by Nedra Weinreich | Apr 13, 2015 | Blog, Resources, Social Marketing
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Weinreich Communications, I’m thrilled to share with you a new ebook I created to help social impact professionals get started using social marketing in their programs. This free 22-page publication is designed to inspire those working in nonprofits or the public sector, and others seeking to create health and social change in their communities, to use the effective, systematic social marketing approach.
Even if you’re already a social marketing pro, I hope you’ll download the ebook to share with your colleagues or clients who may not be as familiar with how marketing can be used to create social impact. It lays out the key principles of social marketing, provides lots of resources and has a section for those who are considering social marketing as a career. Please help me spread the word about social marketing and let me know what you think about the ebook. Thanks!
by Nedra Weinreich | Jun 24, 2010 | Blog, Resources
So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.
Lots of big news to share! Here’s the latest…
- The next Social Marketing University will be in Atlanta, GA on August 16, 2010. I know that for many of us, taking time away from work can be difficult. That’s why the next Social Marketing University training will be a “crash course” where you’ll get much of the same social marketing information offered in longer SMU trainings in an intensive one-day format. It’s the day prior to the CDC’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media in the same venue. If you’ll be attending that research- and practice-focused conference, SMU will provide you with a good foundation in the principles of social marketing so that you can get the most out of the conference sessions. The training is, of course, open to people who are not attending the conference as well and will not focus exclusively on health issues. The early registration discount for SMU ends July 16th, and a student discount is available.
- Several fantastic books have come out in the past month or so related to nonprofit marketing, written by fellow bloggers who I have known virtually for ages, and who are all at the top of the field. Each book deserves a blog post unto itself, but I don’t want to wait that long to tell you about them. They are:
- Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits by Jay Levinson, Frank Adkins and Chris Forbes – This book will teach you how to use the well-known Guerrilla Marketing approach and apply it to the unique situations of nonprofits. With strong guidance on how to develop the right mindset and create an effective strategy, plus 250 tactics to put to use right away, the book will give nonprofits a whole new way of thinking about marketing.
- The Nonprofit Marketing Guide by Kivi Leroux Miller – This book is the logical extension of Kivi’s nonprofit marketing empire. Drawing on her fantastic blogging, trainings and webinars, this book offers clear instruction on how to create a nonprofit marketing strategy and implement it effectively.
- The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine – Beth, the grand-dame of nonprofit social media and Allison, a well-known author and blogger herself, offer a new model for how nonprofits can get rid of the fortress mentality and hook up with “free agents” inside and out of their organization to maximize their effectiveness. Using social media provides an opportunity for bringing together distributed social networks to work toward a common goal, and real success requires organizations to start operating differently.
- Speaking of books, the new edition of my book Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Change for Good is in the process of being typeset at this very moment. It has lots of new material and case studies, including a big section on social media, and is scheduled to come out in mid-October. Whether or not you have a copy of the first edition, I think this new one is substantially different enough that you will want to buy a copy for yourself or your staff.
- While it’s not related to social marketing, I would be remiss if I talked about books on my own blog without mentioning that my husband just published a book as well. It’s called Who Really Wrote the Bible? (And Why It Should Be Taken Seriously Again). It’s a literary whodunnit that takes on the established dogma, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing I hope you’ll check it out.
- Fard Johnmar, the driving force behind the health marketing community Path of the Blue Eye, is thinking ever bigger and planning a unique event called unNiched 2010. Not a traditional conference, unNiched is a collaborative online and offline “bootcamp” for health marketing communicators, where attendees from across professional disciplines will come together to apply the unNiched Innovation Model to help a real-world organization – the Lung Cancer Alliance. Learning by doing, plus learning from each other, will be an amazing educational experience (Disclaimer: I’m on the Advisory Committee). For a discount on registration, use code ‘unich10disc’.
- Finally, I’m excited to have been offered a free airplane ticket by Virgin America and Klout to fly out to Toronto (apparently they consider me an “influencer” –disclaimer-). As much as I’d love to spend a few days just exploring the city, I’d also like to make the most of it by seeing if any organizations (e.g., nonprofits, government agencies, hospitals, universities) would be interested in social marketing or social media training/consultation while I’m in town. Please drop me a line soon if you’d like to set something up at a discounted rate.
There are so many other things and thoughts I’d like to share with you, so I’m hoping I can fit some more blogging into my schedule. Until then, don’t forget you can usually find me on Twitter if you want to see the latest ideas and resources I’m excited about!
Photo: Fifi LePew
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 14, 2009 | Blog, Resources
Here are some assorted bits and pieces I’ve collected for your reading pleasure:
- Starting next week I’ll be offering a new webinar series on Social Media for Social Marketers. The four 60-minute webinars (at 11 am Pacific time) are:
- October 22 – Designing a Social Media Strategy for Change
- October 29 – Blogging and Beyond: Tools to Build Your Movement
- November 12 – Twitteracy for Social Marketers
- November 19 – Monitoring and Evaluating Social Media
If you are interested, but can’t make a particular event live, you can always view the archived events and ask me any questions afterward. For more information about the webinars and to register, see the Social Marketing University Online page.
- Recently, more attention is being paid to applying design thinking to social marketing; in other words, how can we design the environment or product to make the desired behavior the most natural and easy choice? The best resource I have found in thinking through how to apply a design approach to behavior change is Dan Lockton’s Design with Intent Toolkit. With lots of examples and different angles to consider, it’s a great introduction to the discipline. I found it so helpful, in fact, that I created a companion worksheet to go along with it: the Design Approach for Behavior Change Worksheet.
- If you haven’t seen Franke James’ visual essay about an event that brought Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Kingwell together to discuss social change, you’ll find it a treat for your eyes as well as your brain.
- The UK’s Ingenious Group is sponsoring the first-ever Global Social Marketing Awards. For-profit and nonprofit organizations can enter in categories like Best Global Social Marketing Campaign, Most Effective Strategic Partnership, Most Effective Use of Budget, and more. Finalists will be announced soon, with winners receiving awards in December. This is a great idea, but with the entry fees at £175 (~$280) per category entry, it’s a bit too pricey for any organization but a for-profit agency to enter, greatly limiting the candidates to choose from. I’d love to see awards like these done with no barriers to entry, with campaigns nominated and voted on by their social marketing peers. Perhaps it’s an idea for the Global Social Marketing Association to consider once it gets up and running.
- A couple of weeks ago, the “Save the Boobs” campaign from ReThink Breast Cancer got people buzzing about whether it was okay to use sex to get men interested in the issue of breast cancer (my answer was yes, but this ad was so poorly done from a behavior change point of view that it would be fairly ineffective). Soon after it came out, a group called HCD Research conducted a MediaCurves study to quantitatively measure the responses of men and women to this ad. Not surprisingly, men and women had very different reactions in whether they thought it was appropriate and in the emotions it evoked. The data confirms what seems obvious, though the lack of any clear objective or call to action means the high self-reported “effectiveness” score is fairly meaningless.
- And finally, a huge congratulations to fellow social marketing blogger Alex Rampy (SocialButterfly), who just got married to the man of her dreams. May they have a lifetime of happiness together!
Photo: samk
by Nedra Weinreich | Jul 8, 2009 | Blog, Resources
- John Haydon invited me to share with his readers how I “rock the web” on his excellent blog on social media. In my guest post, I talk about some of the tools I use to take control of my time online. Take a look at the other posts on his blog for insights on how nonprofits can use social media effectively – John is a great resource (and an awesome musician).
- My other favorite nonprofit social media blogger, Beth Kanter, also put up a guest post from me while she’s getting settled from her cross-country move. This one is an oldie but goodie from me on how to select your target audience: should you pick the low-hanging fruit or the hard-to-reach but bigger fruit at the top of the tree?
- People are signing up for the Social Marketing University fundamentals webinars from all over the world. It’s a great way to learn about social marketing from wherever you are, especially if you are not able to travel to an SMU training like the Advanced Course coming up in Berkeley in September. But you can also do both! Don’t forget to use the discount code ‘BLOG’ to get 10% off the registration fee for the Advanced Course.
Photo Credit: Jeremy Brooks
by Nedra Weinreich | May 10, 2009 | Blog, Resources
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of my Tip Jar round-ups of interesting links and pieces of information here on Spare Change. If you follow my Twitter feed (@Nedra) or links I bookmark on Delicious, you may have seen these and many other useful items already; in fact, I see so many great resources every day that it’s hard to pick just a few to share.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are blessed to have the world’s best and hardest job!
- Show your support for the effort spearheaded by Craig Lefebvre to finally get a professional social marketing association off the ground. Join the 100 or so people who have signed it so far by adding your name to the ePetition that lays out the process by which this organization will be formed. I’ve written about the need for a professional association, which has been a long time coming. Kudos to Craig and the others who took the reins to make this happen!
- The CDC’s 3rd annual National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media will be happening in Atlanta, GA, August 11-13. I’m on the planning committee, and am very excited about the quality of the sessions we are going to be offering. Bill Novelli has just been confirmed as a keynote speaker, and we’ll be featuring other high-level speakers yet to be announced. Like last year, I will be offering one of the pre-conference half day workshops, this time on building a social media strategy. CDC eHealth Marketing staff will be conducting an introductory-level social media workshop as well. I hope to see you at the conference!
- Thanks to Andre Blackman of Pulse + Signal, I found the healthGAMERS blog that focuses on games designed to promote health. Some games focus on education, some are geared toward motivating behavior change, and others actually require healthy activities to occur as part of the game. Andre writes about the Stop Swine Flu game that makes it easy for kids to visualize how easily germs spread. If you are interested in learning more about this field, the Games for Health Conference will be happening June 11-12 in Boston.
- Speaking of flu, Advertising Age published an excellent article offering ten things marketers can learn from the CDC’s response to the H1N1 flu outbreak. These lessons include items like: empower those who want to help others, make search simple and accessible, syndicate the message and more. The CDC has done many things right in its communications efforts, and even though the efforts are still evolving, we can learn from and improve upon what we do.
- If you work for a marketing firm, you may be able to relate to the episodes of a new comedy web series called Groupthink. The short videos follow a pair of friends as they start their firm, invent new buzzwords, and conduct focus groups for wacky products.
- I’ve recently found some fun new blogs to follow for quick infographic and design insights:
- If you want to use storytelling to get your messages out in an effective way online, A Storied Career blog (another new favorite of mine) posted an excellent round-up of a dozen web-based storytelling tools. I would also add to these a site that my 11-year old son uses regularly called Bitstrips, which makes it incredibly easy to create professional-looking comics.
- Gennefer Snowfield (@gennefer) interviewed me about social marketing on the TriplePundit blog. It’s a general introduction to social marketing and its relationship to cause marketing. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!
Photo Credit: Dain Sandoval
by Nedra Weinreich | Oct 27, 2008 | Blog, Professional Development, Resources, Social Marketing
Over ten years ago, I saw a need among nonprofit and public agency staff for a book that would lead them through the process of developing a social marketing program. So often, health, social and environmental organizations decide they want to apply social marketing to the work that they are doing, but do not have the budget to hire a consultant or marketing firm and still have enough left to carry out the project. I decided to fill that gap in the field, and turned in the first draft of the chapters to the publisher in March 1998, just before my first child was born (it was like giving birth twice in a row!). In June of 1999, my book Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide was published by Sage Publications.
Since then, I’ve been gratified to find out that my book has been used by people all over the world to create social marketing programs, teach college and grad-level courses, and to overhaul how organizations carry out their activities directed toward positive behavior change. It’s always exciting when someone tells me they have used my book and found it helpful.
But this blog post is not about promoting the book. Rather, I’m asking for your help. A lot has happened in social marketing — and the world in general — in the ten years since I wrote the book. I’m currently working on the next edition of the book, which will be updating everything that’s outdated and changing chapters and worksheets around based on how my own practice has evolved over the course of a decade. I’ve certainly learned a lot since the book was published, and the field of social marketing has matured as well.
So now I’m reaching out to my target audience (you) to do some research to find out what you would like to see in the next edition. For those of you who have read and used the book, whether as a student or practitioner, please let me know your suggestions. What is most helpful about the book? What didn’t work for you in practice, or was confusing? How can I make the book a better resource for you?
And even if you haven’t read the book, please let me know what topics you are most interested in learning more about. This is a how-to book, so what parts of the social marketing process do you get stuck in? What topics do you want to know more about? What are the big questions that keep you up at night worrying about your social marketing program? And what would your ideal guidebook look like in terms of format?
Any input that you can give me (either in the comments or via email) would be incredibly helpful in making the ultimate product a book that can help you and others to change the world for good. Thank you in advance!
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. 
