The Nonprofit Marketing Ideas Blog

This is going to be the first of a series of articles on how to sell social change by adopting some of the ideas and practices of an advertiser. If you want to sell social change of any kind, you are a marketer and can benefit from using some of the tools companies use to market themselves. Evaluating the Marketplace: How many people are open to going vegan, ditching their cars for mass transit, or donating money for an anti-poverty program in the city? What types of people are there who might appreciate your message and how do you connect with them. Your program goal is to convert people into vegans. These are some questions you need to ask: What types of people might be interested, and what are their interests?  What challenges in their lives might make them resistant to going vegan?  What misconceptions do they have?  How much do they know about the vegan lifestyle? What values do they have that are relevant?  Perhaps they think they'll have to live on b...

Social media activism is all the rage in recent years, but someone needs to ask if these social media campaigns really help. There are reasons to suspect they may not be working well, or at all. Part of the problem has to do with who they reach, part with how results are measured (if they are measured) and part with the type of information that gets shared. Confirmation Bias: Unfortunately, social media activism can serve more to reinforce peoples' prejudices than to educate or motivate. Feminist memes, for example, might be intended to share information about women's issues but that is not always what happens. Probably it happens more by mistake than through a deliberate marketing effort. The "echo chamber" effect is at work. People who want to be informed about issues that concern women are going to see the meme, blog post, or news story. People who don't, will not. This isn't all bad, because you publish these things to inform people who follow your i...

Do sad headlines and images make you more likely to support an organization by donating money? Does going negative hurt more than help, and how do we know? If we don't know, maybe just keep things positive.  This post is an appeal to take a new approach to appeals that touch on sensitive social justice topics. Things like female genital mutilation and child sex trafficking get people wound up. Focusing on the US, sexual violence, and gun control push peoples' buttons. Fighting climate change is, well, a different case. I point out these obvious facts only to raise a concern about how we use emotion to promote social change.  Sometimes activists use emotions effectively. That approach (appeal to emotion) seems common in campaigns dealing with issues in low-income countries (LICs), the places sometimes stilled identified as 'developing' or 'third world'. Issues that deal with vulnerable populations in the United States -children, transgender adults, the homeless ...

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. Is the United States' version of capitalism treating average people fairly? Many people would say it isn't. Those people might cite poverty stats or examples of huge CEO compensation packages. There is a huge gap there, for sure, but the gap is justified based on how important those CEOs are to their companies. That would be the logical counter argument. Could we get better results, or similar results, by eliminating the CEOs and having employees make decisions collectively. Crowdsourcing as an Economic Tool Most people have an idea of what crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small  group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have som...