by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 5, 2007 | Blog, Social Marketing
Once again, it’s time to roll out the big top for the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. As always, it features the seven best posts for nonprofits from across the blogosphere, this week focusing on social marketing.
Starting it off is Paul Jones of Cause Related Marketing, who gives us the good, the bad and the ugly of using celebrities in your social marketing.
Craig Lefebvre of On Social Marketing and Social Change reports back from the Mobile Persuasion conference about how mobile technologies are being used for behavior and social change. Don’t miss the free Captology Forums being offered to continue the discussions.
Carol Kirshner of Driving in Traffic describes how using the unexpected and piquing people’s curiosity can make your messages stick.
Matthew Monberg of Beyond Giving urges us to make our messages relevant by building them around the needs for connection and reward.
Kivi Leroux Miller of Nonprofit Communication provides a clever example of an advocacy campaign that uses a calendar of not-so-pretty pin-ups to make its point.
Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention notes some other creative examples promoting condoms and other social issues that she found at Houtlust, also one of my favorite sources for news on innovative social marketing campaigns from around the world. [By the way, an interesting bit of trivia I learned from Marc (Mr. Houtlust himself) is that in Dutch, the word “Houtlust” is nothing kinky, but an old-fashioned word that people name their homes or boats; the word hout means wood, and the blog is so named because from the window of Marc’s studio in the Dutch Riverlands he can see his stove wood. Sorry to disappoint those of you with more active imaginations.]
Speaking of condoms, CK stirred things up this week at the Marketing Profs Daily Fix with a post on New York City’s efforts to market safe sex with its own branded condom. She solicited ideas from other marketers on how to create the brand/slogan, which she is going to be presenting to the people at NYC City Hall for their consideration.
And for the bonus host post from yours truly, I discuss how we as marketers need to make sure we think about what is rude, crude and socially unacceptable in light of the kerfuffle that Cartoon Network marketing caused in Boston last week and a billboard that was pulled because it had the word “sucks” on it.
Kivi, the founder of the Carnival, is hosting next week. If you would like to submit a post for consideration, send it to npc.carnival AT yahoo DOT com with your name, your blog’s name and the URL of the post (not your blog homepage). The deadline is Friday, 8:00 p.m. ET.
Thanks for coming by! Feel free to stay and poke around for a while if you’re new here.
[UPDATED 2/8/07: Fixed links to Beyond Giving, which just moved to a new URL.]
Technorati Tags: carnival of nonprofit consuhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifltants, social marketing
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 4, 2007 | Blog, Social Marketing
Better World Advertising, which is known around these parts for its controversial in-your-face HIV prevention social marketing, is taking a different tack with a new campaign to address HIV risk behavior during meth use in San Francisco.
A billboard went up above Cafe Flore in the Castro today (Thursday, February 1) and newspaper advertisements will run all month. The ads are pretty much blank except for text in red ink that reads “(your ideas here)” over a white background. In yellow text the ads ask, “What should we do about METH [sic] in our community?”
The public is then asked to send its “advice, experiences and opinions” to the Web site http://www.sfmeth.org. [The new Web site went live February 1.]
The health department has budgeted $185,000 for the meth campaign, but will not know the total cost for it until the final concept is selected. The billboard alone is costing about $15,000 for the month.
Both Tracey Packer, the department’s interim HIV prevention director, and Les Pappas, owner of the ad agency, insisted the approach is not a response to the criticism in recent months of the previous campaigns.
“We definitely, if there are people out there that have ideas and opinions about this, we want to give them an opportunity or method to participate. I know there are some people who probably feel like there isn’t enough participation in the development of these kinds of things,” said Pappas. “We have a lot of people involved in these projects but nobody really knows about it. This will make it very clear we are interested in people’s opinions.”
Packer said she wanted to ask for the public’s ideas “because the issue of meth in a campaign is not simple and straightforward.”
“We would like to see what community members have to say. What should be said about meth use?” asked Packer. “We really hope community members respond to us and it will build a better campaign by getting community input.”
With four companies using consumer-generated ads in the SuperBowl on Sunday (NFL, Doritos, Alka Seltzer & Chevrolet), Better World seems to want to get into the act. Not to mention that this approach hinges upon community participation — something that the ad agency has been criticized for not taking into account in past campaigns.
Is this a good way to create social marketing campaigns? Can citizen marketers be effective in reducing HIV risk during meth use, or is it something that should be limited to less important products like marketing movies or cars?
I think the answer is not clearcut. The approach they are taking seems more like conducting a citywide focus group than like the commercial CGM campaigns linked above that solicited actual ads. They are not leaving the strategy or execution to the whims of the public, but perhaps will get some new ideas from people within the target audience. The risk they take with this approach is that it is not yet seen as a legitimate or accepted form of marketing by many (and especially by public agencies not used to being on the cutting edge).
Supervisor Bevan Dufty called it a waste of money and makes the city, which established a task force on crystal meth almost two years ago, seem stupid and lacking a plan.
“I am dumbfounded,” said Dufty after being shown the ads. “It begs the question if we have had a task force operating for two years why would we pay for a billboard that makes it seem we have no ideas or suggestions?”
The key to the campaign will be in how well Better World is able to combine the input they receive from the community with best practices in social marketing. Just because someone has what seems like an innovative or interesting idea does not mean that it will be effective in bringing about behavior change. People love to throw out cute slogans, but a catchphrase does not a strategy make. We’ll see what is rolled out in June, when the final campaign is supposed to be ready. I wish them luck in sorting through the submissions and turning them into an effective campaign.
Technorati Tags: cgm, social marketing, hiv, meth, san francisco
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 2, 2007 | Blog, Resources
From time to time, I come across odds and ends that I want to let you know about but may not warrant a full post. I prefer to combine them together rather than having lots of short one or two liner posts a la Instapundit (Indeed.). These posts shall henceforth be named… [insert drumroll/trumpets] …the Tip Jar. Here’s what we have this week:
- 64.9% of online community members who participate in social causes online say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they started participating in social networks, while 43.7 % of online community members say they engage more in social activism since they started participating in online communities. – from the USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project (via WOM Research)
- Back in September I wrote about the youth screenwriting contest sponsored by Scenarios USA. Scenarios partnered with Rap-It-Up, the award-winning public education initiative of BET and the Kaiser Family Foundation, to launch the “What’s the REAL DEAL on Growing up in the Age of HIV/AIDS?” story and scriptwriting contest. They have a winner, and the new film “Reflections,” written by high school senior Kayana Ray, is premiering on BET on February 4th at 12:00pm.
- Food marketers should not pretend that fruit-flavored kids’ foods contain actual fruit, but parents and kids need to learn to be more skeptical of the pictures on the packaging as well. A new report (pdf) came out from the Prevention Institute that contained some “no duh” moments (e.g., Fruity Pebbles and Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries do not contain any fruit), but is also a good reminder that many people need help learning how to read and understand food labels better. (thanks to Tamar for the tip)
- There has been a lively discussion over on the Social Marketing Listserv this week about definitions of social marketing in theory and practice. If you would like to become a part of this international e-mail network of social marketers, here are instructions for how to subscribe. Send an e-mail message to listproc@listproc.georgetown.edu with “subscribe soc-mktg yourname” in the body of the message (your name goes in place of “yourname”). But be sure to keep the instructions you’ll receive so you don’t have to harass the other listserv members with numerous incorrectly sent “unsubscribe” messages if you change your mind.
- I am hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants on Monday. If you have a blog post you would like to submit for potential inclusion — particularly on the theme of social marketing for nonprofits — send it to me by Sunday at npc.carnival@yahoo.com.
- Finally, tonight begins the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees. So eat some fresh or dried fruits and nuts, plant a tree (or let someone else do it for you) and think about all the wonderful things that trees do for us. Give your favorite tree a big hug.
Photo Credit: Paul Schreiber
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 31, 2007 | Blog, Marketing
A couple of things converged today that got me thinking about how we — as a society and as marketers — set standards for what is considered acceptable in marketing campaigns.
I got a note from Chris Kieff at MSCO’s Unconventional Thinking pointing to an interesting and lively controversy unfolding on the blog. The company had leased two billboards leading into Manhattan from Clear Channel to promote MSCO CEO Mark Stevens’ book. The billboards simply present the book’s website address: www.YOUR MARKETING SUCKS.com, with no other copy or graphics. Clear Channel approved the billboards, they signed the contract, and they went up with what sounds like a good response from people who want to improve their current marketing situation. Then last week, he got a call from an exec at an affiliate of Berkshire Hathaway, who was irate because he said his 6-year old daughter saw the word “sucks” on the billboard, and threatened that if it was not taken down, they would “feel the full wrath of the Berkshire Hathaway empire.” A couple of days later, one of the offending billboards was covered up without any notice or explanation. When they called Clear Channel, they found out that someone in the New Rochelle Mayor’s office had called in with a complaint about the billboard, so they had pulled it.
While Mark is framing this as primarily a censorship/first amendment/abuse of corporate power issue, I’m more interested in the very important questions this story raises about what the standards should be for the marketing images and words we put out there. How do we balance promoting our messages in an attention-getting (and sometimes intentionally provocative) way with the social norms around what is acceptable and what is offensive? A debate broke out within the comments of the post between those who think there is nothing wrong with using the word “sucks,” despite its sexual origins and rude nature, and those (primarily parents) who are not comfortable with their children being exposed to the word.
The other thing that happened today is the Cartoon Network ad campaign gone very, very wrong in Boston. Traffic came to a halt as police bomb units scrambled around the city to safely detonate and remove 38 electronic circuit boards with some components that were “consistent with an improvised explosive device” left around the city on bridges, highways and subway stations. They turned out to be magnetic lights in the shape of characters from the Adult Swim animated show Aqua Team Hunger Force (appropriately, in view of the chaos they wrought, raising their middle fingers). This is a larger-scale version of the Los Angeles news rack that was blown up by the bomb squad because the device that was rigged to play the Mission Impossible theme song to promote the movie when the door was opened had fallen on top of the pile of newspapers, protruding wires and all.
Ann Handley makes the very good point:
First, market responsibly. In a post 9-11 world, it seems near crazy to tuck blinking packages with wires protruding near major municipal hubs and landmarks. Fenway Park? Sullivan Square MBTA stop? What were they thinking? Last time I went through airport security, they confiscated my 10-year-old’s SpongeBob toothpaste. That’s how crazy the world is, and unfortunately that’s the lens through which municipal leaders view any blinking devices.
There are two aspects of our marketing we need to think about that these examples illustrate – the what and the how:
- What is the content of the images and messages? Is it worth being deliberately provocative — either in words or pictures — to get our audience’s attention? How will people outside of the target audience interpret the copy and images? What might be some of the negative consequences — to our organization or to particular segments of society — that could come from going forward with this campaign?
- How are we going to get the message out there? What could go wrong with the execution? Is there any way that the promotion could be mistaken for something more sinister? Could the promotion have the effect of inconveniencing other people for any reason?
These are all questions that may not have a clear-cut answer, and different people will answer them in different ways for the same campaign. You will need to decide whether the risks of the campaign going wrong somehow are worth the benefits you will get by getting noticed.
Keep in mind that it’s not all about you, your organization and your product. It’s not even all about your target audience. We operate within a larger world, and we do have a responsibility to the greater society. There should be a difference between what can be done in the public commons and what can be done when it’s just between you and your adult audience.
Social marketers work with many issues that have the potential to offend various segments of society, or are not appropriate for younger children. A campaign I worked on to promote contraception by young adults had several newspapers refuse to run our ads that contained basic facts about sex and birth control, and we received a few complaints from readers of those that did run them. But we decided that the blowback was worth getting the information out to the people who needed it. While being provocative for its own sake is not always the best approach, sometimes it takes something shocking to wake people up and get them to take action. There are no clear-cut rules except to think your marketing through as well as you can before you decide to épater les bourgeois so that it doesn’t come back to kick you in the derriere later on.
Graphics/Photos: Target-Sucks.com, AP
Technorati Tags: marketing, advertising, msco, aqua team hunger force
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 31, 2007 | Behavior Change, Blog
One of the things I love about Los Angeles County is that every restaurant (and other establishments that serve food) is required to post the results of its most recent health inspection in the window by the entrance. Depending on the score they received for about 100 different factors like food temperatures, food preparation practices, vermin (yuck!) and presence of hot water, the restaurants are assigned a grade of A, B, C, or the actual score if below 70. The signs (which look like the picture above) have to be posted, and they are large enough that they can even be seen by someone driving by.
Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but this was a brilliant idea on the part of the LA Public Health Department. This system has been in place for perhaps about 10 years, and LA was, as far as I know, the first to adopt this idea. Though it’s old news around here, it’s still a groundbreaking system for a couple of reasons.
First, it puts power into the hands of restaurant customers, who can make an informed decision whether they want to risk getting a foodborne illness from a restaurant that is not following entirely safe food preparation and storage practices. If I don’t see an “A” in the window, I drive right by and go somewhere else. Why take the risk? Before this system, the only way we’d know that the restaurant did not pass its health inspection with flying colors is by asking the restaurant or the health department. I doubt that happened very often.
Second, it puts pressure on the restaurants to make sure they get an “A.” While they will probably not be closed if they receive a “B” (unless there are code violations that necessitate shutting down until the problem is fixed), the negative effects of the lower grade means they will have fewer customers, who may not return even when the grade returns to an “A.” In my experience, word of mouth spreads quickly when a popular restaurant loses its top grade, and even people who do not see the grade in the window themselves stay away.
Imagine if this system spread to other industries: cell phone companies required to post the number of complaints they received that month right on their websites, airlines required to post their scores for flight delays and lost luggage, hospitals with a placard out front showing how many of their patients came down with a hospital-acquired infection last month… We would come closer to Adam Smith’s vision of using perfect information to let the invisible hand work its magic in the marketplace. And we could all make choices that would leave us healthier and happier.
Photo Credit: hawaii
Technorati Tags: health, ratings, los angeles, restaurants, food
by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 30, 2007 | Blog, Marketing
Nancy Schwartz asks, while soliciting entries for the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants:
How do we, as nonprofit communicators, engage audiences who are overloaded with marketing messages and images?
Context: Marketing and communications are everywhere. On steps, windows, tray tables on airplanes. You know the deal – and all that’s in addition to everything else that’s online and offline. Ubiquitous is the only word to describe it.
- As a result, our audiences are more saturated than ever with data, images.
- And more skeptical.
How do we:
- Penetrate the glaze of audience overload when eyes, ears and brains are simply overwhelmed
- Communicate not only the basics, but the often complex or new ideas necessary for success in nonprofit advocacy and fundraising campaigns, program delivery, etc.
- Compete with for-profit marketers who have far more resources than we do (how can we be smarter)?
All good questions, and ones that social marketers face constantly. Rohit recently wrote about the ubiquity of advertising and even the examples he came up with as so-far unused advertising space (e.g., fruits and vegetables, public restroom doors and hubcaps) have not entirely escaped the ad industry’s touch.
Despite this expansion of advertising into anything and everything that might be seen by a pair of eyeballs, marketers are also starting to realize that advertising is not necessarily the best way to get their product noticed. Hence, the trend toward product placement in television shows, movies, and even blogs.
I’ve written about this before, and I think they’re onto something. Think about getting your message out in the places that people actually pay attention (as opposed to the increasingly Tivo-ed commercial breaks or mind-numbing advertising everywhere we look). Move away from methods that shout out in blinking lights M*A*R*K*E*T*I*N*G. Move toward becoming integrated into the things people are already doing and engaged with. Embedding your message into entertainment content is one way to get that attention.
Developing relationships with your audience is another way. If they like and trust you, they will listen to what you have to say even while screening out the thousands of other marketing messages they are exposed to during the course of a day.
What are some ways a nonprofit or public agency could do this?
- Reach out to fan communities. While not every nonprofit has the resources or connections to persuade the writers of Desperate Housewives to show a character getting a mammogram or talk about getting her kids immunized, there are ways of reaching TV fans outside of advertising or “product placement.” If a show has a character that is dealing with a particular health or social issue that your organization addresses, you can reach thousands of the show’s fans by leaving a post on the show’s message board with information and a link to your website (e.g., the Desperate Housewives message board has almost 45,000 posts and probably many more people reading the messages without writing anything). Or perhaps a character on the show has a blog you can leave a comment on. Writing about the episode on your organization’s blog and tagging it in Technorati will reach anyone searching for information about the show.
- Go to where your audience is and talk to them there. You can go into virtual worlds like Second Life or MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach to talk to people about your issue. Engage in discussions on health-related message boards where people are asking questions and looking for information. Offline, sponsor a race car and distribute information at the track, work with a local restaurant to highlight healthy alternatives on the menu and create placemats or table tents with nutritional information, supply handstamps to clubs with the phone number of your safe ride program on them.
- Create your own content in which to embed your message. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal has an article (WSJ subscribers only) about how the New York Federal Reserve Bank has created a series of comic books to teach students about banking, foreign exchange and other kinds of financial information. (I just have to share this great line from the article: “Although a certain former Fed chairman ranked as a superhero on Wall Street, these comics do not feature Alan Greenspan in leotard and cape, wielding a magic clarinet against the evil forces of inflation.”) Another example is advergames – online games designed to feature a product in the context of an engaging game. mtvU and the Kaiser Family Foundation are sponsoring another contest to develop a web-based game along the lines of the previous winner, Darfur is Dying. This time they are looking for a game related to HIV/AIDS. Other ideas for content could include things like a concert, an entertaining video posted to YouTube, a ringtone, or whatever your audience is into.
- Make it easy for people to share your message with friends. When your message goes from peer to peer, it is much more powerful than coming directly from you. Provide ways that people can easily send content from your website to their friends. Provide coupons or incentives for bringing a friend to your organization. Make your fans into your brand ambassadors. A friend’s recommendation gets past the marketing filter.
- Develop a relationship with your audience members. Blogs are a great way to build a community and develop relationships with the people who are interested in what your organization does. Get the permission of people who visit your organization’s website or attend your events to send them updates on your activities and offerings. Put a human face on your organization so people feel like you are an old friend. Provide them with ways to create content and engage in a conversation with your organization and other supporters like themselves.
- Partner with other brands to integrate your message. Your audience already spends time shopping — whether at the grocery store, the mall or online — and has emotional relationships (positive & negative) with certain products. Find the brands that they prefer and try to develop partnerships with them to get your message out through cause marketing approaches. Even if you are too small to get Coca-Cola or Target to pay attention to you, look at local resources like small businesses or the branch of a larger company in your neighborhood as potential partners.
By avoiding glaring M*A*R*K*E*T*I*N*G methods and focusing your efforts on embedding your message into content and building relationships with your audience, you can get past the glazed eyes of advertising overload and into their attention zone. Make sure you make it worth their while when you get there.
[UPDATE: Here is the link to Nancy’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, which features perspectives on the same question from 14 other bloggers. It’s well worth a read!]
Photo Credit: e d d d d d d d i e
Technorati Tags: marketing, nonprofit, advertising
Nedra helps nonprofits and public agencies create positive change on health and social issues through social marketing and transmedia storytelling strategies at Weinreich Communications since founding the company in 1995. She helps organizations make a difference for the populations they serve by strategically designing programs that draw on state-of-the-art behavior change techniques, digital media approaches and the power of stories. 
