by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 21, 2006 | Blog, Cause Marketing
How do you convince someone to contribute to your cause – whether in time or money? This is the eternal question for most nonprofit organizations. Another big question is how to get your cause in front of millions of potential donors.
Canadian organization Right to Play seems to have done something right. They are “an athlete-driven international humanitarian organization that uses sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world.”
After winning the Olympic gold medal in speedskating, American Joey Cheek announced that he would be donating the entire $25,000 that he would receive from the US Olympic Committee to Right to Play to support their programs for refugee children from Darfur who are now in camps in Chad. After placing second in Saturday’s race, he pledged the $15,000 he would receive for his silver medal. Even more impressive is the fact that, as a speedskater, he is not rolling in corporate endorsement deals — $40,000 is a substantial proportion of his income for the year.
In the traditional post-competition news conference, gold medalists generally describe the thrill of victory and the agony of previous defeats. But Cheek would not address that lighter side until he had made his announcement, well aware that the world might never again pay attention to him.
“I can take the time to gush about how wonderful I feel,” he said, “or I can use it for something productive.”
Cheek challenged his corporate sponsors and other Olympic advertisers to match his donations. Since his gold medal win, over $250,000 of pledges have come in from ten corporate sponsors and other donors via Right to Play’s website. Their website received about 100,000 hits in just two days after his announcement.
How has Right to Play succeeded in bringing all of this attention to itself? First, the president and CEO of the organization, Johann Koss, is an Olympic speedskater himself, who donated the proceedings from his own gold medal to RtP’s precursor organization. He has assembled an international roster of hundreds of athletes who serve as ambassadors and supporters for the organization’s message. As a role model, he is able to motivate his peers to join him through his credibility and understanding of what other athletes need in order to participate.
Second, the organization is promoting itself in a venue that is logically tied to the program’s mission and target audience. Having a presence at the Olympics is an obvious piece of the strategy. They have a “hub” in the Athlete’s Village in Torino where the athletes can learn more about Right To Play and pledge their intentions to be a Right To Play Athlete Supporter. They are sponsoring a photo exhibition in downtown Torino that highlights the work RtP is doing around the world. Athlete-signed merchandise is being auctioned off on eBay, and they also have their own branded sweatshirts and other items on sale in Torino.
Finally, they provide compelling programs that channel athletes and sports fans into a way of helping less fortunate children and communities that utilizes their existing skills and interests. The focus of their SportWorks program is child and community development, while their SportHealth programs “leverage the convening and influencing power of sport to provide health education and encourage healthy lifestyle behaviours. Specifically, SportHealth teaches the importance of vaccinations, HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria prevention.” What athlete wouldn’t want to do what they do best while also helping save lives? Right to Play capitalizes on the appeal of their program methodology, not just their outcomes.
For a look at other programs communicating about health through sport, take a look at the Communication Initiative’s latest issue of the Drum Beat.
UPDATE:
Nancy Schwartz at the Getting Attention blog has posted an analysis from the other side of the coin — what did Joey Cheek do right to bring attention to both the cause and himself?
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 19, 2006 | Blog, Marketing
This week’s Carnival Of Marketing is now up at Simplenomics. I’m excited to have one of the seven featured articles up this week, and there are many other interesting posts as well. I hope you will check it out!
I will be hosting the Carnival in May, and am looking forward to it. Great job this week, Mike!
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 16, 2006 | Blog, Social Marketing, Social Media
I’ve had all I can stands and I can’t stands no more. – Popeye
Social marketing. It’s brand-new, word-of-mouth, viral, social networking, blogging, buzzing, consumer-generated media, right?
WRONG!
Looking at Technorati results, you would think that “social marketing” is all about the use of new media, social networking and Web 2.0 applications. Because bloggers have these things on their minds, not surprisingly, they write about them. But increasingly they are using the term “social marketing” as a catch-all phrase to describe what I would call “social network marketing.”
Google the term. You’ll see that the phrase “social marketing” already has a very specific meaning. I would define it as the use of marketing techniques to bring about positive behavior change related to health and social issues. You have to go through five pages of search results that follow that definition before you come across a link to Forrester Research, which offers a “Social Marketing Boot Camp” on “new technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS.”
Even people who should know better, like Chris Perry (Sr. VP at PR company Weber Shandwick), who says “he has followed the social marketing movement through the Going Social blog since 2002,” are using the term incorrectly. CMO Magazine (“the resource for marketing executives”) ran a story called “Social Marketing in Four Flavors,” which talks solely about word of mouth, blogs, RSS and podcasting. And the Association of Internet Marketing and Sales is offering an event called “Social Marketing: Tapping Into The Power Of Connected Customers” that is clearly not about bringing about social change, but bigger profits. I have found many other examples as well.
Keeping these two marketing subdisciplines distinct and clearly defined is in everyone’s best interest. Imagine the confusion that someone searching for information on blogging or word of mouth marketing would have if they googled “social marketing.” There is not a useful link for miles around in Google distance. Likewise, I am constantly frustrated as I search for others writing on my kind of social marketing in the blogosphere. Everyone is better off if the term keeps the meaning it has had for a quarter century, rather than having the new definition propagate until nobody knows what anyone else is talking about.
This is not to say that social marketing does not or should not use the many useful tools offered by social network marketing. But they are not one and the same.
So, new “social marketers,” please continue the great work you are doing. But let’s come up with a new term to use – whether it’s “social network marketing,” “consumer-generated media,” “social media,” “word of mouth marketing” or anything else you prefer.
But leave us our one small piece of semantic real estate.
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 16, 2006 | Blog, Gaming
The Darfur Digital Activist Contest brings together student activism, technology and the cachet of the MTV and Reebok brands. mtvU (the network’s college student-targeted website) and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation are offering up to $50,000 for the development and marketing of a computer-based game designed to raise awareness and stop the genocide in Darfur. They have selected three student team finalists and voting is going on right now to select the winner.
The games include a child running to fetch water while dodging Janjaweed in jeeps, a Darfurian survivor returning to her burned out village while navigating threats to her survival, a simulation of a UN worker trying to keep rival tribes apart, and an action game in which the player works to disarm the Sudanese government infrastructure through nonviolence.
While I don’t generally connect video games with reducing violence, this is a clever and creative way of engaging students through a medium with which they spend a lot of time. And MTV has turned over development of the product to the members of the target audience who know best what will be effective with their peers. It will be interesting to see whether the final game actually makes an impact in awareness. With $50,000 behind it and the promotional resources of the network, it could be quite successful.
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 10, 2006 | Blog, Marketing
Who would have suspected ten (or maybe even five) years ago that cell phones would evolve into a multifunction tool that allows you to surf the internet, check your email, take pictures, send text messages, download and listen to music, get GPS directions, keep your schedule and contacts organized, play games, watch TV, and have your fortune read — let alone talk on the phone? How many of us foresaw a few years ago that millions of people would share their deepest personal and professional thoughts on blogs (over 27 million blogs now, with a new one starting each second)? How do these trends affect what we do to try to reach our target audiences?
Trendwatching.com gives us insight into the techniques they use to track consumer trends in their latest briefing on Tips & Tricks on How to Become a Better Trend Watcher. What exactly is a trend? They define it as “a manifestation of something that has ‘unlocked’ or newly serviced an existing (and hardly ever changing) consumer need, desire, want, or value” — something that we definitely need to pay attention to as social marketers.
The three main challenges they lay out that we face in watching and using trends in our own work are:
- Management and corporate culture (‘They’re just not into trends’)
- Resources (Information overload or starvation, lack of time and/or lack of funds)
- Understanding and applying trends (How to think Big Picture? What to actually do with your point of view?)
They offer ways to deal with each of these challenges. Here is their handy list of the types of resources you can use to spot trends:
- Papers, websites, blogs, news, newsletters (online and offline); also see VIRTUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
- Magazines (online and offline), books
- TV, movies, radio
- Seminars, fairs, trade shows
- Eaves-dropping, chat rooms, conversations
- In-house trend units
- Advertising at large
- Other trend firms, thinkers (philosophers, architects, sociologists), management gurus
- Street life, travel
- Friends, colleagues, family
- Customers(!)
- Trend reports
- Consultants, researchers, experts
- Universities
- Shops, museums, hotels, airports
- Catalogues
- Competition
And once you have identified a trend, what then? Ask yourself if the trend has the potential to change any of the following:
- Vision
Influence your company’s vision
- New business concepts
Come up with a new business concept, an entirely new venture
- New products, services, experiences
Add ‘something’ new for a certain customer segment
- Marketing, advertising, PR
Speak the language of those consumers ‘setting the trend’: we haven’t come across too many trends that were not useful in shaping (part of your) marketing messages.
- Internal
Improve your organizational processes
I highly recommend reading the whole article and exploring trendwatching.com’s database of trend briefings. They are fascinating and may help you look at what’s happening around you in a whole new way.
by Nedra Weinreich | Feb 8, 2006 | Blog, Social Media
Social marketers increasingly need to be web-savvy in order to take advantage of online opportunities to promote their issues. Part of my hope in writing this blog is to help people working in social marketing to utilize the Web 2.0 tools that harness the power of social networks to spur individual and social change – ideas like user-generated content, peer networking, and the development of online communities.
I have just learned of a project called NetSquared (tagline: “remixing the web for social change”), which works to provide nonprofits with the know-how to adopt new online technologies. It’s a great website to use to learn more about how the web can augment your social marketing programs or nonprofit outreach efforts.
Daniel Ben-Horin, president of CompuMentor, which created NetSquared, describes its mission:
We will catalyze the catalyzers. We will use the new tools and culture shift to engender conversations among the early adopters (who often don’t know of each other), between early and later adopters, between nonprofits and technology developers, between nonprofits and the growing army of technology helpers, and between all of the foregoing and the major technology companies (who have so much to gain from this dialogue in terms of marketing and realizing technology’s social potential).
If you are reading this blog, it’s likely that you are already pretty conversant with using the web. Many in the social marketing field, though, still think of the internet as only websites and e-mail. We need to move toward Social Marketing 2.0 so we can utilize the widest possible set of tools available to us. I will be putting together a workshop to teach social marketers how to use the latest technologies in their programs, so please let me know if you have any interest in this issue.
Also, NetSquared will be having a conference in May that will bring together nonprofits, technology people, philanthropists and others involved in the confluence between these groups.
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. 
