Archive for the ‘Green’ Category

Marketing Causes Harder Than Products

Posted on: January 9th, 2011 by Geoff Livingston 15 Comments

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Homeless Image by Raileen Viorel

Marketers love telling nonprofits how to market their social solutions. They get miffed when they see a perceived slow road to change, an underfunded website written by someone in their 20s, and a general failure to resolve society’s ills. Of course, the answer must be the crappy marketing. Having worked with both types of organizations closely, it’s easy to definitively say social change marketing is much harder than marketing a product or service.

Quora Response

Look, whatever your experience is — Procter & Gamble, Old Spice, Cisco, start-up sold — great! Yes, selling domain names and marketing organic strawberries is hard. But the difference between marketing and activism will always revolve around this truth — People want stuff, but they don’t want to change. Getting people to want to change themselves is much, much harder.

Think about it. Do you want to change? Do you want to buy a more expensive electric car (kudos to Ford for announcing the world’s third major electric car at CES)? Yeah, most Americans get sustainability — it’s one of the most over-marketed words out there. But when push comes to shove, people don’t want to change, otherwise green legislation (forget electric cars) would be a top priority in the United States.

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How about cigarette smoking? In spite of every marketing trick in the book including severely negative product packaging deployed by the best minds in the business via the Ad Council, in spite of every piece of cancer causing knowledge out there, 20.6% of U.S. adults still smoke.

Beyond that core communications difference, causes are not businesses. They do different things than shilling burgers or IT services. Causes and people fight to affect social change. They have to make every donor dollar count. They don’t have the resources, staff or the wherewithal that a business does.

Quora Responses

There are too many causes because every entrepreneur who made a little scratch goes off and starts yet another Foundation or cause to do it “their way.” And for every fat well-known cause out there like Komen, there are dozens fighting an avalanche of apathy, scrapping to make ends meet.

Yet business people think they suck because they don’t market right. Maybe the marketers are that good, but there’s only one way to find out… By doing some actual field work. Please report back the research!

What do you think? Is it easier to communicate for causes or for-profit endeavors?

Thanks to Florian Engel, Jennifer Rosenberg, Stacey Monk, Kevin Vine, and Joe Waters for their answers on Quora.

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Six Months Later: BP’s Oil Spill Still Stains

Posted on: December 27th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston

It has been six months since the height of public outrage about the Deep Horizon catastrophe and ensuing oil spill. Periodically, news bubbles up about potential lawsuits against BP and partners, but for the most part, the media has moved on to more current pastures. Meanwhile the damage left behind still ravages the Gulf Coast environs and economy.

Earlier this month, ABC News reported on University of Georgia’s Samantha Joye’s findings that Deep Horizon oil carpets the Gulf of Mexico floor. At 5,000 feet below the surface there appears to be an 80-square mile kill zone. “It looks like everything’s dead,” Samantha Joye said.

Meanwhile economic relief efforts seem to be hitting some walls. While tourist centric business like casinos located far away from Gulf shores are getting Gulf Coast Claims approved by the government, fishermen are being denied after one of the worst shrimping seasons every recorded. These fisherman fall into four classes:

  • Small vocal number who have presented Feinberg with strong documentation.
  • A much larger group that has been paid, but far less than their emergency claims called for.
  • Another group of more than 30,000 claimants, led by an organized Vietnamese contingent in Louisiana.
  • Thousands who can’t produce enough documentation to satisfy the Gulf Coast Claims Facility.

The government dismisses these as suspect or fraudulent. Somewhere in between lies the truth. And on the interwebs, the BP PR machine continues.

No one asked BP to negligently contract and manage the operation of the oil Deep Horizon rig and its ensuing damage. Regardless of how the government and BP spin it, Americans, and the global environment will suffer for years to come.

2010 will go down as one of the worst years ever for environmental disasters. And BP’s negligent actions before and after the oil spill will go down as the largest lump of coal in the lot. The novelty of this has not been matched by the actions necessary to reverse the affects of manmade climate change. In fact, at least in the United States, environmental regulation seems to be moving backwards. Again, action to change falls to the individual.

If you would like to take action to help the fishing families of New Orleans, please consider Citizen Effect’s CitizenGulf project. Money goes to provide fishing children after school education programs.

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The Nature Conservancy Extends Green Gift Monday to 2011

Posted on: December 13th, 2010 by Geoff Livingston

Green Bag
Image by ZoofytheJinx

Last November, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) put together an effort on the fly to encourage environmentally friendly holiday gifts (see Green Christmas post). Dubbed Green Gift Monday, the grassroots effort sought to create a guerilla consumer movement on Cyber Monday that encourages environmentally sound holidayshopping. Encouraged by the initial marketplace reaction, TNC has decided to extend and expand the program into 2011.

Green Gift Monday.jpegLaunched two weeks before Cyber Monday, TNC generated support from over 65+ blogs, nonprofits, and eco-retailers participate. There were 900 uses of the hashtag #GGM2010 and an additional 500 mentions of the phrase “Green Gift Monday” in the social media space. TNC had its #2 traffic day on its blog, Cool Green Science (the number one day dealt with the Gulf oil spill).

Now that attention and interest are apparent, the Nature Conservancy will expand the program for 2010. The organization has proof of concept to offer potential Green Gift Monday partners, and hopefully turn it into a consumer movement.

“This year was our test run – now we have results to share with potential partners,” said Amy Ganderson, Associate Director, Digital Marketing at The Nature Conservancy. “Like most campaigns, people like to see who else is involved before they jump on board. So for next year, we’re in a better position to start earlier and make it even bigger.”

The organization will likely extend its grassroots activities to Facebook event, a live Twitter chat, and other tactics. But most important for TNC is moving beyond awareness to demonstrate true results to the marketplace.

“Tactics are easy wins for us, but the real question is how can we quantify our collective efforts to give green,” asked Ganderson. “Do we launch a petition, can we quantify how much revenue is driven to our partners from the event, that’s the direction we need to go in to show that we’re truly making a difference with Green Gift Monday.”

Congratulations to TNC for moving the ball forward with Green Gift Monday!

Geoff Livingston is a frequent contributor to the Rare Planet blog Adventures in Conservation.

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