• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 25, 2008

Not all behavioral targeting needs to sell cars and travel. At the activist and progressive hub Care2.com, causes are the merchandise and call to action has a very specific meaning. The 8-million-member social network for people who want to get involved and make personal changes does lead generation campaigns for 300 nonprofits. With 50 to 75 campaigns running across many different interests, director of nonprofit campaigns, Joe Baker, tells us how Care2 uses BT to match the right people with the right causes.

Behavioral Insider: How does Care2 address such a broad range of issues and causes?

Joe Baker: We try to serve the me and the we. We give people information and tips about making simple changes in their own lives to live healthier, in sustainable ways, making a difference for the environment. But we have ways to take action collectively to make big change. Some come in from the me side for a recipe or tip. Others come in because they are very concerned about their issue: global warming, endangered species. We try to bridge across people coming in from either direction and give them ways to make changes at a personal level and to feel part of a larger community.

BI: How are you tracking and segmenting your audience?

Baker: People may be coming into the site on an action like something we may have been doing on behalf of an organization. We tag those actions with the specific causes they are related to: animal welfare, environment, because most of our nonprofit partners are focused on one or a handful of those cause areas. In the end we are trying to pair people up with nonprofits they would be interested in.
 
It is an excellent opportunity to gather data. If they are signing a petition it makes sense for us to gather where they live and who they are. We can get some expressed preferences about what issues they are interested in. And then we are tracking their behavior, what issues do they take actions on, how frequently do they take actions, which causes are they not interested in.

BI: Are you tagging content to determine categories of interest?

Baker: All of our actions are tagged. The groups are tagged. We have a social media site where people can post news stories that are all tagged. And then people also have profiles so they can specify their interests. We are able to gather data about interests in a lot of different ways.
 
BI: How does this become a database you can use for clients?

Baker: We track measures of their interest level, which is a statistical model we use so that every time that they are offered an opportunity to take action on a particular cause we record whether or not they took that action. Initially we were just tracking what people were doing, which let us track what people were interested in but not what they weren't interested in. Recently we have been trying to get measures in both directions. We started too narrow. If someone started taking global warming action, they were likely to get another global warming action and another. We didn't really find out what else they were interested in. We do more probing now in different areas.

BI: Are your databases revealing interesting affinities, like someone into global warming is also into animal rights?

Baker: We are working on that now, figuring out how issues cluster. The environmental and wildlife issues cluster pretty strongly. And there is a pretty strong affinity between environmental issues and progressive issues like gay and lesbian rights. It was a little surprising how strong some of those correlations were. And we find that the animal welfare audience is one that can be quite different. There are a lot of people who care a lot about animal welfare who don't' care about a lot of the other issues we have. They aren't necessarily politically progressive. We had one person who actually wrote to us, ‘I only take actions for animals; I don't take actions for people, so please don't send me any actions for people.'

BI: What lead generation products does this tracking enable?

Baker: Our core organizations when we started were national advocacy organizations on the environment, animal welfare, and progressive causes. So there were natural ways to do the lead generation, in that most of them are running advocacy campaigns where there are bills in Congress, policy-making, and opportunities for online advocacy where members can make a difference on the issue. It is a great way to contribute our members to a nonprofit. Typically we use an e-mail or Web promotion to introduce members to a particular issue like wolves losing their protected species status. We speak to them in Care2's voice and bring them to an action that is branded by the nonprofit that shows what that nonprofit is doing about the issue.

So the first thing is to generate interest in the issue and then bring our own members to actions that are branded by the nonprofit and get them to take that action and really commit to the issue. And then we offer them the opportunity to sign up for the nonprofit and engage in a longer term campaign through the nonprofit on that issue.

So we use out behavioral data to identify who are the people we should be sending which promotions to.  Or even for a particular nonprofit, how should we be massaging a particular segment of our audience?

Often legislation will span a number of cause areas and we will try to identify either based on demographics or behavioral information which way is the best way to phrase the message. As we work with more and more non-advocacy organizations, we have to come up with more engaging ways to introduce them to our members that gets them to care about the organization that isn't just us yapping at them.

BI: Does behavior here change over time, or is your database evergreen?

Baker: There is s shifting depending on what is in the news. Our audience fractures into three groups. There are the animal welfare people, who tend to be pretty interested in any animal welfare issues at any time and they stay engaged in that. And then the folks in the environmental area, the specific causes do tend to be impacted by what is happening in the world and in the news. We don't tend to have people who are just about whales. They have a wide span of interests, but we'll find different issues working well at different times. With progressive causes, we are still investigating, but people will often come in on one issue and then over time their interests broaden as we introduce them to other issues and become fairly wide spectrum.

BI: Is there a point of diminishing returns with this audience where they get saturated with requests?

Baker: Because we do lead generation, there is a limit to how many nonprofits we can connect one person to. So it is important as we bring folks into our audience to make sure we make good connections to organizations they really care about. When I first joined I thought the model would be bring people in sign them up find out their interests and sign them up and then they would become kind of dead to us. In fact, it turned out that there are a lot of people who really stay engaged with Care2 so we really want to make sure we continue to connect them to actions they care about and we are using them the best way we can.

  ;