Commentary
Green 2.0: Part 2
- by Brad Stewart , September 22, 2010
This month explores a few charities that have pushed the outreach and fundraising envelope, by inventing so-crazy-it-just-might-work campaigns, adopting new technology, partnering with major brands, while re-writing the playbook on accountability to boot.
Why have a campaign when you can have a phenomenon? Such is Movember, an annual month-long moustache-growing event, founded in 2003 founded by a group of Australian guys over beers in the name of men's health. They sported their 'staches that year, and discovered the conversation-starting potential: the perfect tool for awareness-raising! The following year, they hauled in the single largest donation in history for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia. From there, they scaled internationally with 2009's total reaching over $45 million.
Movember's website shamelessly promotes everything from luxury items to skateboards, and including -- of course -- razor blade manufacturers. It's a brilliant alignment for brands like Schick and Mercedes, as thousands of men become completely engrossed in their own facial hair for an entire month. As a participant last year, I can attest to the fact that little else ends up being on your mind other than the patch of irony on your upper lip. I must have uttered the phrase "Movember" a few thousand times last year during that single month! At the end of a long month of humiliation for a good cause, I certainly felt that I had earned a few luxury items, and desperately needed a good razor.
Another charity that has literally exploded over only a few years with the aid of emerging online technology is Charity: water. Charity: water was founded in 2006 by famous N.Y. club promoter Scott Harrison after a life-changing trip to Liberia. He realized that the main reason affluent people from his social circle did not donate to charities was the all-too-common problem of donation leakage and accountability. Along with a simple and transparent corporate governance model (50% goes to programs and 50% goes to operations), Harrison employed Google Earth to illustrate the location of each and every well that was drilled from donorship.
Charity: water also discarded some of the stereotypes of African aid organizations, by adopting a sharp, professional and highly polished aesthetic and partnering with Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks showed a soft side to passersby, and ending up gaining significant media attention with its engaging display cases.
New charities are not the only ones to employ Web 2.0 as an outreach and communication tool. The United Way, one of North America's most visible and historically innovative charities, is also on the social bandwagon.
In an interview for Marketing:Green, Stacey Diffin-Lafleur, director of marketing for United Way Centraide Ottawa, extols the virtues of Twitter and Facebook as phenomenal outreach vehicles. As she explains, the United Way Centraide uses Facebook and Twitter mainly as community builders:
"Web 2.0/social media has been a fantastic addition to the marketing tools we use. We've used it to expand our presence, engage brand new audiences, promote events as well as use it as a tool to recruit new talent. I've even got our president and CEO on Twitter."
Tweeting under her own name alleviates any worries about negative brand exposure, as she adds that "people like to talk to people, regardless."
The lesson here for both charities and marketers is that engaging a contemporary donor/consumer marketplace requires innovation, risk-taking, creativity, and new media. If the balance is right on both sides, charitable partners can be significant brand-builders for companies, and vice-versa.
Correction Notice
Charity: Water has a governance model that actually goes beyond what was stated in this article. In fact 100% of public donations goes directly to programs, and operations are funded entirely through a group of private donors, foundations and sponsors that help pay for the everyday costs of running the organization.