Posts Tagged ‘nonprofits’

CForward: There Is No Profit without Nonprofits

Posted on: November 4th, 2011 by Geoff Livingston 2 Comments

This week marked the launch of CForward, a 501c4 — a Political Action Committee (PAC) — committed to better inclusion of nonprofits in political economic agendas. In spite of nonprofits vital role in the nonprofit sector in every community across the country — representing 10% of the overall U.S. economy and workforce — the economic contributions of the sector are an afterthought… A way to address cut social services programs.

In fact now, the nonprofit sector is endangered by our local, state, and national politicians clamoring for their jobs bills, economic stimulation, and government cutbacks. Part of the agenda includes cutting vital nonprofit services, the same services that create social sector jobs (usually low paying ones), invigorate a community’s health, and stimulate its economy.

CForward is not a cry for hand-outs. It is a demand to be listened to during the critical 2012 election year. It is an acknowledgment that politicians need to start partnering with the nonprofit community to strengthen the economy, not simply slashing and overtaxing it at every opportunity.

Robert Egger, the genius behind the job creating DC Central Kitchen (and its sister Campus and city kitchens across the country), started CForward. In his Huffington Post piece announcing CForward, Robert stated:

Through grants or government contracts [nonprofits], like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, bring significant outside investment into every community to create jobs, generate taxes and spur the economy through their and their employee’s daily commerce. Any candidate who cannot provide detailed plans for how they would channel that economic and entrepreneurial energy isn’t worth a vote.

What CForward does differently is it offers politicians money for their campaigns — in a non-partisan fashion — IF they will consider the nonprofit sector in their economic plans. It plays the Washington insider game by educating candidates about the economic contributions of the nonprofit sector, and supporting those that play ball. And right or wrong, that’s how DC’s K Street crowd works.

I have joined CForward’s board as the nonprofit sector has been an important part of my entire personal life as well as a critical part of my professional life. To demonstrate my commitment to this effort, I donated $1000 to CForward. I hope you’ll support CForward, too. You can also follow CForward on Twitter.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Marketing Causes Harder Than Products

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

Homelessness_3942
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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The Zoetica Salon and the Business of Free

Posted on: December 1st, 2010 by Geoff Livingston 8 Comments

Kami Huyse (@kamichat) & Beth Kanter (@kanter)
Zoetica Co-Founders Kami Huyse and Beth Kanter

Zoetica launched its Salon today on Beth Kanter‘s personal fan page on Facebook. The Zoetica Salon meets a nonprofit marketplace need for basic peer-to-peer conversations about social media adoption. The primary differentiators of the Zoetica Salon is Beth Kanter and her significant experience in the space, and that it is completely free of charge, and hosted on a common easily accessible social network — Facebook — that doesn’t require a new log-in identity (see press release here).

This begs the question why market a free service? After assessing the current offerings out there, there was no free service. The best educational offerings range from affordable services like the esteemable Nedra Weinreich‘s Social Marketing University series to TechSoup’s NetSquared community and the Nonprofit Technology Network‘s excellent professional membership services.

At the same time, the partners in the company believe basic advice and simple questions should be available free of charge to an industry dedicated to resolving society’s ills. With no organization formally serving that need, a clear opportunity existed. As more social media consultants enter the space, it’s important to remember that advice from bloggers and consultants do not equate to formal training. The Zoetica offering seeks to channel people who want to do more than spend time in the Salon into the capable hands of folks like Nedra, NetSquared and the NTEN team.

Lest a Robin Hood halo be painted, there is an end goal for the company, which is branding and demonstrative leadership. Simply put, by giving people a taste of the offering, the company builds a reputation for its consulting services, and gains new business opportunities. A vast majority of Zoetica’s business is through referral or direct client requests.

What Free Costs

There’s a real cost to free, which most people don’t take into account when they launch their services or blog. That’s the time it takes to build a quality reputation via free services. By assuming that giving away free time will monetize, Zoetica shoulders great risk. For example, in addition to the Salon announcement today, the company also announced the addition of Julie Pippert to the team (Welcome, Julie!). Deploying Julie’s unbillable time to the page is a significant investment.

It is a risk that all of the partners have successfully shouldered individually, so the leap is taken with faith. Perhaps the poster child of free intellectual property Cory Doctorow said it best:

“For me, the answer is simple: if I give away my ebooks under a Creative Commons liscence that allows non-commercial sharing, I’ll attract readers who buy hard copies. It’s worked for me – I’ve had books on the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) bestseller list for the past two years.”

Other online organizations have sought different methods of monetization, including advertising, sponsor programs, affiliate marketing, membership fees and subscription models. Every entity has to choose the model it thinks will serve its community of interest best, and ultimately serve its long-term business goals. And so with that, let the free experiment known as the Zoetica Salon begin.

A complete discussion on the economics of Free can be found in Chris Anderson’s book Free (which was available online for five weeks free of charge).

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