Corporate Citizenship: It’s Just Good Business

ConeInc.Com is among my favorite websites. It should be among yours, too. Cone is one of the most respected cause marketing groups in business. Some say they invented cause-related marketing, back when Carol Cone was at the helm.

Carol has left the company to pursue other interests, but Cone remains a hugely valuable resource for data and findings on American attitudes towards corporate citizenship. Drilling through their website, from the home page to Corporate Responsibility, to the link for “Shared Responsibility,” you’ll find an informative PDF titled “Who’s Responsible?”

Here’s the summary:

Amid the stats and the stories, companies are realizing checkbook philanthropy and checkbox responsibility will not suffice. Dated approaches to addressing social and environmental issues are too formulaic, too reactive and won’t turn the tide on corporate trust. Companies must proactively deal with critical business issues while engaging with and addressing escalating expectations of key stakeholders. Companies are changing the way they approach burgeoning social and environmental challenges because today, it’s difficult to assert where a company’s responsibility begins, where it ends and who is ultimately accountable for solving the issues we collectively face.

And here’s a screenshot of a chart from the document:

The data points are undeniable.  The American public expects good citizenship from corporate America. Over a broad range of topics, the trend of opinion is overwhelming. 

And, the source is trustworthy. According to the site, “The 2010 Cone Shared Responsibility Study presents the findings of an online survey conducted April 8-9, 2010 by Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) among a representative U.S. sample of 1,045 adults comprising 507 men and 538 women 18 years of age and older. The margin of error associated with a sample of this size is ± 3%.”

So, for businesses, what’s next? It’s clear that corporate resources devoted to identifying, tracking, and mapping these sorts of data would not be wasted. Customers, employees, and the public in general are important stakeholders in corporations. Paying attention to public opinion is not Pollyannaism. It’s not “playing to the polls,” as they say in politics.

No, it’s just good business.

Go to ConeInc.Com for more insights like these.

Marketing is MOST important when the economy is down.

It’s not counter-intuitive – it’s true: When the phone stops ringing, it’s time to ratchet up the outreach a notch.

CauseWare can help.

The mission of CauseWare is three-fold: Serving charities, educating donors, and helping employers with charitable programs.

When working with charities, CauseWare focuses on small to medium sized organizations that do not have the budget or staff to plan and execute excellent communication and marketing strategies. Simply put, the mission at that level is to “Bring the tools of corporate marketing to America’s charities.”

It’s a sad fact of American life that a very few charities have the resources to attract and keep donors, or to forge relationships with corporations, for workplace giving, or for cause related marketing.

CauseWare aims to change that.

CauseWare is positioned as a low-cost solution for medium-sized charities. At CauseWare, our career-long commitment has been to bring affordable solutions to charities and non-profits.

There are many low-cost and no-cost channels available to make and strengthen the bond between charities, donors, volunteers, and corporations. Charities only need help in identifying the best, learning how to use them and developing strategies that are efficient and effective.

Please feel free to direct others to my blog at CauseWare.BlogSpot.Com. There’s a lot of free advice here – some of it pretty good, if I do say so myself. Soon, I’ll also have services, mission, etc., posted at CauseWare.Net.

Crunching Numbers

In May, the Chronicle of Philanthropy released "Fund Raising 2010: How Big Charities Are Faring in the First Quarter". According to the data, giving to some charities was down 20%, 40% -- as much as 85%.

On the other hand some charities were up by 200% to over 500%.

What gives? Why the broad difference?

Well, from the 30,000 foot view, it looks like the big gains were made by charities delivering international relief. The earthquake in Haiti might figure large in why some charities increased donations so much over a year's time.

Haitian relief was immediate, and very public. And aid remains much needed. Port-au-Prince remains "stuck in limbo," according to a May 29 article in the New York Times. 

But what does your organization -- or your favorite charity -- do that provides immediate and much needed services or programs? While perhaps not as public or dramatic as a catastrophic earthquake or flooding, hundreds of thousands of American charities deliver, on a daily basis food to the unfed, shelter to the homeless, educational opportunities to the underserved, companionship to the unwanted -- the list goes on and on.

It's an unfortunate fact that charities and other non-profits in America share something in common with American business. That is the need for marketing.

What makes your organization stand out? What is the immediate need you address? What are your success stories? What is the picture of need?

These questions (and more) are what you need to be discussing. Answers to the questions will lead to differentiators, which, in turn, help define your brand.

Want some help? Shoot me an email at RGondella@CauseWare.Net.

Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog

Check out this great post on nonprofit marketing Queen of the Rodeo, Katya Andresen's blog: Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog.

The title is "Four insights on giving from a philanthropist who is a psychologist." It's a very insightful, quick read on the power of words in fundraising.

Connecting the Dots

To tweet or not to tweet: That is the question.

As I wrote in a recent post, my opinion is that Twitter is a great tool for “friendraising,” for developing relationships with "a younger, more educated demographic" that may eventually yield donors. Even with only 7% of Americans using Twitter, those that do use it are a potential resource – now, as volunteers, and later, perhaps, as financial supporters.

So, I was surprised (to put it mildly) as I reviewed some additional research at philanthropy.com and found that 42% of charities use Twitter as a top tool for online fundraising. That means that in America, 500,000 charities, give or take, are using Twitter to reach the same 22 million people.

Just 44 individuals for each charity using Twitter.

Obviously, some charities are going to do better at fundraising with Twitter. But the reasons are going to be wildly dissimilar – a big news event about the cause, an issue that hits that “younger, more educated” demographic smack between the eyes, a catastrophe somewhere in the world. Whatever the case, Twitter, it seems, is currently a pretty narrow band to really have impact on a charity’s bottom line.

The question is not whether Twitter is an effective social media tool. It is. And it will likely get better. As I’ve said, better to be there with a strongly managed message strategy than to not be there at all. But the messaging needs to be strongly managed, or you risk a dissipation of your brand.

So, Twitter is a good idea for messaging and friendraising. But, is it the right tool for fundraising? A pattern emerges, as you dig deeper into the research and connect the dots. 

The Chronicle of Philanthropy vs. Fenton Communications: Who’s Right?

Last week, Fenton Communications released The 2010 Fenton Forecast: Leadership and Effectiveness Among Nonprofits (see blog post below, "Words to live by: Fiscal Responsibility, Content, and Credibility.") The Fenton report painted a somewhat gloomy picture of giving in 2010, drawing the conclusion that giving would be slightly down or flat.

On May 16, The Chronicle of Philanthropy published the article "Donations in 2010’s First Quarter Show Healthy Signs for Charities." This article tells us "Giving grew by a median of 11 percent in the first three months of 2010, compared with 2009."

Who's right? And how can you know for sure?

Having a look at the basis of each study is a good place to start. The Fenton Forecast credentials are good: 

The nationally representative online study, conducted in March 2010, surveyed 1,000 adults aged 18 and older who had donated $20 or more to a nonprofit organization in the past year. The margin of error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. 

My only point of contention with that source is that it was conducted online. How respondents were driven to the survey may skew the results. Then again, maybe not. Based on the information given, it's hard to tell.

The Chronicle's source is different:

The Chronicle’s quarterly survey of giving offers a bellwether of how donations to all charities are doing because it is based on the donation rates to charities that appear on the Philanthropy 400, The Chronicle’s annual tally of the American organizations that raise the most from private sources. 

Four of the organizations that provided numbers were among the top 25 recipients of donations last year: Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund (No. 3), World Vision (No 11), Catholic Charities USA (No 13) and Nature Conservancy (No. 14).

I guess what this means is that if your charity is in the top 400, out of the more than 1.2 million non-profits in America, your prospects are pretty good for 2010 and beyond. On the other hand, if your organization is one of the other 1.19+ million, the situation could be a bit dicey.

No matter the case, my advice would be the same: "Hunt where the ducks are." Look at where your organization's contributions are coming from. Look geographically and look demographically. Do some research on why that location or group has a more natural affinity with your organization. Take the extra time to split a couple of hairs. With minimal effort, you can probably mine good data from the space between two slices of demographic that are otherwise identical, except in their level of support.

Why assess by geography and demographics? These give you hard targets that have self-identified.

From those points of strength work to spread the circle. Go to your established donors -- not with another ask, but with a request that they help spread the message of your mission. Host an event, if it's a geographically sound tactic. Engage a circle of your supporters in a city or region.

Or, make it an online event, if you're working a demographically-based angle.

In any case, if you're important enough for your donors to care about, surely you're important enough for their friends to care about.

In the end whatever the current state of giving is, it is infinitely more important to you to maintain and expand your donor base than to argue over who is right.

Tweeting for Dollars?

There's an interesting blog post on Chronicle of Philanthropy, about the use of Twitter as a tool for fundraising. Interesting isn't always a good thing. There's an old saying, "May you live in interesting times." It's not an ancient version of "have a good day." It was meant as a curse.

In this case, the curse may be the amount of time and resources organizations spend thinking, researching, and generally ruminating on the value of social media. If you're wondering about the value of Twitter in fundraising or in spreading the message and mission of your organization, you should read the post.

Central to the article is the following:

...the number of people who use Twitter at least once a month is leveling off.

The numbers show that only about 7 percent of the U.S. population uses the social-networking site at least once a month.

And that has fund-raising experts like The Agitator's Tom Belford advising charities to ignore the medium. 

The post raises questions, more than it gives answers, and there are a number of comments. Here's my comment on the topic:

Younger and more educated readers [using Twitter] is great. Study after study indicate that this demographic is more likely to donate time (volunteer) than donate money. If an org is most interested in getting volunteers on board, Twitter seems like a good solution.

The same goes for "friendraising." As the old marketing saw goes "Get'em young, keep 'em long" -- the idea being that eventually they will tire of volunteering and start giving dollars.

Spreading the word is great, too. But spreading to whom? Spreading the word to other members of the same demographic might bring more volunteers, more future givers. But are the 45-54 demographic and the 55-64 demographic getting the message? Are the "younger and more educated" being followed on Twitter by these prime givers? From a fundraising perspective, it's a valid question.

We've seen a ballooning of the use of social media. Every .org is eager to get on board with every form of social media. But keeping the organization's brand straight across multiple platforms is near impossible. Likewise messaging strategy.

But, if you're after volunteers, and the idea is friendraising rather than fund raising, get someone on staff to tweet regularly, with a strictly monitored message strategy.

But there's another old saw: "Don't put all of your eggs in one basket."

What do you think?