Is it time for a “I Support Local Causes” Campaign?

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

According to a recent Cone communications survey, 47% of Americans want businesses to support local causes.

What?

When was the last time you saw THAT idea in the mainstream?

The vast majority of cause-related organizations are local and small. They are doing the hard work of community development, health and human services delivery, arts and education at the grass roots level. The people at these organizations work hard to deliver their mission where it counts, measuring success in real terms. They have to – there is seldom much distance between resources and outcomes, and almost never any fat or excess.

But public visibility into the cause-related world is usually around large organizations with big brands. The American Red Cross, the Susan G. Komen Foundation are worthy organizations with long histories and well-established reputations. But when we support them the natural result is that a great deal of public support ends up being shipped out of the local community, where it passes through layers of overhead and administration before it returns (if at all) to the communities who generated it in the first place.

The effect is similar to the local food movement – local providers get bypassed and find themselves struggling, even when there are plenty of willing supporters right next door, who are simply unaware of the great work being done nearby. Local organizations are too busy delivering their mission to spend much of their hard-won resources on drumming up local support, which is complicated and hard to do.

Maybe it’s time for a campaign to draw our attention to the importance of supporting those organizations that make up the lifeblood of our cause-related world. What do you think?

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Care and Feeding of Communities: Vol. 3

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

I heard about a nonprofit the other day who said this: “we don’t want to engage in social media with our supporters because we think it will erode the personal connection we have with them.”

A few weeks ago I took the plunge and experimented with Words with Friends. You may have heard about the nascent universe of social gaming coming from companies like Zynga, experiencing huge success with games designed around social interaction. Words With Friends is effectively Scrabble, played with people connected to me via Facebook. I currently have games going with a church friend, two college friends (whom I see once every five years, if that), and the pianist for my high school choral group, whose face I have not seen in twenty years. I play Scrabble with them every night, and several times a day. If I were to bump into any of them in real life, I wouldn’t treat them as long-forgotten friends but as people with whom I share a current, personal connection.

I recently had dinner with a group of friends who date back to my post-college days, all of whom are now married with children. We make the (rather laborious) effort to coordinate our schedules to see each other face-to-face maybe once or twice per year. But rather than catching up on what had transpired since our last get-together, we spent time on other subjects. Why? Because I see them every day on Facebook. I’m watching their children grow up, sharing their family achievements, sharing a joke or a funny picture, and I’m doing that daily. They don’t feel like long-lost friends – they feel like I “see” them every day.

So when that nonprofit suggested that social media might make connections with their supporters less personal, it was all I could do not to drop my jaw in amazement. If your organization (be it a business of nonprofit or something else) believes that it has a personal connection with its supporters now, wait till you see what happens when you embrace them on the new turf being staked out by social technologies.

Can you play word games with your supporters? Sure. Can you post pictures of your organization’s big “life” events? Sure. In fact, the more personal you get, the more support you’ll receive. Malcolm Gladwell describes the weak, fleeting connections we make with each other as the fundamental currency of social interactions. People who make lots of them, all the time, retain the “top of mind” position in their networks. When the request for volunteers or donations occurs, the organization that hasn’t been heard from since the *last* fundraising request gets less attention than the one you engaged with last week.

Are you the “long lost” organization for your supporters? Do they ask “so what have you been up to?” when they hear from you?

But here’s what else was going on with that statement: change feels risky. “The old system used to work, and I’m not sure how the new one will. Until I do, I’m not going to risk it.” And there’s a grain of truth in that. No one knows how the new system will work. We see glimmers and hear about successes at a distance, but for right now the old ways still pay the bills. But there’s a difference between experimenting with new ways of doing things and betting the farm on them. There’s no reason to leave gala fundraisers or major donor campaigns behind, but it makes all the sense in the world to embrace your community on its own terms and learn from the process.

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Care and Feeding of Communities, Vol. 2

Posted on October 8, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

Saw a great post on Good.is about Yelp and its effect on restaurants. The headline is this: your community is already talking about you, whether you like it or not.

The takeaway from the Good article is that local restaurants with good reviews on Yelp are picking up business, but good reviews on chain restaurants make no difference. In  the aggregate, though, chain business is declining while business to local restaurants is increasing.

The reason is sort of obvious, when you think about it. When it comes right down to it, we only have three sources of information about a restaurant before we go there:

1. personal experience,
2. word-of-mouth, and
3. anonymous advertising and branding.

It should be no surprise that personal experience is the most powerful source of information, or that word-of-mouth is more powerful than advertising. Until social media, though, word-of-mouth was far less efficient and accessible than it is now. Services like Yelp put the comments of groups at our fingertips.

What the Good article makes clear is that advertising and branding are a poor substitute for personal experience or word-of-mouth. The Applebee’s commercials I continue to see on television make the place look great – my family’s one visit to an actual Applebee’s convinced me to ignore them forever. Other locations may be different, but given any other choice they’re going to lose.

Ever since McDonald’s, the chain business has based itself on consistency. If you’ve been to one McDonald’s you know what to expect from all the others. They work hard to maintain that consistency, and even though there is some differences within the chain most are pretty successful at it. In most cases chains are also scientific about location management, so that any given location is just far enough away from any other location to make the small differences in experience a non-factor in choosing locations. I treat my family to a McDonald’s breakfast once a month, and we consistently choose the inferior location over the superior one because it’s half a mile closer. I’ve filed bad reviews on Yelp for the former location (their hygienic standards are, shall we say, spotty), but it doesn’t make much difference *even to me* when it comes to a quick takeout run.

When my wife and I found ourselves with a (vanishingly rare) opportunity to have dinner together sans offspring last weekend, it was Yelp that helped us pick Il Casale in Belmont Center. Bad reviews could have nixed our choice, but a few good ones drew us in and it turned out to be a good decision.

This applies just as much to cause-related organizations. Just as people are already making their commercial decisions based on what the community is saying about businesses, they will increasingly make decisions about which organizations to support on the same criteria. This won’t apply to the Susan G. Komen Foundation or the Red Cross (the brand equivalent of McDonald’s), but when it comes to local causes, the community will be a deciding factor.

So maybe we should stipulate a New Rule: old school advertising and branding only work in the absence of other information. When people say good things about you, it matters, and in the social media age, it’s more and more likely that your customers will see the things your community is saying about you. Give them good reasons to talk about you – and talk about what they’re talking about.

 

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Community Cause Marketing: What Makes It New

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

The assumption that institutions are active and “audiences” or “consumers” are passive is certainly not unusual – the entire edifice of marketing, which emerged out of late nineteenth century thinking, has been based on that assumption. As we’ve seen in the social media landscape over the past few years, however, that assumption was based on the reality of an asymmetrical technological relationship – advertisers had access to information and means of communication that the public generally didn’t. With the emergence of the social web that balance is shifting at lightning speed towards something much more equal. These days, the ways people increasingly prefer to communicate (email, Twitter, Facebook) are accessible to everyone. Mass communications vehicles are losing their dominance at every turn. Newspapers and magazines are struggling to find business models as people flock to online information sources. The concept of “broadcast” media is rapidly losing its meaning in the face of blogs and YouTube, which instantly give anyone the publishing reach of the New York Times or NBC.

What is clear to people watching this transformation happen is that the active ingredient of any successful institution is the people who have a relationship with that institution. Or, in the parlance of advertising, the value of a brand actually resides among the individuals who have an emotional relationship with that brand. Without people, a brand is just a logo.

In a social media-enabled world, people own the brands, not vice versa. A community of people that is passionate about an institution (be it a company or a nonprofit or something less formal) share a connection that motivates behaviors beyond simple purchasing or donating. They adopt its goals and values and ideals and equate their own success with the institution’s success.

  • Marauder Mania. Take the Belmont Marauders, in the suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts. When the Marauders take on Melrose in an away game, parents and classmates and friends travel on their own to be in the stands. Many of those parents have contributed their own money to purchase uniforms and equipment; classmates and friends have spent hours making up signs; friends and residents of Belmont – some with no personal connection to the team – invest time and money to support them. The local newspaper covers the event because it knows how deep the connection is. When the Marauders win, a palpable sense of satisfaction settles over the entire town of Belmont. When school budget cuts recently threatened to reduce funding for coaching staff, supporters funded the shortfall within weeks.In that context, it is difficult to imagine that the coaches or the school administrators “own” the Marauders brand, any more than a president or a congressman “owns” their electorate. Brand owners know that the direction they take the brand needs to represent only incremental change. If the nominal leaders chose to take the Marauders in a direction the fans didn’t want to go, you can bet the resistance would be strenuous and vocal. At some point, the fans would simply find new leaders rather than watch their brand change.
  • Apple’s Core. On the occasion of Steve Jobs’ (most recent) resignation as CEO [and more recently upon his untimely passing - MS 10/6/11], many took the opportunity to review old video clips of Jobs’ landmark product demos on YouTube and elsewhere. Watching the unveiling of the Apple Macintosh, or the iPhone, or the iPad, one gets a clear sense of the passion of Apple’s core customers. In fact, it becomes difficult to apply the term ‘customer’ to the relationship Apple’s fans have with the company. ‘Insanely great,’ isn’t a one-way marketing term, it’s a description of how Apple’s customers feel about Apple’s products, and by extension the institution that is Apple.

The connection between community and cause is at the heart of Community Cause Marketing. In each case, bonds between members of ‘tribes’ are real and deeply emotional. Both groups want the brand to succeed, and will invest their own time and energy – beyond what many would define as strictly logical – to help them do so.

Next: Why community cause marketing is happening now.

Download the full whitepaper: http://bit.ly/qEYuro

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Care and Feeding of Communities, Vol. 1

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

By this point, communities are a business fact of life. Either your business has one and you care for it as a valuable asset of your organization, or you have one and you’re not paying much attention to it. Communities are like atomic energy – they can hurt you or help you, depending on how you choose to work with them.

I recently came across a great slide deck outlining the essentials of communities by Jen Riehle at NC State, and wanted to put it out there. I’ll embed it below so you can see the original, but the summary is as follows:

  1. A community is any group with shared interests that perceives itself to be distinct from others. (Exactly how or what those interests are is secondary; the self-perception is what’s important)
  2. Increasingly, community members are using social networking sites as the hub of their activities, use of which has grown from 8% to 65% of Americans in just six years.
  3. As a group, communities generally engage in three kinds of interactions: content production, promotion (of ideas or content), and support (of each other and the commonly-understood goals of the community).
  4. To care for your community, set goals that they will support and then choose tools to achieve those goals. Collaborate with your community on all this – you can’t force them do something that they don’t want to do.
  5. Community Management tips: think about making grand gestures, engaging with your community offline, use the community’s own resources, and always be engaging them with things that drive their goals.
  6. Measure what you’re doing, to see if you’re moving forward. And always keep the community’s goals in mind. Remember that using social media is not the end, it’s a means to achieving the community’s goals.
Implicit in Jen’s deck are a couple of important insights: communities are not audiences to be addressed, they don’t belong to anyone, they know what they want (and what they don’t), and any community manager or influential serves at the mercy of the community. More on all that later. Here’s the actual deck, so you can enjoy the kickass stormtrooper illustrations.

Where is Everyone? Community-Building Online

View more presentations from Jen Riehle

Got it? Good. Let’s consider the elements of Jen’s deck to be stipulated fact, and then go from there.

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Community Cause Marketing: What makes it different

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

Joe Waters (author of Cause Marketing for Dummies) defines cause marketing as “a partnership between a nonprofit and a for-profit for mutual profit.” At the essence of Waters’ definition are two core assumptions: first, that institutions are the key players in a cause marketing relationship, and second that the goal of the partnership is predominantly (perhaps exclusively) financial.

By contrast, community cause marketing places the emphasis not on the institutions or brands involved, but squarely on the communities at the heart of those institutions. The goal of a successful community cause marketing relationship is defined by the community, and is financial only insofar as the accumulation of resources can help further the community’s goals. Put another way, the goal of a community is never “raising money,” but the outcomes that money can be used to accomplish. Those outcomes are often extremely tangible – the cleanup of a vacant lot or the painting of a fence – and can occasionally involve no funding whatsoever.

Next: Why community cause marketing is new

Download the full whitepaper: http://bit.ly/qEYuro

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What I Learned at FutureM

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

Last week was FutureM, the big marketing conference in Boston sponsored by MITX. I was lucky enough to attend a number of sessions (although not as much as I would have preferred – running an actual company kind of got in the way a bit). It was an eye-opening week, well run and tremendously useful. I saw and met a huge number of smart people, many of whom I am overjoyed to be in touch with and vow to stay so.

Coming out of the week, I had a few high-level observations.

1. We are witnessing a disruption of epic proportions. I was present during the dotcom era of the late nineties, when all the world was in the crosshairs of a set of disruptive technologies and serious paradigm shifts. Back then it was common to have to explain why websites were important and remind people to put their domain name on their print advertising. Established businesses were being encouraged by consultants and pundits (we didn’t have bloggers per se) to ask themselves what their “internet strategy” was, and the mainstream openly questioned whether the Internet was just a phase. We don’t do that sort of thing anymore.

Well, folks, I can personally testify that it’s happening again. Only this time it’s happening much faster. The implications of social media marketing threaten to disrupt things as taken-for-granted as advertising, philanthropy, and (oh, I don’t know) business cards. There’s also a lot less skepticism from the folks outside the disruption.

2. The disruption is unevenly distributed. The pioneers in technology enabled marketing I heard speak at the Gravity Summit on Monday were significantly ahead of the sessions I heard later in the week about communities and gamification and cause marketing. Just as an example – many people in the industry are finding it hard to shake the idea that ‘advertising’ isn’t top-down anymore – it’s node-based and nonlinear. I heard a lot about the role of agencies in ‘broadcasting’ to ‘audiences,’ and how big, splashy, beautiful campaigns that reach lots of people are still the name of the game.

I’m also convinced that the world outside FutureM is puzzled a bit by what was going on there. I call it the “Twitter Bubble” – the world of people whose days revolve around social media exchanges and do a lot of thinking about it. Twitter is only used by 13% of American adults (and probably a minority of those are active users) but I’m sure that 90% of the social exchanges for the people inside the bubble are Twitter-based, so it’s natural for them to assume that the world is having the same experience they are. The experience of people looking into the Twitter Bubble is probably like the experience of looking inside a fishbowl and wondering what the strange creatures inside think about all day.

3. Disruptions are destructive. It was like this last time too: watching things change so fundamentally is immensely entertaining if you get paid to watch and comment – not so much if you’re the one being disrupted. Clay Christensen speaks about how hard it is to disrupt yourself, especially if you were successful beforehand. I sympathize a little bit for the nonprofits who aren’t rushing headlong into new technologies – although it will take some time for the impact to be truly felt. Almost as bad is the role of those of us offering “disruption services” to those being disrupted. Part of Cauzoom’s job is to offer ways for social organizations to take advantage of new technologies without a huge amount of risk or effort, but persuading them that they should even try is often painful. The number of nonprofits that downloaded the whitepaper we released last week is dwarfed by the number of bloggers and journalists and agency folks who did so.

That said, the last disruption has been playing itself out over the past fifteen years (more or less coincident with my professional career, interestingly), and one thing being in the website hosting industry taught me is that there’s plenty of money to be made in industries that will take decades to die. Netflix’s first iteration is crashing as it attempts to disrupt itself, but there’s still money to be made in DVDs-through-the-mail for a few more years. That money is just as green, for now.

 

 

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Community Cause Marketing – A Primer

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Michael Sattler, Cauzoom CEO

We’re all familiar with traditional cause marketing: products branded with pink ribbons, Live Strong yellow wristbands, signs at the Whole Foods register offering to contribute funds to organic farms. Ever since American Express coined the phrase in 1983 when it offered to contribute a penny from every transaction towards restoring the Statue of Liberty, we’ve seen the practice grow. In 2011, businesses were estimated to have spent $1.6 billion annually selling things associated with causes.

But something interesting has started to happen since the advent of social media. As new technologies have begun to empower consumers in unprecedented ways, a new kind of cause marketing has started to emerge. It’s more democratic, more grass-roots, and far more personal. It’s more meaningful and more powerful, and it doesn’t rely on big budgets or big marketing agencies to craft or drive or promote. It’s enabled by technology but not technological in nature, and it’s becoming a new source of marketing power for the brands – large and small, for-profit and not-for-profit – that are savvy enough to recognize it. It also promises to be a brand new source of funding for social organizations, and ultimately an extremely powerful force for channeling resources towards social good. It’s called community cause marketing, and it’s coming your way.

What is community cause marketingHere’s how we define community cause marketing (we’ll call it CCM here just to save trees): 

Vehicles that allow communities to channel their passions towards both business value and social good.

 

 

 

 

Because people feel deep, personal connections with certain causes, they not only respond positively to commercial transactions aligned with those causes, but will actively advocate for, promote, and champion them. While this kind of emotional connection happens only seldom with traditional cause marketing, community cause marketing is predicated on the instinctive personal, social connections we make with the things that are important to us. When commercial transactions are aligned with our goals, we don’t just accept them, we embrace them. Put another way, CCM is about linking mutually beneficial financial transactions with the outcomes we care most about. 

 

 

 

 

Next: What makes CCM different from traditional cause marketing?

Download the full whitepaper: http://bit.ly/qEYuro

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I love everything about this

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Dylan Wise

When I was a kid there was nothing I wanted to be more than a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Eventually I grew up and realized I probably wouldn’t become one, because I was a human and they were cartoons. My dream then shifted to be Marty McFly, from Back to the Future. Much, much more attainable. I related to Marty. Like him I played guitar, and felt like I didn’t quite fit in. Those movies were really like an escape for me and since Back to The Future I have been a huge Michael J. Fox fan. I followed him from the Back to the Future films to Teen Wolf and Spin City. He was always kind of a hero to me.

When I found out about his struggle with Parkinson’s disease, and even more so his hiding of it, he became an even bigger hero. Last night while clicking around on twitter I saw a video posted starring Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader and Kevin Durant. The video is a trailer for Nike’s latest cause marketing campaign for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. For the next 10 days Nike will be auctioning off 1,500 pairs of the shoes Marty McFly wore in Back to the Future Part II with the proceeds going to the MJF Foundation. Wait, plus Google is going to match any contributions from now until 2012. WHAT?!

I love everything about this campaign. I mean, what’s not to love? Cool concept, great cause, excellent partnership and a brilliant execution. It brings together three really enthusiastic communities, two of which I am a part of: Sneaker junkies, Back to the Future geeks, and the Parkinson’s community. Everything about this is right on.

This is everything that cause marketing should be, take note Chik-fil-a. Oh, also can I borrow $65K from someone out there so I can wear these at my wedding?

 

-Dylan

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Summer Slump?

Posted on August 18, 2011 by ramona

A few ideas for those financially slow summer months

In November and December of every year, money starts to flow towards the non-profit world like no other time of year. You probably send your big call for donations in October, knowing that your members and donors are planning for the end of the tax year. At one of the more successful non-profits I’ve worked for, we spent most of January catching up, and then we were thrown into the major work of our annual volunteer event.

Large volunteer events seem to work best in the Spring. Just before school gets out, classrooms can come as groups, and the weather is just nice enough to get everyone outside.

By the time you’ve recovered from a big Spring event, things in the financial departments are often stalling. And this Summer… well, let’s just say that people aren’t feeling spendy.

So what can you do to jump-start your member donations again? Or better yet, how can you keep your costs low when a cash drought hits?

First of all: clean house. Do all those little things that you never have time to do. Do some filing and clean up your desk. Although this seems silly or obvious, you’ll be amazed by how refreshed you’ll feel with a clean slate in front of you.

Update the website with new photos and re-worked text. Freshen your organizations face to the world. A little website love will be appreciated by those members who may have lapsed or gotten bored by the same old message.

Speaking of members, clean up your member database. Get rid of duplicates and bad addresses – how much money do you spend sending mail that gets returned? Go through and find the folks who used to be members but have lapsed. Send them an email asking if they have ideas for how the organization could better serve the constituency. Focus on engaging donors in conversation, rather than asking them to mail a check. Subtly let them know that you’ve noticed they’re not as interested, and that you want their attention again.

Take some time to organize the office.

Once you can see it all again, look at what you have and work on the wish list. Identify a few items that you could really use, but that are outside the everyday spending price range, like a projector or new computer. If you don’t already have a wish list on your website, put it up there. You never know what your fans and members have lying around in the garage.

Once you know what you need, aim to get those things for free. One small non-profit I’ve worked for receives free office supplies. How? A teacher who always brings her classroom to the volunteer events puts out a call to parents, who then send their kids to school with a ream of paper, some pens, maybe some staples. Once a year, they deliver piles of paper, white and colored, pens, pencils, highlighters, tape, post-its, and all kinds of other things. This kind of community support is a great demonstration of how much your organization is appreciated – thank your donors publicly and remind your large funders that even school kids are pitching in.

And if you can’t get those wish list items for free, hold a mini-drive. Of course, this quiet time is the perfect time to have a project on Cauzoom. Ask the community of volunteers and members to buy some gift certificates – for things they might buy anyway or as a gift for someone else – and at the same time you can replace that ominously slow computer, or buy much needed supplies. Cauzoom offers a way to engage those members and volunteers who haven’t been able or willing to donate directly for a while.

Consider an inexpensive project that combines family fun with education about your mission and the work you do. Hold an art day and use some of the final pieces as Thank You card designs that can then be used as membership premiums. Use Cauzoom to raise money for supplies and printing costs. Give parents an easy way to hang out with their kids, and always have a donations jar handy (with some fives and tens in it so it looks like others are giving already). Have an email sign-up list handy, too, in case your faithful followers bring their friends.

Every small event can be an opportunity for people to donate, and even small gatherings serve as a reminder of all the good things you do. If you can hold an event that doesn’t cost much money, and doesn’t take a lot of employee time, you are doing your organization a favor that will give back in time: events serve to build community.

Your volunteers and members are a community of people who probably don’t know that much about each other yet – give them opportunities to spend time together. Hold an educational walk for singles who want to meet other people that are interested in the work your organization does.

If you can combine one or two low-maintenance events with an office re-org and a website and database clean-up, your summer will be over before you know it. You will have connected with your members and volunteers and helped them to connect with each other. Some percentage will renew or become members right away, and all will remember the fun they had when it comes time for that year-end appeal letter.

When you’re thinking of new strategies to bring in cash, remember there are other ways to make your organization more efficient and effective. Take any and every opportunity to remind your supporters that your organization was founded to do good work for the community, and that when everyone pitches in just a little bit, big things can happen. Now clean up that desk!

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