What Can Nonprofit Marketers Learn from the Election?

Photo by Tanya Ryno on Flickr

UPDATE: I’ve added two new articles to this post at the bottom.

In my various online marketing trainings this year, I’ve been saying that within six months, somebody from the Obama campaign will write a book about how they used texting and social media to build the campaign into something the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Just as the nonprofit sector learned all kinds of lessons about online fundraising from Howard Dean in 2004, so will we reap similar lessons from the 2008 campaign.

But until those books are written and interviews given, let’s look at what we’ve gleaned so far.

A linguistic analysis of the Obama and McCain websites by 7 Billion People found that they were preaching to the choir and missing opportunities to win independents over. They say: ”McCain’s site talks about risk avoidance, “trusting your gut”, and is organized very procedurally driving visitors down specific messaging and paths. Obama’s website focuses on hope and change, speaking to people that prefer to be thought of as a group, driving consensus. His site also offers a more varied set of navigation paths, emphasizing choice.” The sites feel good to the base, but do little to move new people in their direction. 

Makes me wonder, how many nonprofit websites are giving their existing supporters what they need, but also answering questions that skeptics may have?

Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog has some questions for you if you are wondering how your nonprofit can learn from the Obama campaign’s fundraising successes:

“Is your organization a Barack Obama? Are you unlike all the others, or are you one of several similar organizations — distinguishable only by experts and insiders?

Is there urgency built in to everything you say?

Do you have the ability to reach out, grab people by the heart and actually make them feel differently from how they felt before they encountered you?

Are you fighting an enemy? (It needn’t be a person or people.)

If you can say yes to all those, then you can ask:

Are you really nailing your online fundraising techniques?”

In other words, says Jeff, your “offer” is more important than your “technique.”

My brilliant friend Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention provided a great summary back in September of what she saw as the lessons in how to do good email marketing, based on what she saw from the campaigns, and more recently criticized the Obama campaign for not listening to what their supporters really wanted. Nancy is also looking forward to seeing what Barack Obama does with his massive online network, regardless of how things turn out tonight.

Advertising Age published “What Marketers Can Learn for the Obama Campaign.” The three take-home lessons are Simplicity, Consistency, and Relevance.

Ragan Communications has published “What the 2008 Campaign Taught Communicators,” with 15 lessons including Social Media Is Here to Stay, The Person Who Tries Something New Wins, and Write for the Sound Bite.

If you really want to be the first to know how all the election lessons shake out, follow Colin Delany’s blog at e-politics. He has even more posts for you to mull over on his Election Day summary. See the Essential Background section in particular.

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Who’s Your Target Audience? Please Not the General Public!

Who is Your Nonprofit’s Target Audience? Figure it out during Thursday’s webinar: Forget the General Public! How to Define and Reach Your Target Audience Photo by practicalowl on Flickr

We chant it together in my in-person nonprofit marketing trainings: “There is no such thing as the general public. There is no such thing as the general public.”

If you are spending time and money trying to reach the general public with your nonprofit’s message, you are wasting it. All of it. OK, maybe just 95% of it. But don’t you want to do better than 5% success?

I’ll show you how to define, research, and yes, target, the people who matter most to your organization’s success during this week’s webinar:

Forget the General Public! How to Define and Reach Your Target Audience

Thursday, October 23, 2008
1:00-2:00 pm Eastern (10:00-11:00 am Pacific)

$35 per connection (everyone squeezing around the speakerphone and computer monitor is fine with me)

I’ll walk you through several examples and give you plenty of tips and resources during the webinar, but if you can’t make it, here is a quick-and-dirty approach that’s far better than going for the “general public.”

Think about the change you are trying to bring about through your work. Then visualize someone taking an action that helps you bring about that change. What does that person in your mind’s eye look like? Where are they? Who are they with?

Now try to think about demographic characteristics that could help define who this person is, such as gender, age, ethnicity, income level, education, employment, hobbies, family status, religion, affiliations, and geographic location. Where would this person get information? How would she spend her free time? How would he spend his disposable income?

Now think about some of the values that would be important to this person. Values can include everything from time, money, sleep and convenience to adventure, power, status, fun, and more. Add those values to your demographic description.

Next, you need to match your message (what you are trying to communicate and the action you want someone to take) to those values. The way you describe volunteer opportunities to a 17-year-old girl will be quite different from how you describe them to a 65-year-old man. They are different demographically and they value different things. Your messages should be customized accordingly.

Learn more about how to make this work for your nonprofit during Thursday’s webinar. Register now to reserve your spot!

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Follow-Up: Do Movie Boycotts Work as Nonprofit Advocacy?

Guest Blogger Rebecca Jamison

Last week I wrote a post criticizing the Special Olympics’ decision to use a movie boycott to launch a campaign against the use of the word “retard.” The post was picked up by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where it received quite a few comments on all sides of the debate (some obviously from Special Olympics insiders, though they did not identify themselves that way). I asked Rebecca Jamison, a big movie buff, a big sister to a Special Olympics athelete, and one of my best friends, for her take on the issue. Here’s what she has to say about the use of movie boycotts as nonprofit advocacy and about this specific boycott of Tropic Thunder by the Special Olympics.

~Kivi

When I first heard there was a boycott called by the Special Olympics against Tropic Thunder, my first thoughts went back to two previous film boycotts - the late 1980s boycott by religious conservatives of The Last Temptation of Christ and the 1990s boycott by gay activists of Basic Instinct.

Now I guess the boycotts achieved something in that I remember them, but not in glowing or effective terms. The Last Temptation boycott seemed very ill advised to me at the time and I was a junior in a Kansas Church of the Brethren founded college! This was a Martin Scorsese film adaptation of a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, the same guy who wrote the beloved Zorba the Greek. I read the book and found it moving and helpful in interpreting the life of Jesus and appreciating all the more what he may have faced, experienced as a mortal man asked to fulfill an incredible destiny. The Devil, as described in the Matthew, Mark and Luke, did tempt Jesus. Why a dramatization of another temptation was wrong or should be banned, I never understood.

It reminds me of the sentiments that led to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. For in his Booker Prize winning novel, Satanic Verses, Rushdie envisioned the Prophet Mohamed also dealing with the Devil’s temptations. Many Americans thought that the reaction of Iranian followers of Islam was absurd. Interestingly the fatwa and the Last Temptation boycott were both in 1988-89.

And Basic Instinct, what is there to say about that boycott? Do folks now even remember there was a controversy? Leftist liberals in San Francisco took exception to gay characters being represented as serial killers. They’d had enough of it, with earlier films such as Cruising with Al Pacino, The Eyes of Laura Mars with Faye Dunaway, and The Fan with Lauren Bacall to name a few. Gay=killer in too many films and the 1990s boycott was against this stereotype.

However, the Basic Instinct boycott didn’t work; it did not curtail the movie’s box office or derail the career of its two stars, Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas. Ironically, Sharon Stone is now a huge gay icon. If anything I think it increased interest in “alternative” lifestyles. I am probably one of five people who remember there was a boycott.

So Kivi asked me to contribute to this debate on Tropic Thunder because I have a brother who is mentally and physically challenged, and has several Special Olympic gold and silver medals adorning his bedroom wall. Terry has a rare disorder that is yet to be defined as familial or non-familial dysautonomia. The genetic test is at the lab as I type.

Has he ever been called the “R” word? Not in my presence. How would I feel were he were called that? Livid of course. But my thoughts would then steer to the uneducated, unenlightened status of the person wielding the insult, not to the disadvantaged person who received it, be it my brother or someone else. I don’t like the “R” word, but I personally do not think it historically or socially is equal to the “N” word.

And then there is Tropic Thunder. I watched this film in a New York City Upper East Side movie theatre, a bastion of intellectual liberalism if there is one, except perhaps LA from where most of the characters in the film hail. The NYC audience laughed at the “R” word’s usage between Robert Downey, Jr. and Ben Stiller as they discussed why Stiller didn’t win an Oscar, let alone got a nomination–Because he went “full r-tard” whereas other winners only had versions of the disability.

The audience around me laughed — I didn’t but I was watching, critiquing for this write up. Otherwise, I might’ve laughed. Why? Tropic Thunder is a satire, which all too often Americans just do not get. It seems too French or something. Satire is, and I borrow this definition from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary: the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. [emphasis added].

The characters use of the word in Tropic Thunder demonstrated how utterly stupid, shallow and callous they were, not only in using it but in the approval of others from their community, e.g. Hollywood or the film/theatrical community in accepting its use. The use of the “R” word in Tropic Thunder was meant to point out that even in liberal Hollywood or New York, where people trip over their leftist sentiments, some words and ideas are still, wrongly, accepted, like the “R” word. The whole film is a critique of the ludicrousness of the Hollywood lifestyle and its’ values.

Now as to Kivi’s point that the boycott was perhaps ill advised. I now have to wonder, was it? I originally saw her point of view recalling the two other films mentioned earlier and was dismayed at the vitriol of the comments she received to her column questioning the efficacy of a boycott. But here we are talking about the use of the word. And that generally is the most a boycott can realistically expect to do-get us to talking.

Maybe, just maybe Ben Stiller who has been working on this project for 10 years wanted us to do that all along-see Hollywood for how insufferably frivolous it is. And to stop idolizing the idiotic people who work there. Or is that giving him too much credit? Let’s just be thankful its out in the open and we can now proclaim the use of the word Retard is obnoxious for everyone be it LA or New York or Kansas.

So denounce the word– not a satiric movie or Kivi for raising a question. Because if you have done the latter too, I’m afraid you’ve missed Ben Stiller and Kivi Miller’s points entirely.

Tags: boycott, tropic thunder
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Hearts (Not Heads) and Identity Motivate Voters — and Donors

I read an interesting political article in Newsweek yesterday called “When It’s Head versus Heart, the Heart Wins” that has tons of parallels for nonprofit marketing.

All of the campaign gurus agree — people are drawn to candidates who “assuage fear, inspire hope, instill pride or bring some other emotional dividend.” It’s more important what people feel than what they think, thus the facts don’t really matter all that much. This explains why so many people seem to vote against their own economic self-interest.

According to the article, anxiety does push people to seek out new information about candidates. Unease moves people to find ways to feel more comfortable. If someone is anxious about terrorism, they’ll pay attention to which candidate has the best plan to make them feel safer. But enthusiasm has the opposite effect - it closes voters’ minds to new information. Their hearts have been won over, so there’s no need for the brain to process more data. Candidates just have to keep ‘em feeling good.

Katya Andresen also blogged on emotions that motivate this week when she recounted a recent post by Seth Godin. Seth contends that people act based mostly on three emotions: fear, hope, and love. Katya cautions nonprofits about overdoing the fear angle and instead advocates the hope and love angles.

Based on the Newsweek article, I’d add pride to hope and love. Can your make potential donors feel genuine pride in themselves by giving to your organization? What is it about helping your nonprofit specifically that could make someone swell and gush? If you can work it out in a way that feels genuine, you can probably chuck a lot of your fact-based marketing materials.

Personal identity is also huge in politics and in nonprofit marketing.

The article also talks about how it’s important that a voter identify with a candidate at the gut level. It made me crazy when I heard people say they were voting for George Bush because he was the kind of guy you could have a beer with, but this is exactly why. The article mentions the identity conflict for black women voters this year — do they identify themselves first as a woman (and thus vote for Hillary) or first as an African-American (and vote for Barack)? And Hillary’s choked-up moment? Women her age completely identified with what she was saying and feeling and could see themselves reacting the same way under that intense pressure. They came back around in big numbers for Hillary in New Hampshire, even though a lot of them had been in line for Obama Hope Train tickets before she almost cried.

Newsweek also mentions a study I found really interesting. Personal identity is so important to action that Asian girls who were asked to identify their gender on a math test didn’t do as well (because girls can’t do math, right?). But when they were asked to identify their ethnicity, they did much better (because Asians are good at math).

Can you tap into the personal identity of a segment of your supporters and make a firm link to your organization? Describe what it is like to be in their shoes and then see if you can find a natural connection to your organization. “I am a (describe the person’s demographics) and therefore supporting (fill in your organization) feels entirely natural to me because (explain how it reinforces the person’s identity).”

Remember that series of posts I did (here all on one page) on the University of California’s direct mail makeover? This connection to personal identity is exactly why, after getting that mailer, I gave to Cal for the first time since I graduated. The internal dialogue went like this: “I am a (creative, independent firebrand) and therefore supporting (Cal) feels entirely natural to me because (Cal nurtures and graduates innovative, free-thinking people). The fact that I’m an alumnae puts me in the target audience, but that alone was not enough to inspire me to give, because I don’t really consider going to Cal part of my core personal identity. This exercise isn’t easy and you’ll need to play around with it, but it’s worth giving it some serious thought.

And what about those people who are already enthusiastic supporters? That’s much easier. Just keep feeding their hearts, and don’t worry so much about their heads.

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Use PowerPoint Much? Some Tips from Two Must-Read Books

I’ve been using PowerPoint for years to teach workshops and while I usually get great reviews from participants, I’ve always felt like something wasn’t quite right about the way I used the slides. When I decided to launch the weekly webinar series on nonprofit marketing this year, I knew I’d be using PowerPoint much more often, and since participants wouldn’t see me, the slides had to work really well. It was time to address that nagging feeling.

I purchased two books: “Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire” by Cliff Atkinson and “Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery” by Garr Reynolds. I highly recommend both. Here are a few key points and my take on the strengths of each book, if you can’t fathom reading both.

While the tone of the books is very different, the authors are totally in sync on several points.

1) Remove all those bullet points from your slides.

2) Instead, fill your slides with a photo or graphic, with very minimal text (one short sentence).

3) Use storyboarding techniques to map out your presentation.

4) Treat your slides like the visual channel and your voice like the audio channel, creating one seamless presentation that feeds your participants’ minds in a more natural way. It’s apparently impossible for our brains to read text on slides while also listening to words and to process both fully. (This makes perfect sense if you think about how annoyed you get when you try to talk to someone who is reading and they refuse to stop. You know they aren’t really listening to you - because they can’t.)

5) Therefore, stop treating your slides like your presentation notes (my sin) or like handouts. The slides, your speaking notes, and handouts are three distinct items all with their own needs.

6) Both love istockphoto.com. I already purchase credits there by the hundreds, so at least I’m getting that part right.

7) Chuck the provided templates and don’t put your logo on every slide.

On to the differences in the books . . .

Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is three times the size of Presentation Zen (Zen). It took me about two weeks to get through it, reading in bits and pieces. I read Zen in one day (yesterday, Superbowl Sunday) despite dozens of household interruptions. BBP is published by Microsoft Press and it looks and feels like a manual, including black-and-white graphics. Zen is a much more beautiful book, with full color slides, very clean design, nicer paper, etc.

BBP is better if you really have no clue how to structure a talk. The heart of the book is showing you how to use a three-act structure to create your presentation and how this structure matches up with how people learn and retain information. Even though I think the structure of most of my courses is fundamentally solid, I did pick up some great tips about how people take in information and will be making some adjustments accordingly.

For example, it’s better to have three times as many slides and keep only one point per slide than to crowd fewer slides with multiple bullet points. Some of my five-hour workshop presentations have about 60 slides and I now see how I could easily triple that, following the “one slide per minute” rule of thumb. (I do lots of exercises, so during a five-hour workshop, I’m probably only speaking two-three hours.) BBP also contains lots and lots of PowerPoint how-tos, much of which I skipped over since I’m fairly comfortable with the software. I did learn a few new tricks though, so do skim those sections.

Zen is better if you are seeking advice on what your slides should actually look like. Where BBP tells you what to do with your slides, Zen really shows you. The three chapters on design really make the book. Zen doesn’t explain how to outline your presentation in anywhere close to the level of detail of BBP. Instead, it talks much more conceptually about what makes a good presentation and leaves it up to you to decide whether a three-act structure or some other format works best for your material.

I’m glad I read them in the order that I did. BBP is more of a how-to manual and primer on how people take in data and process it. It shows you how to take your zillion bullet points and tame them into a presentation that people may actually remember.

Zen speaks at a much higher level about incorporating “six aptitudes for the conceptual age” into your presentations. These are design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. As the author says, Presentation Zen is an approach, not a method (like BBP). I really enjoyed Zen, but I think much of that has to do with just finishing BBP. I think if I would have read Zen first, I might have been left yearning for more methodology. But with the BBP foundation, Zen really helped me see how to bring my own creativity and personality into a well-structured presentation. And like I said earlier, the slide design chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

Whether you give presentations with PowerPoint to hundreds or thousands of people at conferences or to small groups of supporters or board members, you need to read these books. They will change the way you prepare for every talk you give and your audiences will be eternally grateful.

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How to Get Reporters Interested in You: Cut the Bull

Claire Meyerhoff

Last month, Claire Meyerhoff called to interview me about nonprofit storytelling for some articles she is working on, and we ended up having an hour-and-a-half chat about how hard it is for so many nonprofits to get press coverage, even though they have such great stories to tell.

We shared all kinds of theories about why this is true, and one of Claire’s points was really on target: Nonprofits need to cut the bull! Blathering on about your wonky mission statement, the infinitely deep root causes of a problem, and the complicated system-wide solutions required just doesn’t work for print reporters who need to think in terms of hundreds of words, not thousands, and TV journalists who can give you only 30 seconds of airtime.

I was so impressed with Claire’s down-to-earth perspective that I asked if she’d be interested in doing a teleseminar with me. Then she told me a bit more about her history and I couldn’t wait to host this event.

If you can spare $20 for some great media training, here’s where you should spend it:

Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit: How to Tell Your Story So They’ll Tell It Too!

It’s next week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide teleseminar (in other words, it’s a toll-free conference call) on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Gather ’round the speaker phone — as long as you are all from the same organization, $20 buys training for your whole staff.

Here’s what you should know about Claire, and why I was so eager to introduce her to all of you. Claire is a communications professional who has spent twenty-something years spreading the word with no muss and no fuss. As a news writer in CNN’s Washington bureau, she took complex stories and honed them into :30 worth of copy fit for Judy Woodruff and Wolf Blitzer. She also helped the National Safe Kids Campaign make the CBS Evening News — and I’ll have her share the story about why that wouldn’t have happened if she had done what the “higher ups” wanted her to do.

She has also reported on Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath on XM Radio’s “Red Cross Radio” channel, and she wrote and narrated an award-wining video for Ronald McDonald House of Durham, NC. Simply put, Claire gets nonprofits and on Wednesday, she’ll help you get the media.

I’m calling this a “Hot Seat” interview, which means I’ll spend the first 15-20 minutes of the hour-long call peppering Claire with some good, tough questions. Then it’s your turn. You can submit questions in advance and during the teleseminar via email to ask AT hotseatquestions.com or send them in via AIM to hotseatquestions.

Get the details and register for the teleseminar now.

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Social Networking Success: Be Yourself and Let It Go

Have you heard the one about the breast cancer patient on Twitter and the frozen peas yet? If so, you can skip the next paragraph and move on to why I think this is such a great lesson for do-it-yourself nonprofit communicators. If not, here’s the quick summary:

Susan Reynolds gets a breast biopsy and then a mastectomy. She is an avid social networker, so she’s tweeting and blogging the experience at Boobs on Ice. She posts a photo of herself easing the pain with a bag of peas on her breasts. Long story short, the crowd goes wild, she’s got people all over the place taking photos of themselves with bags of peas, and now there is a Frozen Pea Fund that’s raised over $7,000 for the American Cancer Society. I learned about this story from Craig Colgan, who wrote a great feature for the Washington Post called “How Frozen Peas Started A Movement: Cancer Patient’s Blog Builds Web Community,” which you can read on his blog. Oh, and this all took place in less than five weeks.

The lesson here is not how social networking lets you make friends and influence them to part with cash. We’ve seen tons of examples of that working. The big lessons are instead (1) be completely human and (2) let others run with your ideas. That’s how to build an online community that actually accomplishes something.

While I have never spoken with Susan, I seriously doubt that posting a photo of herself with frozen peas sticking out of her camisole was some calculated move to raise money. Instead, it was authentic, natural, and also a bit funny. In other words, it was completely human. And that’s what people respond to. They don’t respond to monolithic nonprofit organizations with mission statements and action plans. They respond to human beings.

Then, she let it take off. People started taking the pea photos. A online friend suggested donating the price of two bags of peas to breast cancer research. Another suggested setting up an actual fund to group the donations. And another, who just happened to be doing consulting on social media and working with the American Cancer Society brought it all together. Lots of people are doing lots of different things and something tells me Susan is not chained to her computer trying to micromanage it all. She’s got better things to do, like fight her breast cancer. She doesn’t need to do anything else but what she’s been doing all along on Twitter and her blog. It’s happening, in some ways now, without her.

My guess is that the being human part will be much easier for most nonprofit marketers than the letting go part. But if you are willing to run a bit of risk of people going completely off-message, you might find they come up with something that’s way better than you ever dreamed.

More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)

How Would You Market the Importance of Art Education?

Melissa Eckes, a senior at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in Wisconsin, sent me a message this week asking for ideas on how a local public awareness campaign could increase support for funding arts education in public schools. She’s writing her thesis on the importance of art education and wanted my advice, and yours, on how to create a powerful campaign message.

Do have any thoughts you can share with Melissa? Leave a comment on this post if you want to help. You’ll find my suggestion below.

Here’s what Melissa says about the benefits of arts education:

“My idea is creating an public awareness campaign for art education in the Milwaukee school area. A lot of the research I have been doing is finding articles and interesting facts about the benefits of art education. How it helps you be creative and teaches you self-discipline, which is important to many careers today. I understand that when schools are in money troubles, the first thing they cut is art programs. I’ve found that there’s only national advertising for saving art education, and I want to do something local to be more effective.”

One idea I shared with Melissa is to use the power of the unexpected. If you are are talking about art education in schools, use adults instead of kids and more left-brained imagery (less artsy) than right-brained (more artsy). I suggested using images of analytical professionals with tag lines that talk about how arts education helped them get where they are today.

For example, an ad could picture a surgeon with text like “Top brain surgeon. Moves a scalpel with precision. Learned to control his hands that way with a paintbrush in fourth-grade art class.” Then you could include a stat or two about the value of arts education, followed by a strong call to action — whatever the campaign wanted people to do, whether that’s asking the school board to restore funding for the arts or whatever.

What else could Melissa’s arts education campaign try?

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