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October 2006 Archives
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October 30, 2006
The United Nations Joins Online Video Bandwagon
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Technology
When Google drops $1.6 billion to buy up the online video site YouTube you know the online video craze is just getting crazier. Now the United Nations is joining the fray. The U.N. World Food Programme's Fight Hunger initiative is hosting an online video contest. They're looking for upbeat viral videos that help spread the word about ending child hunger by 2015.
It's a great example of how causes can tap into technology and give power to the people. (link via Pienso)
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October 28, 2006
Teach for America
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Featured Nonprofit
Tapping into the idealism of college graudates, Teach for America puts recent grads on the front line of education. Teach for American recruits graduates from any field--teaching experience not required--and trains them to teach in a low-income classroom for two years.
The goal is to overcome the education gap. On average, half the students from low-income neighborhoods won't even graduate high school. Those who do manage to graduate have the same reading and math levels as eighth-grade students from high-income neighborhoods.
17,000 people have worked with Teach for America to change these troubling stats for more than 2.5 million students since it all began in 1988, thanks to another idealistic student--Princeton senior Wendy Kopp--who started Teach for America. She tells her story in the book One Day, All Children.
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The Power of Brand Identity
Posted by Brett Hutchinson | Filed under: Whitepapers
Your brand identity is more than a combination of symbols and letters printed on stationary and placed on your products--it is a symbol that identifies who you really are--your reputation, your results and the recognition you have received. Just look at the brand of the infamous Jack Sparrow.
The Power of Brand Identity (PDF, 84 KB, 2 pages)
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October 26, 2006
Homelessness Isn't What You Think
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Research
Part of the trouble with a cause is that it's not always what you think. Changing the world takes more than the standard pat answers. Take homelessness for example.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, wrote a phase-shifting article about homelessness for The New Yorker. The piece pointed out that homelessness doesn't follow a standard distribution, but it follows a power distribution (also known as the long tail) where a very small percentage account for the majority of the expenses.
One study showed that a full 80% of people are homeless for a day or two and then never again. The next 10% are episodic users, usually into drugs and turning to shelters during the winter for a few weeks at a time. The final 10% are your stereotypical homeless, the chronically homeless who had been so for years and often had mental or physical disabilities.
Continue reading "Homelessness Isn't What You Think"
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October 24, 2006
Helping the Homeless with Marketing
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Marketing
A Cornell University business major spent part of his summer internship helping the homeless in New York City. Matthew Zimmerman worked with the marketing company Sinek Partners and was given the task of helping beggars increase their revenue. Zimmerman focused on helping beggars forge an emotional connection through the message on their signs. For at least one beggar what was usually an all day chore to collect $30 happened in less than three hours.
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Think Before You Pink: Will Pink Ribbons Solve Breast Cancer?
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Cause Marketing
October is breast cancer awareness month--in case you haven't noticed the pink ribbons on everything from breath mints to bagels, from soup to Serta mattresses. But not everyone is as excited about the cavalcade of pink products offering undisclosed percentages of the purchase price as a donation to fight breast cancer.
"If you think you're going to solve the problem by buying Yoplait, you've got another thing coming," says Barbara Brenner of Breast Cancer Action, an organization that started Think Before You Pink, an online campaign to educate consumers. The campaign points out that few products divulge how much of each purchase is going to fight breast cancer, and often the cause "to fight breast cancer" is vague and doesn't cite specific organizations.
The charge is that the partnerships aren't always as favorable as they seem, sometimes with only a penny on the dollar going to charity. So in the end companies are getting boatloads of goodwill for supporting the cause against breast cancer, but the support doesn't match the hype. Instead of supporting causes, companies can be seen as leaching causes.
It's the danger of doing cause marketing wrong and consumers will have to decide whether or not buying pink will make a difference, . While the ideal for cause marketing is that everybody wins, in the end the cause is king. The cause has to win. Otherwise it's just selling out.
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October 19, 2006
Is Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty the Real Deal?
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Cause Marketing
We've talked about the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty before, but it gets especially interesting with the release of a new time-lapse video showing the make-up and Photoshop process that creates a "beautiful" billboard model (also available on YouTube).
Dove is going all out to change perceptions, including the Dove Self Esteem Fund and a global study that found that 67% of women withdraw from life because of how they feel about their looks and 90% of women want to change at least one aspect of their physical appearance.
As great as it is to see honesty in the marketing of beauty products, you have to wonder how deep it goes. Is this the real deal?
Continue reading "Is Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty the Real Deal?"
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American Cancer Society
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Featured Nonprofit
In 1913 75,000 people died from cancer in the U.S. alone. It was a disease rarely talked about, clouded by fear and denial (much like AIDS in the 1980s). A group of 15 doctors and business leaders in New York came together to found the American Society for the Control of Cancer in an effort to spread awareness, boost research efforts and support those fighing the disease.
Today cancer kills over half a million people in the U.S. every year and is the second leading cause of death in the U.S. One in four deaths in the U.S. are due to cancer. But today enormous strides are being made. The American Cancer Society has invested $3 billion in research, and funded 39 Nobel Prize winners. The five-year survival rate for all cancers diagnosed between 1996-2001 is 65%, up from 50% in 1974-1976.
Perhaps the best news in the fight against cancer is that many forms of it are preventable. All cancer caused by cigarette smoking could be prevented, saving 170,000 lives per year. A full-third of cancer deaths are related to poor nutrition, lack of physical activity and obesity, and could be prevented. The more than one million cases of skin cancer that are diagnosed each year could also be prevented. While cancer does shatter so many lives, it also a disease that can be treated, prevented and someday cured, thanks to the efforts of organizations like the American Cancer Society.
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October 17, 2006
Michael Medved Questions Red Campaign
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Cause Marketing
While Apple has joined the Red bandwagon and released a red iPod Nano with $10 of each purchase going to fight AIDS--not everyone is so thrilled with the Red Campaign. In case you missed our earlier entry, the Red Campaign is a collection of product offerings from major companies including Apple, the Gap and Converse, where a portion of the profits go to the Global Fund to fight AIDS. It's doing well while doing good.
Radio talk show host Michael Medved apparently dismissed the idea behind the Red Campaign (we're going on blogger reports here, since Medved doesn't offer show archives online), saying that it serves to distract people from the real problems in Africa and simply encourages consumerism.
It's a valid criticism against any cause marketing endeavor. Non-profits and businesses need to be sure that any partnership is going to make sense. There's a certain irony to throwing a black tie dinner at a swanky restaurant to raise money for a soup kitchen. That's a distraction.
But I think Red works for four reasons:
Continue reading "Michael Medved Questions Red Campaign"
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Online Giving Report
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Cause Marketing
Network for Good, an online donation portal for non-profits, has released The Young and the Generous Study, a free PDF report detailing online donation habits. The report is limited to giving through Network for Good, so it's not necessarily reflective of the entire industry, though it does cover $100 million in online donations to 23,000 charities.
A few highlights:
- Online donors are young--averaging 39-40 years old--compared to 60+ for offline donors.
- Online donors tend to donate more on average than offline donors.
- Online giving is the method of choice for times of disaster. One-third of the 2004 tsunami donations were made online, more than twice the proportion of gifts following 9/11. Half of the donations made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were made online.
- 96% of online donors have given offline in the past, so online donors aren't new to giving.
(link via Nonprofit Blog Exchange)
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October 16, 2006
Acumen Fund
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Featured Nonprofit
What's the best way to heal the world?
"Entrepreneurial solutions to solve global poverty," answered Acumen CEO Jacqueline Novogratz. "We need to build companies that know how to deliver things people need at prices they can afford."
The Acumen Fund invests in business ideas that can help the poor. It's venture capital for the four billion people living on less than $4 per day, as opposed to venture capital for well-to-do techies. They approach poverty with a business mindset, trying to find projects that are sustainable as well as scalable and that provide affordable goods and services to the world's poor.
Manufacturing malaria nets in Africa, offering affordable home loans in Pakistan and making clean water in India. They're projects that can change the lives of the poor, not through simple handouts, but through business initiatives.
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October 13, 2006
New Personality Web Site
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Personality News
Welcome to the new Personality web site. It's been a long time coming, but now we're telling our story again.
We'll probably have some bugs to work out, as well as plenty of new features, content and flourishes to add. But take a look around and breathe in that new web site smell.
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October 12, 2006
What a Good Cause Marketing Campaign Says
Posted by Brett Hutchinson | Filed under: Whitepapers
The days of giving to a cause just because it is the right thing to do are gone. People are demanding to see a return on investment even in the area of social action. People see value in supporting causes as a kind of personal and social investment. It's about supporting causes that help others and help me. Causes that don't deliver are dumped.
What a Good Cause Marketing Campaign Says (PDF, 104 KB, 2 pages)
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How to Communicate with Everybody and Nobody
Posted by Brad Abare | Filed under: Whitepapers
Communication without repetition is noise. If you are not willing to repeat what you say, chances are pretty good it wasn't worth saying in the first place. When it comes to the stuff that matters, we must understand that no one heard us the first time.
Communication without repetition is noise.
How to Communicate with Everybody and Nobody (PDF, 80 KB, 1 page)
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October 5, 2006
Buy Stuff. Fight AIDS.
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Cause Marketing
That's the basic premise of Red. A number of companies including Motorola, Gap, Converse and American Express have joined Red to sell branded products with a percentage of the profit going to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The idea is that people are buying this stuff anyway, so why not buy stuff that will help fight AIDS? It's the brainchild of U2's Bono and the Kennedy family's Bobby Shriver, the same folks who have been involved in other idealistic ventures like One and DATA. Only this time around there's money to be made.
"Gap in the beginning couldn't understand how they were going to make money," Shriver said. "They wanted to do a T-shirt and give us all the money. But, we want them to make money. We don't want anyone to be thinking, 'I'm not making money on this thing,' because then we failed. We want people buying houses in the Hamptons based on this because, if that happens, this thing is sustainable."
And that's the deal. It needs to be a sustainable venture. It's doing well while doing good.
"I could go with my begging bowl every year to a major corporation and say 'give me some money,' and they might give me a one-off contribution, but it wouldn't be large and it wouldn't be sustainable," Global Fund Executive Director Dr. Richard Feachem said. "Red is intrinsically sustainable because Red is good for the companies."
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October 4, 2006
Groceries for Breast Cancer
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Cause Marketing
October is breast cancer awareness month and Kroger grocery stores are planning to donate $3 million as part of a "pink tag" event. Select products throughout the store will have pink tags and purchasing these products will help support breast cancer research and awareness. Campbell's Soup has also shed their familiar red and white label for a pink and white label on 7 million cans of chicken noodle and tomato soup, exclusively in Kroger stores. Campbell's will be selling twice the amount of soup they normally do in Kroger stores and will be donating $250,000 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
Campbell's donation amounts to 3.5 cents per can, and considering that they'll sell twice as much soup as normal, it's a win for everybody. Advertising Age points out the benefit of these kind of partnerships:
According to a 2004 survey on cause marketing done by Boston brand-strategy firm Cone, 91% of 1,033 consumers say they have a more positive image of a company or product when it supports a cause and 90% will consider switching to another company if it's aligned with a cause.
(link via Selfish Giving)
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October 2, 2006
Ten Thousand Villages
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Featured Nonprofit
In 1946 Edna Ruth Byler visited volunteers in Puerto Rico who were teaching locals how to sew in order to earn a better living. Impressed by the work of the locals, Byler brought some of their handmade products back to the U.S. to sell to family and friends, realizing a larger market would earn more for the artisans who lived in poverty. Soon Byler was selling Puerto Rican sewing, cross-stitch from Palestinian refugees and hand-carved Haitian woodenware from the trunk of her car.
Today her effort has transformed into Ten Thousand Villages, a non-profit organization that buys handmade products from artisans in developing countries and markets them online and through more than 160 retail outlets across North America. They are one of the largest fair trade organizations and helped start the fair trade movement, including being a founding member of the International Fair Trade Organization.
Their name comes from a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: "India is not to be found in its few cities but in the 700,000 villages ... we have hardly ever paused to inquire if these folks get sufficient to eat and clothe themselves with." Ten Thousand Villages exists to embrace people in every village in the world and ensure that craftspeople everywhere can make a decent living from their work.
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Google Grants
Posted by Kevin D. Hendricks | Filed under: Advertising
Non-profits can score some free advertising, thanks to Google's commitment to not be evil. Google Grants is a program where non-profits can get three months or more of free text advertising on Google. You need to be a 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations and religious and political groups need not apply. It helps if your organization fits with one of Google's ideal causes: science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy and the arts.
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