How Nonprofits Can Lose Donors through Lousy Customer Communications

I love little seals. And I am concerned about endangered sea lions, orcas and humpback whales. My view is that a healthy marine ecosystem equals a healthy planet - and we all want to live on a healthy planet. But when it comes to charitable giving, marine life has not been on the top of my donation list.

I actually have a soft spot for the wildlife of Africa – lions, tigers, giraffes, leopards, giant wildebeest, elephants and the caracal cats with the hairy tufts on the tips of their ears. Perhaps it was growing up in Australia and exposure to the harsh outback that influenced my feelings towards these rugged species? And perhaps that’s why, about six months ago, I signed up to support Greenpeace’s efforts on behalf of these species when one of its volunteer members approached me on the street.

Then, for six months, Greenpeace automatically withdrew a monthly donation from my bank account. In that time, I never did hear from the organization once… until last week.

Out of nowhere, I received a random email from a Greenpeace organizer asking me to either physically or mentally (through a petition signature) accompany her to Alaska as she testifies in a hearing related to protecting the Bering Sea and the creatures that call it home.

Throughout the email, which bore the tired old subject line “I can’t go it alone,” she addressed me as “Venassa.”

As a result of that one misguided and misspelled email, “Venassa” is no longer a Greenpeace donor.

Perhaps, as a marketing professional, I am being overtly critical but this was such a customer communications no-no that it turned me off the organization and the missions it supports right there and then.

Rule number one in marketing is get your customer’s name right. Rule number two is be relevant.

Greenpeace failed on both counts.

When we give money or time and effort to a cause we care about, we get something in return. We are buying the “warm glow” that comes from “impure altruism,” a term coined in 1990 by a University of California economist called James Andreoni.

We don’t just do it to support a cause. We also do it because it feels good. And when it doesn’t feel good, we stop.

As a marketer, you have a responsibility to create, nurture and retain a relationship with your customer. Nonprofits have the same responsibility to their customers and that starts by getting a donor’s name right – especially when he or she is contributing to their cause.

Whether you are a for-profit business or a nonprofit, how you speak to your customers or donors matters. A lot. Customers want to feel like you truly value their business or their charitable contributions. When you know their names and what they like and don’t like, it shows you’ve taken the time to get to know them, which leads to a stronger – and longer – relationship with your brand.

Readers, this isn’t a takedown of nonprofits or of Greenpeace. It’s an example of what happens when marketers don’t do their homework: they send their valuable customers right out the door for good.

Now, does this mean I’m going to stop supporting the causes I care about? Absolutely not! It just means that I’m going to seek out other organizations that take the time and care to communicate with me.

What are some of the worst examples of poor customer communications you’ve seen? I encourage you to share them with our community in the section below.

Business as Charity: The Ever-Evolving World of Social Impact

As someone who takes social-impact work very seriously, I’ve found the Stanford Social Innovation Review to be an invaluable window into the world of social and economic justice.

I recently came across an interesting SSIR blog post which touches on what I think is a very constructive development in the world of charity: business as charity.

In our current economic climate, where job creation is a keystone in every political campaign, Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company (they make Samuel Adams beer), decided that instead of giving money to charity he would become, essentially, a microlender. His new program, called Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream, gives small loans to small food, beverage and hospitality businesses in South Boston.  It also provides free coaching and mentoring from members of Koch’s team. The point? Trying to create new jobs by supporting small business rather than non-profits.

This is an excellent idea. Even a small loan can determine whether a micro-entrepreneur’s business succeeds or fails; I’ve seen this firsthand in my own business.

At ThinkInk we recently launched a PR and thought leadership campaign for a Miami-based microfinance company, OUR Microlending. To date, the company has disbursed about $6.2 million in loans to over 600 small businesses across South Florida, including a Colombian souvenir store, a printing and vinyl signage shop, a cell phone accessories wholesaler and a nutritional consulting and supplement store. These are hardworking entrepreneurs whose loan applications were rejected by the big banks. Because of OUR Microlending’s services – which are sorely needed all over the United States, not just in the developing world – these self-starters have been able to grow their businesses and create jobs to help stimulate their neighborhood economies.

Of course, this is not to say that I don’t think we should support nonprofits. In fact, we are in the process of restructuring The ThinkTank, a division of ThinkInk that is devoted to helping nonprofits grow their organizations through visibility and intelligent PR. We’re recreating the company into a for-profit/nonprofit hybrid that would allow us to significantly expand to this unit to help more nonprofits throughout South Florida.

In his SSIR post, author Aaron Hurst, founder of the Taproot Foundation and a well-known leader in the world of non-profits and social-impact, asks: is business the new charity?

I’d have to say no. Charitable giving is still crucial to nonprofits’ ability to fulfill their missions. However, considering how difficult it is today for the owners of very small businesses to access traditional banking services, I hope to see many more programs like this spring up to help create much-needed jobs and re-energize our still-shaky economy.

Pink Overload: What’s Happened to the Breast-Cancer Awareness Movement?

Pink ribbons, pink cars, pink kitchen mixers, pink vacuum cleaners, pink knives and now, pink guns?

That’s right, breast-cancer awareness guns. Truly inasane.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to breast cancer-awareness campaigns in and of themselves; it is a worthy cause that may help save some lives by spotlighting the importance of early screening and does bring emotional support and fellowship to many suffering from breast cancer.

What truly bothers me is that the movement has morphed into a commercial behemoth - a massive money-making, cash-raking frenzy that makes the month of October look like someone hosed it down with Pepto-Bismol. At nearly every fundraising event and in every related media campaign you see evidence of massive corporate sponsorship. There’s Ford Motor Company’s “Warriors in Pink” clothing line, entire Japanese trolleys wrapped in ads for Avon’s pink-beribboned product line and Yoplait’s “Put a Lid on It,” for example. Here’s a spot of bitter irony: when Yoplait first launched that campaign, they were making the yogurt with dairy from cows injected with a growth hormone that has been linked to breast cancer. At least General Mills pulled the hormone from Yoplait after activists started making noise about it.

With the seemingly endless millions flowing to this movement, it’s clear that some are profiting big. But are we really any closer to finding the elusive cure? I recently wrote about Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s disastrous attempt to pull Planned Parenthood’s funding – which the group uses to provide potentially life-saving breast-cancer screenings to low-income women. Wow. Just, wow.

Another gripe with the pink-ribbon overkill is that it overshadows so many other worthwhile causes and nonprofits – groups that do incredibly valuable and needed work in their communities – that are barely noticed and chronically underfunded. At the ThinkTank, the arm of ThinkInk that works with nonprofits. Unfortunately for many of them, their funding dried up as the recession struck and donations dwindled, forcing them to eliminate PR – which is what keeps them in the public eye – from their meager budgets.

It’s heartbreaking that so many great community programs delivering vital services such as medical care for the poor, food assistance and transitional housing, but lacking the visibility of the charity giants, languish in obscurity.

I absolutely support raising funds for breast cancer research as well as early-screening awareness, and I have nothing but good wishes for the many women who have survived, or are currently battling, breast cancer. But the actual impact of the movement as it stands today hardly seems commensurate with the eye-popping river of money it pulls in.

So let’s try and find other causes, other non-profits that desperately need our help in order to help others.

Because their missions matter too, you know?

An Internet Hot Spot’s Cold Response: When Calling Something an ‘Experiment’ is no Safeguard from Critics

In one of the early scenes from the dystopian 70s cult classic Soylent Green the camera shows a largely homeless and grotesquely overpopulated New York City street whose riotous masses are cleared with dump trucks – called scoops – treated more like rubbish than people. And in later scenes the audience learns not only is prostitution legal, but the women that come with the little remaining luxury property that’s left are called “furniture.” Nice.

If only treating people like objects was confined to Charlton Heston-starring science fiction.

Instead, the recent marketing misstep by BBH Labs, the innovation arm of the international marketing agency BBH, has brought us all a notch lower on the “soylent slide.” Earlier this week, at the annual tech-fest better known as the SXSW technology conference, BBH Labs hired 13 volunteer homeless people to stand in as human mobile hot spots. Carrying Wi-Fi devices and wearing t-shirts that read: “I’m [name] a 4G Hotspot,” the volunteers were enlisted to help prevent the overload of the existing mobile network, a common occurrence at tech-crowded events. It was also intended as a conversation starter – homeless workers would have an opportunity to speak with mobile users about their plight and discuss America’s homeless problem. And who knows, maybe a chance encounter would aid their employment and housing prospects?

In fact, Saneel Radia, the director of innovation at BBH Labs, who was quoted in a New York Times story about the Austin, Texas event, seemed utterly surprised by the public backlash.

“We saw it as a means to raise awareness by giving homeless people a way to engage with mainstream society and talk to people,” he said. “The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story.”

Somehow I think that positive outcome is unlikely, especially when you start with turning homeless people into an awkward marketing ploy while treating them like glorified telephone poles –albeit telephone poles with enough of a human voice to request that their 4G “customers” consider a donation to help them survive. While it’s true that these unlucky 13 did volunteer for their services and were paid for their efforts (more on that later), the program speaks to the worst kind of human exploitation. It’s one thing to know your actions are exploitative and nevertheless carry them out based on some flawed “greater good” logic, but it’s another level entirely when you’re oblivious to that cruelty.

The marketing carelessness also highlights another disturbing trend related to technology, a term that Chris Klauda, a vice president at D.K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company calls, “isolated togetherness” – people in close physical spaces, but remaining disconnected from the “real world” and are instead solely focused on the goings on in their virtual worlds via their smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.

As the technology through which we all communicate continues to advance, becoming more immersive, digitally interactive, and mobile, it’s critical we – not as public relations professionals but as moral, caring, and empathetic members of the human race – remember that treating people with respect isn’t just about asking for someone’s assistance or paying them for their efforts in some endeavor. Nor does calling a marketing misfire a “charitable experiment,” excuse BBH Labs from their decision. That kind of qualified and dare I say bullsh*t language serves no one. In fact, it’s the kind of language PR professionals rely on so often that gives our industry a bad reputation and further fans the flames of the media mess at the heart of this blog post.

For their efforts the 13 volunteers, selected from the Front Steps homeless shelter, earned themselves free t-shirts, $20 a day (which based on an 8-hour work day amounts to $2.50 an hour or about the same legal minimum wage in 1976, and $4.75 below today’s legal minimum), and the opportunity to collect some extra donations.

But if you ask me, and the many others who were similarly disturbed by this story, I think they all got a lot less than they bargained for. Consider this “charitable experiment” a dismal failure, and hopefully one that will not be re-dressed and re-hashed for the next South by Southwest technology conference.

They may not have been called furniture as in Soylent Green, but these 13 volunteers definitely served as a 2012 appliance.

Shame on us all.

An Organization With Terminal Cancer

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 2/10/12.

Here’s something that almost anyone from any side of the political spectrum can agree upon: the past week has been heinous for Susan G. Komen. And it has shown that the organization most known for its staunch (some, like me, would say steamrolling) support for finding a cure and raising awareness for a single type of cancer -- breast cancer -- above any other has a cancer all its own. It’s a cancer common to any group that has become bloated with a false sense of self-righteousness and one whose arrogance and hubris causes it to stray from its stated (if overzealous) mission and become embroiled in a politicized mess.

What I'm talking about, of course, is this week's announcement that Karen Handel, Susan G. Komen’s vice president of public policy, jumped before she was pushed. A speedy resignation with no severance package, Handel excised herself from the organization before mounting pressure within the group would have forced her imminent departure.

Her resignation caps a week of intense public backlash over Susan G. Komen's decision to first cut and then hurriedly restore about $680,000 in funding to Planned Parenthood, a provider of reproductive health services, including contraception and abortions.

In her resignation letter, which has been posted on Forbes, Handel goes to great lengths to explain how the situation got so out of control. Her defense? Komen is in the business of saving lives. Anything that distracts from that goal is a disservice -- thus the decision to pull funding and divorce itself from a controversial organization that might be spending money illegally, like funding abortions.

In October 2011, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I wrote about how the "pinking" of America was diluting the message of curing cancer and replacing it with corporate capitalism and too much consumption. I also took issue with Susan G.’s near-bullying tactics as they related to how the fundraising and marketing gargantuan has left smaller cancer-fighting organizations to fend for themselves, and how they aggressively muscle out any group that seeks to challenge breast cancer as the only cancer worth raising money for.

This latest misstep only adds to my great concern that Susan G. Komen, for all the good it has admittedly done for breast cancer awareness, has become a monopolistic and politically compromised organization. If she were alive today, I wonder what Susan Goodman Komen -- whom the organization gets its name from -- would think. After what must have been a grueling fight for her life, finding a cure and staying true to the organization's mission and goals would be more important to her then whether or not grant money was going to another group similarly charged with helping save the lives of young, often poor women -- an organization that happens to provide abortions.

Letters of resignation aside, let's not forget that Karen Handel is a former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, whose campaign promises included cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, and was Georgia's 26th Secretary of the State.

On Sunday, the Huffington Post reported that it had obtained an email exchange between Komen leadership confirming that Handel had the sole authority in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Does this not have all the makings of a woman hell-bent on achieving a personal goal and using a behemoth organization which itself had become too politically connected, as cover to achieve her aims?

Yes -- the organization did reverse course in barely 72 hours, and restored the funds. It also made changes to its grant awarding guidelines that say only organizations under criminal investigation would be denied funding. But like a true cancer, this organizational one has already done much damage -- to those who truly believed in the structure of non-profits being “doers of good,” to those who held Komen as saviors of women, and to the brands who’ve invested heavily to be part of Komen’s shiny pink halo.

The upside to all this? Susan G. Komen’s misdeeds have opened up an enormous pathway for all the non-profits around the country, breast-cancer-related or not -- to start reclaiming their place in consumers’ hearts, minds and wallets.

And as for the PR advice, first administered by Ari Fleisher and now Ogilvy, all I can say is that it will take a lot more than some clever PR tactics and new positioning to rebuild this country’s trust in the Susan G. Komen brand and its “values.”

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of ThinkInk, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 2/10/12.

Who Can Nonprofits Turn To For Help? From Marketing Daily

There isn't a person in this country (excluding, perhaps, Pat Robertson) who hasn't been deeply saddened by what happened in Haiti on Jan. 12. Actually, make that most of the world. Watching the heart-wrenching coverage, we are reminded that natural disasters can strike anywhere, at anytime. It's how we react and respond in times of need that can make a difference.

For many, myself included, the crisis in Haiti is a throwback to August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf States and wiped out more than 850,000 homes and displaced several hundred thousand Americans. While the death toll doesn't even compare with that of Haiti, millions of Americans lost their homes and more than $10 billion was spent on rebuilding levies, which devastated a land mass bigger than Haiti. But the fundraising efforts and how the country reacted then to today's crisis is strikingly different.

In just two days, the American Red Cross was able to raise $8 million, according to Mobile Marketer.com, with millions more raised by nonprofits, including Yéle, UN Foundation and the International Rescue Committee. Millions of people were moved and money was mobilized -- instantaneously -- thanks in large part to mobile donations.

Just a year ago, however, most people hadn't heard of mobile donations; only a handful of behind-the-scenes companies like GiveOnTheGo and mGive, that had been developing this powerful fundraising platform for charitable organizations, knew what was brewing in the mobile space.

Now, sadly, thanks to the Haitian crisis, millions of consumers have been abruptly introduced to mobile giving overnight. And they don't seem to have a problem with it.

For nonprofits, fundraising -- on any scale -- is an operational imperative. Without supporting funds, there is no organization, period. And while mobile giving is being crowned as a charity's newest savior, it's a rather useless one if the organization doesn't have a proper structure. And by proper structure, I mean a having robust and sensible PR and marketing strategy -- of which mobile is a part. Simply having a mission and a vision to "do good" is all well and good, but it falls flat when no one knows about a nonprofit's work.

In today's climate, a nonprofit has to market itself like a business, yet most don't. I'm not talking about The Red Cross or Médecins Sans Frontières or Oxfam. I'm talking about the 1,569,572 or so nonprofits in this country that have set out to create change, to help those less fortunate and to make our world a much better place. They might not be selling products or services, but they are selling a cause.

For many of those nonprofits, however, PR and marketing is ranked number 8 or 9 (10 being the least important). And where does PR/marketing rank for a for-profit company? Number 2, 3 or 4.

So why the disparity?

In working with nonprofits, I've found it to be an inherent part of the funding and grant-writing structure. Foundations and large donors enforce strict stipulations about the amount of money a nonprofit can spend to promote itself. And yet, if it doesn't promote itself to endear its cause and mission to a new generation of donors and consumers, its fundraising and awareness building-efforts will be severely limited. It's a Catch-22.

I'm not saying that all nonprofits need to go crazy with big marketing budgets. But if they want the world, or even just their local community to know about their invaluable work and deeds, they need to invest in themselves and their story a lot more.

In times of crisis, it's clear that millions of people pay attention to these worthy organizations.

But it's the rest of the time that nonprofits have to worry about. Because that is the time when having a robust PR and marketing strategy can be the difference between success and failure for many of them.

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