed now, he said, is a clear call to action. A few days later, a lot of well-intentioned but poorly positioned Earth Day email was clogging my inbox. Most of it lacked a clear, Luntz-style call to action. He was right.
There was one notable exception. My friends at Care2 sent me a link to their petition page. Nice, vivid video (I’ll never forget the five arms). Simple action (sign the petition). Room for user-driven content. 10,000 signatures and thousands of personal notes in a few days. Well done.
Remember: Ask for something simple, clear and compelling or don’t ask at all.
Comments
Great point on the “make it clear.” i’ve just started <a >directing some energy toward getting the church here in Canada to take really easy-but-concrete steps toward being a little kinder/lighter on the ol’ environment.
seeing as how earth days also fell on a sunday we laid out a really simple request: carpool, bus, walk, or bike to church on sunday.
we posted a short video and found the positive spin on the simple request (“don’t drive by yourself”) was an excellently non-guilt-inducing way to get people excited and actually doing something to make a difference.
<a >here’s the video</a>
<a >here’s the original post</a>
Hi Katya,
I appreciate your addressing these issues in your blog. I’m a student at Stanford Business School and I read your book recently in preparation for a class project. I think that nonprofits still have a lot of room to leverage the viral marketing phenomenon. I think the likes of MySpace aren’t necessarily the right setting for the nonprofit message, but there’s definately a huge untapped opportunity. I am launching a site in partnership with nonprofits soon that I hope will demonstrate what’s possible for nonprofits in terms of viral effect. Thanks for your book; it was very inspirational!