U N C H A

R I T A B L E

A Completely Biased Guide To Non-Profit Communication

Introduction

Let’s distinguish between good and bad marketing. Good marketing is an honest argument which convinces you to buy a product or support a cause. Bad market-ing is deceptive. It’s a trick. It lies about the product it represents. (Though sometimes quite cleverly.)

Communicators understand good mar-keting starts with a useful product. Why, then, is most non-profit communication mediocre? Non-profits have an intrinsic

advantage over for-profit companies. Most do amazing, meaningful work but it’s the for-profit companies who typically do a better job communicating. What follows are my ideas why that might be and how NGOs can improve their strategic commu-nications.

I’ve been involved in several expensive, ulti-mately futile, branding exercises. You know the kind. The organization brings in a high-priced consultant. They lecture on the im-

By Chris Cutter

portance of brand, stories, and consistency. Most of the communicators nod their heads and think, “Yes, we understand but how do we implement it?” Too often, the question is never addressed. The mission statement is refreshed, enormous time and effort is taken to reach a consensual list of institu-tional values, and, at the end of the process, the agency presents a beautiful brand book with a refreshed logo, new boilerplate, and a set of “sacred stories.” They collect their fee and go off to the next project. Inside the

organization, nothing changes. This white paper is written for non-profit communicators. It is – more or less – a how-to guide. Non-profits often have a distrustful view of marketing. What follows are ways to overcome this resistance. Many of the examples offered are the product of the hard work of others and culled from scores of marketing books and papers. Where the ideas or example are not my own I have credited the authors.

W H O O W N S T H E M E S S A G E ?

The first question for non-profit communicators is this: Who owns the message?

If you can’t answer that question, follow the money. Whoever controls the communication budget(s) is leading communications. If it’s not the communications team, it raises an obvious question: “Why?” Budget holders set strategy, initiate communication activities, and maintain “final cut” over communications products.

For many non-profits – even advocacy organiza-tions – communications, marketing, or public affairs is seen as a necessary evil. It is needed to obtain funding and support, but isn’t inherently virtuous like the mission-driven work of the orga-nization. Too often, the prevailing attitude is this: the media are sloppy, asking for money is crass, and marketing is manipulative and shallow.

Typically, the communications function in an NGO is set up as a “service” – an “in-house agen-cy” – to meet the needs of the program team. This is, effectively, designating non-communicators to lead communications. For example, a legal advo-cacy NGO will put attorneys in charge of commu-nications. Or: communication at a developmental NGO will be managed by development profes-sionals. The communication coming from those organizations, unsurprisingly, sounds like it was created by lawyers or policy wonks. At other non-profits, communication budgets are meted out democratically, predictably resulting in fragmented messaging.

Go to the home page of any NGO and notice

what’s featured and how it’s presented. It’s usually self-evident whether the communications budget is controlled by the program staff, marketers, fun-draisers, or all of the above.

Delegating the control of communications bud-gets to non-marketers is a mistake. It happens in all industries but is especially acute in non-profit organizations. The communication budget should reside in a single account, administered by the lead marketer. The lead marketer is, in turn, respon-sible for drafting a strategic marketing plan for the organization. The plan is created in collabora-tion with the executive leadership and focused on the most strategically important priorities – i.e. SMART (Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely) goals. A good plan covers 12-18 months, no more, with 75% of the activities planned in advance. It articulates assumptions, defines and measures success, and progress is monitored and reported on regularly.

Doing this effectively requires joint-planning. It calls for specificity, clear roles, and accountability. It means doing fewer things better and making difficult decisions about what good ideas not to do. It takes time. It is not easy.

If you are working at an organization where com-municators don’t control the message or budget, organizational communication will be consistently mediocre. If you are a good marketer, you’ll never succeed. Fight for control of budgets and accept accountability for the effectiveness of communica-tions or you’ll be perpetually frustrated.

This white paper uses the terms “marketing,” “communications,” “marcom,” and “public affairs” interchangably. There are non-profits that use these labels in very specific ways, sometimes for good reasons, but for our purposes let’s just assume they’re the same thing. Likewise for “non-profit,” “NGO,” and

“mission-driven organization.”

M I N D Y O U R I N T E R N A L A U D I E N C E S

The primary target audience for any marketer is always the internal audience.

This is especially true at non-profits where employ-ees are greatly invested in the mission. Marketing is unique compared to other business disciplines – like say, accounting – because most people think they communicate reasonably well. Every profes-sional marketer has at least one story about an executive/CEO/client passing on a ridiculous idea from a friend, relative, or significant other – even a stranger on an airplane – regarding the latest logo, brochure, or microsite. The stories are all the same. They are our professional lament.

This problem is rampant at non-profits where communication is led by mission-driven special-ists. A poorly conceived idea can only be margin-ally improved through execution, even by the best communicators.

Communicators need to establish credibility within their non-profit by demonstrating that marketing isn’t conjecture or opinion. It isn’t dishonest, either, or magical. There is an art to effective communi-cation, but there is also a solid body of literature undergirding marketing and communication ap-proaches. It may not be the hard science of a biolo-gist or a climatologist, but the discipline of persua-sive communication is studied and codified nearly as much as economics, philosophy, or psychology -- three fields it draws heavily from.

As an appendix I’ve included a primer on the his-tory of persuasive communication. If you’ve already earned the trust and respect of your colleagues, read on. If you haven’t, flip to the back for ex-amples and techniques to bolster your arguments. Win over your co-workers first. This, too, is part of advocacy communication.

Ignore it at your own peril.

W H O A R E Y O U A N D W H A T D O Y O U S T A N D F O R ?

In his book The 8th Habit, Stephen Covey de-scribes the results of a 23,000-person poll which was administered across a diversity of companies and industries. It showed: • Only37percentsaidtheyhaveaclearun-derstanding of what their organization was trying to achieve and why.• Onlyoneinfivewasenthusiasticabouttheir team and organizational goals. • Onlyoneinfivesaidtheyhadaclear“lineof sight” between their tasks and their team and organizational goals.• Only15percentfelttheirorganizationfully enabled them to execute key goals.• Only20percentfullytrustedtheorganiza-tion they worked for.

I find these results fascinating. They clearly illus-trate that confusion, entropy, and atrophy are the natural state of corporate life and only organiza-tions with inordinate skill, energy, and creativity can overcome them. The polling validates the idea that the companies with strong identities are the clear exception, not the rule.

The word “brand” or “branding” is often misun-derstood. Your brand is your identity. Corporate identity. Shared identity. I don’t mean a plaque on the wall or a laminated card handed out at orientation. Great brands start with organizations that have a strong sense of self. Self-identity is the genesis of branding. Effective brands establish a strong internal culture and then communicate their identity externally.

Tailor messages to your audience, but don’t let oth-ers define your brand. Sony founder Akio Morita once said, “Our plan is to lead the public. They do not know what is possible.” Likewise, Henry Ford decided to make cars because he thought it was the

right idea, not because of public demand. “If we had asked the public what they wanted they would have said ‘faster horses,” he said. Scott Bedbury, a successful marketer at both Nike and Starbucks, elaborates on this point in his excellent book A New Brand World:

“Some of the world’s most beloved brands, Star-bucks among them, spent next to nothing on traditional marketing activities. Yet Starbucks em-ployees knew how to behave. Their training, their benefits, their sense of solidarity – and therefore their attitude and presentation – are consistently a cut above those employees in the rest of the res-taurant-and-fast-food industry. Which is a prime example of how, if you understand your brand – its values, its mission, its reason for being – and integrate it consistently into everything you do, your entire organization will know how to behave in virtually any and all situations. Behavior and quality, over time, build trust. Advertising, if it is any good, should help confirm what already is, not what should be. … [at Nike] We instinctively re-coiled at the notion of running a new print, radio, or TV advertisement by an ostensibly randomly selected group of consumers to find out how they might respond to it. To us, that approach lacked self-confidence and replaced gut instinct and creative intuition with conservative, risk-averse, lowest-common-denominator thinking.”

I’m not arguing against market research, but don’t use market research to tell your organization what it stands for. This is especially important for mis-sion-driven organizations.

Bedbury continues, “Unless your brand stands for something, it stands for nothing. Uncover what resides at the heart of your company. Where is the passion? … Once you have identified the

values that are most essential to your desired brand … measure how well you’re communicating and delivering those values. This is your benchmark. Then do whatever you can to grow it, to promote it, and to make it part of everything you do so that no one can miss it. ... [w]e were able to distill the Starbucks brand experience into three words: ‘Rewarding Everyday Moments,’ which ... would serve as our brand touchstone. ... [and] ‘Authentic Athletic Performance’ provided Nike with a reach well beyond shoes and apparel, while not forsak-ing cohesion. In seeking to craft a simple statement that would be as broad yet defining for Starbucks, we made sure that the Starbucks mantra didn’t even mention coffee. Because whether it be selling tea, Frappucino, books, or newspapers, or just pro-viding a comfortable, well-lit place to relax, provid-ing ‘Rewarding Everyday Moments’ encompasses all of these experiences within the Starbucks brand structure.”

Notice Nike’s self-described identity isn’t “state-of-the-art athletic gear” nor is Starbucks’ “world’s best coffee.” Instead, the brand is about what defines the company, not about the merits of the prod-uct. The brand idea isn’t the marketing message. The Nike commercials didn’t say: Nike: Authentic Athletic Performance, they proclaimed, “Just Do It.” A non-profit brand isn’t the mission, but who the organization is and what it feels like when people interact with it. It has to be honest and must emerge, organically, from the reality of the organizational culture. It should affect the behavior and decision-making of the employees. It’s meta-phorical.

Herb Kelleher [the long-serving CEO of Southwest Airlines] once told an interviewer, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are the low-fare airline. Once you

understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”“Here’s an example,” he said. “Tracy from market-ing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that the passengers might enjoy a light entrée on the Houston to Las Vegas flight. All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Cae-sar salad would be popular. What do you say?”

The interviewer stammered for a moment, so Kelleher responded: “You say, Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us the low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas? Because if it doesn’t help us become the unchallenged low-fare airline, we’re not serving any damn chicken salad.”

Creating a one, two, or three word brand descrip-tion for your organization is a challenging task but an organization with a strong corporate identity – and I mean those words literally – becomes, by definition, a more unified workplace. A clear iden-tity creates esprit de corps, high productivity, and attracts talent.

But not at first. This exercise is a great challenge at non-profits where employees often have deep-seat-ed personal beliefs about the mission and divergent points-of-view about how it should be interpreted and acted out. For-profit companies struggle to find an authentic identity. Non-profits basically know who they are and what they stand for. The struggle becomes choosing between differing opin-ions. Any brand discription you commit to will not please everyone. Some negotiation is inevi-table, but don’t try to forge a compromise between mutually exclusive ideas. Consensus will result in a weak brand. A brand commits to a position, a point-of-view. Consistenly communicated, over time, it will build trust with external audiences.

Can you distinguish immedate gratification from long-term goals? i.e. Have you learned to balance between jumping at opportu-nities as soon as they are presented to you and working steadily and patiently towards your long-term goal? Do you feel consis-tent in your self-image and the image you present to others? Have you tried different roles in searchof the one that feels right to you? Do you believe that you will be suc-cessful in what you choose to do? Are you able to become both a leader and a follower, whichever is called for in a given sitution? Have you found a set of basic social, philo-sophical, or religious values that your out-look on life can be based upon?* (*Ques-tions psychologists use to diagnose whether someone is having an Identity Crisis)

I S Y O U R O R G A N I Z A T I O N H A V I N G A N I D E N T I T Y C R I S I S ?

I S Y O U R O R G A N I Z A T I O N H A V I N G A N I D E N T I T Y C R I S I S ?

T H E L A N G U A G E O F B U S I N E S S

For many non-profits and NGOs the word “brand” has a strong connotation with com-mercial culture. Coke is a brand. BP is a brand. Toyota is a brand. Saving children is a cause, not a brand. You must work to overcome this bias.

Let’s face it, there is a surfeit of shallow, lazy for-profit marketing out there. It’s not unreason-able to draw a distinction between marketing a product and marketing a mission. However, do not allow colleagues to dismiss disciplined mar-keting strategy and protocols with a wave of the hand, “Maybe that’s how they do it at Mercedes but we’re trying to save the rainforest here.”

The writer David Foster Wallace articulated this modern dilemma, “An ad that pretends to be art is -- at absolute best -- like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simu-lacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts up-ping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

The language of business is an instant turn-off to many non-profit executives. There exists a bias to-ward words like “brand” and “ROI.” Many dedicat-ed professionals, across all fields, gravitate to NGOs as an alternative to working for corporations that expends great effort and seriousness to sell people products they don’t need. It’s why talented people accept less money to work for cause-driven organiza-tions.

Mission-driven specialists are often passionte people with strong character. They will object if they think you are undermining the seriousness of their dedica-tion and the gravity of the mission. They will take it as a personal attack and respond accordingly.

As with any target audience, you’ll be most effec-tive when you speak their language. This goes for internal audiences, too. You might get more traction using the word “character” instead of “brand.” Or “communication” instead of “marketing.” If your colleagues resist the language of business, change your language.

Every outward facing organization in the world has wrestled with its brand at one time or another. Those that have taken it seriously and done it well have outperformed their peers in the marketplace.

T H E L A N G U A G E O F B U S I N E S S

Study after study illustrates this. NGOs should take note. Your brand or identity or market posi-tion – these are interchangeable names for the same Platonic idea – is simply what people think of your organization, product, or cause. Your brand exists in the collective mind of your audi-ence. It’s not the logo or the boilerplate. It’s not the mission statement or values. It’s what they think, not what you think.

Here’s the final and most important point I’ll make about the importance of branding: It is your organization’s most critical leverage with the outside world. Every non-profit exists to affect change. Brand equity is critical to promoting change. Very few organizations have the resources and pedigree to affect change single-handedly. Almost every NGO in the world relies on partners to advance it’s mission. A strong brand makes it much easier to build strong alliances and accrue political capital, income, and influence. Non-prof-its must realize they are in a highly competitive marketplace for these assets.

Investing in your brand is smart business. It opens doors. Building a strong brand isn’t an empty marketing exercise, it is a moral imperative to any non-profit.

G E T T I N

G T O A

P L A N

It’s time to start putting things together. First, you need a marketing plan. Normally, a marketing plan is built upon the organization’s business plan. Most non-profits don’t have a business plan, so you’ll likely need to do some strategic work to align com-munication activities with institutional priorities. Clarifying complexity and choosing what to mar-ket and what not to market is the critical challenge for non-profit marketers. A marketing plan that tries to do a little bit of everything isn’t really a plan. A strategic plan aggregates resources around critical priorities. It calls for difficult choices and assumes some projects/aspects won’t be promoted as heavily as others. Set a one-day meeting with the top leaders of your organization. Get the key decision-makers in one room and ask each to list his/her most impor-tant goal for the next 12-36 months. It must be a mission-critical goal, not a communication goal. Raising money isn’t a goal. Ask, “Raise money to do what?” That’s your goal. Examples might be: “Protect 100,000 hectares of forest in Southeast Asia” or “Lift 1 million children out of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.” A big, ambitious goal will suck in all the relevant strategy.

Next, ask: “Who can make that goal a success?” These two questions will establish both a strategic framework and your primary audiences. Third, go through every audience and fill in the chart to the right.

Do this exercise with everyone in the room. It will produce the raw material for a 12-18 month marketing plan that: 1) Is built on organizational priorities 2) Defines a strategic context and target audiences and 3) Focuses communication on af-fecting change -- which is what persuasive commu-nication does.

Take the raw material from this workshop and ag-

gregate it into a plan. It will almost always result in something that is far too ambitious for the organi-zation to achieve. Be realistic. Edit it down into a plan that is both SMART and consistent with your brand.

Meet again with executive management for a day-long workshop. Present the plan and hold a work-ing session to refine it. This will produce a final plan. All of this is extraordinarily time-consuming, but once it is done it will focus communication activities for the year. You’ll know who to target, what you need them to do, and what you need them to think to advance the organization’s priori-ties. The final step is the fun and creative part of marketing: brainstorming of tactics in order to achieve the stated goals.

Goal: (What is the big organizational/program/project goal for the next 1-3 years)

Audience: (Who can make the goal a reality?)

Current do: (What is that audience doing now?)

Future do: (What does that audience need to do to make the goal a reality?)

Current think: (What does the audience cur-rently think?)

Future think: (What does the audience need to think in order to take the desired action?)

Current message: (What are you currently broadcasting to this audience?)

Future message: (What the audience needs to hear to be convinced to act?)

F R A G M E N T A T I O N

According to Bedbury, “One of the greatest prob-lems affecting brands today is ... too many brand parents. … Some brands have multiple product or marketing chiefs with little or no leadership at the brand level. In these companies the brand is a ward of the corporate state. No one is deeply connected to it and few assume any real responsibility for it. It is defined by its parts, and never its whole. Market-ing funds are allocated to separate product or busi-ness unit silos, each with their own interpretation of what the brand is and how it should be present-ed. Companies that are organized this way often have several advertising agencies, each with a ‘piece’ of the brand. Besides the obvious lack of synergy, companies that are organized this way usually end up schizophrenic and conflicted. Customers see different values, different personalities, and differ-ent styles within the same brand. It is especially hard to build trust with such a company.” [Italics mine]

Decentralization and/or overlapping communi-cation responsibilities afflicts many non-profit organizations where building trust with external audiences is mission-critical. Decentralized market-ing budgets produce fragmented communication. Overlapping priorities produce decision-making by committee which, as with any creative process, results in lowest common denominator consensus. Decentralization can enable quick, on-the-ground decision-making but it does not lend itself to the dissemination of a singular, coherent identity.

Too often, marketing resources are divided by geography, project, or channel (online, PR, pro-gram communications, etc.) that do not reflect the needs of target audiences. These are false divisions. There is no such thing as country office communi-cation or project communication. It’s institutional communication with different audiences. Lacking a detailed, common strategy and identity, these communication divisions become sources of ten-sion and conflict instead of places of strength and collaboration.

“Companies and their creative agencies must never lose sight of the brand as they go about their tasks.” says Bedbury. “Nike did not see a market-ing process as either product- or brand-focused, though there were clearly some venues like the Su-per Bowl that pushed us to think as broadly about the brand as possible, given the audience. Many companies break marketing budgets into two neat buckets, brand and product, and inevitably leave few resources to do anything for the brand after all the product assignments have been met. This attempt to establish some division between brand and product doesn’t work. It’s not the way custom-ers look at products. They don’t separate the brand from the product. If anything, the brand looms larger than the product in the purchase decision. Think Coke. Great brands weave themselves into everything they do, no matter how small, no mat-ter how targeted it may be.”

It is essential that every non-profit create an in-stitutional marketing plan both to guide strategy and to prevent individual marketers from being consumed by immediate, unexpected opportuni-ties. Without an institutional framework, decisions can only be made within individualized, localized contexts. Without an understood identity, indi-vidual marketers have incomplete information on whether an individual opportunity reinforces the brand or not.

Building your marketing organically, that is, the process of allowing different marketing channels autonomy in the creation and dissemination of communication, will never allow for the type of brand identification I’m arguing for here. A weak brand reduces opportunities to partner with im-portant, mission-critical constituencies. Under-mining your brand, or failing to make it the mar-keting priority, will, in the long run, hinder your ability to build trust with external audiences.

M A K E A N A R G U E M E N T

Aristotle defined three modes of persuasion: lo-gos, pathos, and ethos. NGOs should incorporate all three modes into their communications. People are influenced in different ways. Logos is an argu-ment built on reason. This is the dominant form of NGO communication and is arguably the least persuasive. Pathos is an argument based on emo-tion. Outside of fundraising appeals, many NGOs feel uncomfortable about appealing to emotion, fearing it devalues the seriousness of their mission. Ethos is an appeal to the honesty of the messenger. This should be one of the strengths of NGO com-munication – NGOs are honest brokers – but it is highly underused.

Advocacy communication should make an argu-ment. Human beings are not logical. If all of us made rational decisions, societies would be just, no one would smoke, and a whole host of prevent-able problems would be averted. Even economists are beginning to understand that people (and mar-kets) can be incredibly irrational. An understand-ing of human psychology, decision-making, and identity is just as important as a logical orchestra-tion of facts.

Presenting information alone is a hopeless exercise. Make an argument. Bolster it with facts (logos), emotive appeals (stories, metaphor, pathos), and do it with authority (ethos). Focus on target audi-ences and you will build a community of support. Will you alienate people? Yes, but if they aren’t critical audiences, don’t sweat it. Clear articulation is representative of critical, focused thought. Good ideas are contagious. They help us organize the world and understand our-selves. Corporate communication of any kind can be seen as the attempt to manipulate these trans-actions. Do it well and honestly. For more details and specific examples, see the appendix.

For-profits are run like dictatorships and non-profits like democra-cies. Decision-making at the latter is often much more difficult and con-sensus-dependent. Be inclusive in the planning but develop a strong, strategic vision for in-stitutional communica-tions and stick to it.

C R E A T E A V O C A B U L A R Y

Color is a language. Music is a language. Fonts have personality. Design is a language. The style of your copy, your tagline, and your key messages all communicate something about who you are.

The most intimidating challenge for creative professionals is manufacturing a brilliant idea in a vacuum. It’s what Robert Frost called playing ten-nis without a net.

A strong identity with clear goals provides guid-ance for creative decision-making. Focused restric-tion increases creativity, not vice versa.

The challenge is to aggregate all the communica-tion elements: words, ideas, presentation, style, images, design, and color so that they are all communicating the same message. This requires careful thinking about your brand expression and making choices how it will be articulated through the various elements. It also means thinking about key audiences. Pepsi, for instance, is “Pesi” in Spain because the former is difficult to pronounce for native Spanish speakers.

Building a vocabulary with flexibility is enormous-ly important for NGOs that market themselves internationally. It may be neccessary to speak dif-ferently to audiences in East Africa than in Cana-da. A coherent communication vocabulary should allow for flexibility to speak effectively to local geographies without undermining or fragment-ing corporate identity. Starbucks looks different in London than in Mexico City but when you walk in the door you know you are in a Starbucks. Fac-toring in this type of balance when creating your institutional vocabulary will enable more effective worldwide communication.

A few considerations for articulating your vocabulary:1) What is our color palette and what is it communicating?2) What fonts do we use and why?3) How do we speak? What does our style say about us? Is this the language of our key au-diences?4) What types of im-ages do we use? How are they framed/shot? Why?5) Are we using pathos, logos, and ethos in our key messages?6) What is our design strategy? Why?

B U I L D A T R I B E

The proposition: If an organization is true to itself and articulates its values consistently, honestly, and effectively, it will build a loyal audience of like-minded people.

It’s proved true for corporations. “You can belong to the Callaway tribe when you play golf, the VW tribe when you drive to work, and the Williams-Sonoma tribe when you cook a meal. You’re part of a select clan (or so you feel) when you buy products from these clearly differentiated companies. Brands are the little gods of modern life, each ruling a different need, activ-ity, mood, or situation.” (The Brand Gap)

Non-profit organizations offer more than a Big Ber-tha driver. They offer a compelling reason for people to join the tribe. A reason for belonging. People don’t give to non-profits as much as they give to non-profit causes. It isn’t, “I’m giving to help the Humane Soci-ety.” It’s: “I am giving to help animals.” Know the dif-ference. Good marketing gives people stories they can tell themselves. Harley Davidson, for instance, doesn’t just sell motor-cycles, it also sells a timeless emotional proposition: the open road, freedom, rebellion. It’s been so success-ful it has created its own tribe of CEO Harley clubs. “Even the best advertising cannot create something that is not there. If a company lacks soul or heart, if it doesn’t understand the concept of ‘brand,’ or if it is disconnected from the world around it, there is little chance that its marketing will resonate deeply with anyone.” (A New Brand World) “Dan Syrek is the nation’s leading researcher on lit-ter. (From Made To Stick) He has worked with sixteen states – from New York to Alaska – on anti-litter initia-tives. In the 1980s, Syrek and his Sacramento-based organization, the Institute for Applied Research, were hired by the sate of Texas. The state was spending $25 million per year on cleanup, and the costs were rising 15 percent per year. The state’s attempts to encour-age better behavior – ‘Please Don’t Litter’ signs, lots of roadside trash cans marked ‘Pitch In’ – weren’t work-ing.”

”We found that people who throw the stuff are real slobs,” Syrek says. “You had to explain to them that what they were doing was littering.” Syrek kept with him a photo of a macho-looking man in a pickup truck. “This is our target market,” he said. “We call him Bubba.” “Syrek knew the best way to change Bubba’s behav-ior was to convince him that people like him did not litter. Based on his research, the Texas Department of Transportation approved a campaign built around the slogan ‘Don’t Mess with Texas.’” “One of the earliest TV commercials featured two Dallas Cowboy football players: Ed “Too Tall” Jones and Randy White. Later commercials included pitcher Mike Scott, Warren Moon, George Foreman, Stevie Ray Vaughan, country artist Jerry Jeff Walker, and Willie Nelson. Keep in mind, this wasn’t just garden-variety celebrity endorsement. No, it was more subtle than that. The spots were not driven by pure celebrity – Barbara Streisand wouldn’t pack much of a punch with Bubba. And even macho celebrities wouldn’t have worked the same way. Schwarzenegger is macho but does nothing to evoke Texanness.” “The campaign was an instant success. Within a few months of the launch, an astonishing 73 percent of Texans polled could recall the message and identify it as an antilitter message. Within one year, litter had declined 29 percent.”

“During the first five years of the campaign, visible roadside litter in Texas decreased 72 percent and the number of cans along Texas roads dropped 81 percent. In 1988, Syrek found that Texas had less than half the trash found along the roads of other states that had run antilitter programs for comparable periods.” “Don’t Mess with Texas,” as a phrase, is a great slogan. But we shouldn’t confuse the slogan with the idea. The idea and the appeal to the identity of a distinct target market were the keys to success.

A W O R D O NS U C C E S S

For-profit marketing and non-profit marketing use many of the same tools and techniques but there are disparate challenges to each. Keeping score at a for-profit company is easier, for instance. A product sells and you make money (or not). Measuring success at a non-profit is a challenge.

For example, how do you measure incremental success at a non-profit that champions biodiversity? Or fights for childhood nutrition? This complex reality argues for developing a clear strategic pathway and carefully aligning the marketing actions to those priorities.

There will be resistance to doing this. Not only, exter-nally, which should be expected, but internally as well. Department heads, country office managers, program leaders, and campaigners will have strongly held and divergent opinions on how marketing can best serve the mission. Non-profits also have the additional challenge -- different from for-profit companies -- of satisfying an enormous array of internal audiences. Supporters, funders, policy-makers, and champions who act as partners often have deeply held convictions associated with an NGO’s mission. They hold stong opinions on strategy and communcation.

Create strategies and budget resources to market to these internal audiences. It is critical that any non-profit establish a strong brand identity. An identity provides a point-of-view, an argument to the world. Articulate it clearly, consistently, and strategically and you will find an audience that agrees with you. Try-ing to be all things to all people or to accomodate too many points of view and you’ll find yourself lost in “mission drift.”

Studies show that trust in traditional institutions such as government, business, media, and the church has been oscillating -- and mostly falling -- over the last decade, while trust in NGOs has steadily risen. Non-profits are the product of a civil society that wants to create a better world. Communication, of course, can’t do that work. However, if you set a clear strategy, know who you are, articulate a clear and powerful argument,

stick to your point-of-view and fight for it, and build a community of supporters, communicators can make an important contribution.

Realize that what I’m arguing for here is a potentially disruptive process. As a young executive I was fortunate to do PR for Apple after Steve Jobs returned to the company. Jobs cancelled product lines, realigned strate-gies, and fired agencies. It was unclear to many if Apple would declare bankruptcy. A big loan from Microsoft helped pay the bills. There were a lot of doubts about Jobs, too. He’d just come from NEXT where he was not particularly successful. Even Jobs’ famous reality distortion field could not prevent a ton of skeptical press. From my point of view, however, there was a coherency to where Apple was becoming.

The point being that what I’m advocating for will likely look like creative destruction. That is: It will probably get worse before it gets better. Things will need to be restructured. Strategies will need to be altered. You will need to fight for budget. But sticking to it, which is as important as any dynamic when it comes to provoking change, will lead to a stronger brand. It will help build a stronger organization. It will pay off.

There’s a wonderful insight about change quoted in Rebecca Solnik’s A Field Guide To Getting Lost: “In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who ‘knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysa-lis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half cat-erpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.’ But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is psyche, the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawl, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”

A P P E N D I X

Scott Bedbury is one of the most successful market-ers of our time. He was a guiding force behind Nike’s enormously successful “Just Do It” campaign. Equally impressive, after building Nike into a Goliath, he moved to a small coffee franchise called Starbucks and marshaled that brand into what it is today. Consider that for a moment: Two iconic companies with entirely different marketing approaches. Nike was built, largely, with exceptional, splashy, highly-visible paid adver-tising. Starbucks never ran a national ad campaign until it rolled out instant coffee in 2010. Bedbury is someone worth listening to. Here’s how he defined branding in his book A New Brand World. “The more enlightened definition of branding that I’m going to propose here originated many centuries in the past. Well ahead of his time, Plato believed that behind and above and beneath everything concrete we experi-ence in our daily lives is the idea of that thing, which gives the thing a lasting, even everlasting, meaning. In a comparable way, every brand has a fundamental essence. This essence is not physical or defined exclu-sively by products or services. ... Today, a brand is, if it is any thing, the result of synaptic process in the brain. The great nineteenth-century Russian behavioral psy-chologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov would understand this conception of branding. The pleasurable sensation that his dogs felt when he rang his famous bell – and their eager anticipation of the imminent arrival of food, which they demonstrated by salivating – is perhaps the best analogy I can think of to the psychological process that branding elicits in us when it works successfully. The concept of the brand – the Platonic idea, if you will – creates a response in its audience without the audience’s seeing the product of directly experiencing the service. …But for our purposes, even the Pavlov-ian model comes up a little short. …Abraham Maslow offers us a model that may be more relevant for the nuanced consumers of today.”

Let’s beging by looking at Maslov. In 1954, a psycholo-gist named Abraham Maslow undertook a study to figure out what motivates human beings. He synthe-sized all the available research and developed what he called a hierarchy of needs – the basic needs human beings seek to fulfill ranging from biological needs to religious experience. The hierarchy was represented by a pyramid, which, from bottom-to-top, identified the five universal human needs as: Physiological, Safety,

Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. While Maslow’s pyramid is valid today, his ideas have been refined. Maslow conceived of the pyramid as a ladder. Once a person secured his Physiological needs he sought Safety, then Belonging, and so on. It’s now understood that most people pursue all of these needs, all the time, simultaneously. For instance, Maslow’s hierarchy, as conceived, doesn’t really account for mis-sionaries who voluntarily post to dangerous countries, or the proverbial starving artist. The essential concept still holds. The ladder idea is gone. Maslow’s ideas are relevant for communicators today because when messages appeal to one of Maslow’s identified needs, they resonate. Successful communica-tion understands deep motivation. Take the example of Nike . (A New Brand World)

“The sneaker was just a sneaker, in every way pedes-trian, until Phil Knight and Nike came along and connected the aspirational and inspirational rewards of sports and fitness with world-class innovative product performance like that of the Nike Air shoe. Nike could have spent millions preaching the value of encapsu-lated gas trapped within a thin, pliable membrane in the midsole of a shoe, encased by a molded foot frame and attached to a dynamic fit system. Instead, it not only simply showed the product but also communi-cated on a deeper, more inspirational level what the product meant with in the wider world of sports and fitness. It transcended the product. It moved people. … Connecting a brand to a timeless human emotion or to a specific cultural dynamic is not simply a matter of picking superficially ‘appropriate’ music for a com-mercial or a corporate video. … a genuine emotional connection must be intrinsically relevant to what your brand stands for, to those unique physical and emotional needs you deliver, and to what you believe at your core to be timeless values. … What Nike did do – so well that in the process it built itself into a multibillion-dollar brand – was skillfully tap in to the wide range of emotional rewards that are uniquely relevant to sports and fitness. None of these emotions are unique to Nike products, but the company found ways to say both explicitly and implicitly, ‘We know how that feels and we know why it’s important.’ Nike simply became a protagonist of the emotional and

physical rewards of sports and fitness at a time when its competitors were dancing on the head of a pin by selling consumers little more than newly designed cushioning systems.” “The relevance of Maslow’s theory to brands and branding is that too many products are pushed at consumers through blunt and often clumsy appeals to only the most basic needs. … A more skillfully mar-keted product will appeal to emotional states ranked higher on Maslow’s scale of human needs that, Maslow argued, all people feel.” (A New Brand World) In other words, the further up your organization’s communi-cation ascends on Maslow’s hierarchy, the deeper the meaning imbued in your brand. However, there are examples of companies that have successfully targeted the bottom of they pyramid, too. Volvo built its reputation on security. The need to belong has been successfully exploited by Harley-Davidson, a company that created an entire subculture around its brand. And esteem is conferred by luxury brands such as BMW or Tiffany. Non-profits have the opportunity to reach even higher on Maslow’s pyramid, to appeal to the need for self-actualization – people with a desire to be involved with “a cause outside their own skin.” (This is how Maslow described Self-Actualization) Commercial companies can’t do this easily. Often the best they can do is imbue their product with a deep-seated human need. Unfor-tunately, this is an advantage that too few non-profits leverage. This brings us to a discussion on Jung. Of all the major figures in the history human psychol-ogy, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung might be the most misunderstood. Jung was a contemporary of Freud. After the two men were introduced, they became fast friends. Freud became Jung’s mentor. Their relation-ship was irrevocably ruptured, however, after Jung re-jected Freudian theory in favor of his own ideas. They parted ways, Freud’s theories became the dominant frame of reference for the next 100 years, and Jung fol-lowed his own unique path.

Today, the most common perception of Jung is as a forerunner to the New Age counterculture. This is a charicature. His theories have practical implications for today’s marketers, especially cause-related communica-

tors.

Jung’s definitions of personality (introverted/extrovert-ed, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuiting) are the funda-mental basis of the Myers-Briggs test, widely accepted in organizations around the world. Jung isn’t a mar-ginal thinker. He’s one of the most authoritative voices on human personality in the history of psychology. Jung posited that the personality of human beings has three components: the psyche, the personal uncon-scious, and the collective unconscious. He argued that understanding these components is the process of self-actualization. Of all of Jung’s concepts, the psyche is the easiest to understand: It’s consciousness. What one consciously thinks and feels makes up the psyche. The personal unconscious is best illustrated by one’s dreams. Think about it: Your mind never stops working. Ever. You work all day and sleep at night. While your body rests, your mind is running full-speed, creating vivid hal-lucinations. Jung argued that since everyone does this, because everyone spends the entire night engrossed in a dream world of one’s own making, the personal uncon-scious should be considered a valid part one’s personal-ity. Jung’s argument, which I’m oversimplifying here, is that thoughts, feelings, and experiences that don’t make it into consciousness go into the unconscious to live, in dreams. The third component of human personality, the collec-tive unconscious, is the most relevant to marketers In A Primer of Jungian Psychology by Calvin S. Hall, Vernon J. Nordby the authors summarize the significance of the collective unconscious.

“Jung broke free from a strictly environmental deter-minism of the mind, and showed that the evolution and heredity provide the blueprints of the body. The discovery of the collective unconscious was a landmark in the history of psychology. … The mind, through its physical counterpart, the brain, has inherited char-acteristics that determine the ways in which a person will react to life’s experiences and even determine what type of experiences he will have. The mind of man is prefigured by evolution. Thus, the individual is linked with his past, not only with the past of his infancy but more importantly with the past of the species and

before that the long stretch of organic evolution. This placing of the psyche within the evolutionary process was Jung’s preeminent achievement. … [the collective unconscious] is that portion of the psyche which can be differentiated from the personal unconscious by the fact that its existence is not dependent upon personal experience. The personal unconscious is composed of contents that were once conscious, but the contents of the collective unconscious have never been conscious, within the lifetime of the individual. … The collec-tive unconscious is a reservoir of latent images, usually called primordial images by Jung. Primordial means ‘first’ or ‘original’; therefore a primordial image refers to the earliest development of the psyche.”

What type of primordial images are we talking about here? Examples might be the tendency of human be-ings to be afraid of the dark or of snakes. Most of us have no experiental explanationn for these feelings.

“Moreover, Jung who carried on anthropological inves-tigations in Africa and other parts of the world, found the same archetypes [Jung’s term for the contents of the collective unconscious] expressed in the myths of primitive races. They are also expressed in religion and art, both modern and primitive. He concluded, ‘The forms which the [archetypal] experience takes in each individual may be infinite in their variations, but … the are all variants of certain central types, and these occur universally.’’ (A Primer of Jungian Psychology)

Jung put it this way, “The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image.” Jung further argued that this “virtual image” is fleshed out into consciousness by identifying with cor-responding objects/ideas/experiences in the world. The gist of Jung’s argument is that the brain is an evolutionary organ which, over time, has been “hard-wired” with the collective experiences of our primordi-al past. He claimed humans are predisposed to certain types of understanding and specific mental construc-tions. It is Jung’s explanation as to why one can find something like the myth of the great flood (The Bible: Noah’s ark; Hindu Puranic story of Manu; Deucal; Epic of Gilgamesh, Legend of Khun Borom; etc.) across multiple religions and traditions. To illustrate this dynamic in action, consider how human beings acquire language.

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known as the most influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. Chomsky’s central insight was that language acquisition is an innate faculty. He claimed we are born with a set of rules about language in our minds – not unlike Jung’s inborn assertion – which Chom-sky called Universal Grammar. He said,“The universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build. If a Martian linguist were to visit Earth, he would deduce from the evidence that there was only one language, with a number of local variants.” Chomsky’s pointed out that it is comparatively easy for a child to learn language. Much easier, for instance, than learning to ride a bike or understanding long division – both of which occur much later in a child’s maturation. Almost no one speaks in grammatically correct language, yet children, from a very young age are able to form grammatically correct sentences. How? Certainly a child’s environment is a factor – children in Spain do not grow up learning to speak Russian – but language acquisition is largely innate. “Children do not simply copy the language that they hear around them. They deduce rules from it, which they then use to produce unique sentences that they have never heard before. They do not learn a repertoire of phrases and sayings, as the behaviorists believe, but a grammar that generates an infinity of new sentences.” For instance, a two-year old child might say, “Mommy, I hate you” without ever having encountered this exact sentence construction before. Jung is essentially making a similar assertion that, as human beings, we are biologically imbued with mental constructs that are fleshed out through our experi-ence. The collection of these images, universal among human beings, are what make up the collective uncon-scious. Jung called these images, archetypes. As Hall and Nordby note, “It is very important for a correct understanding of Jung’s theory of archetypes that archetypes are not to be regarded as fully devel-oped pictures in the mind like memory images of past experiences in one’s life. The mother archetype, for example, is not a photograph of a mother or a woman. It is more like a negative that has to be developed by experience.” Jung put it this way, “A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it becomes conscious and is therefore filled out with the material

of conscious experience. … There are as many arche-types as there are typical situations in life. Endless rep-etition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the forms of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.” Jung spent much time during the last forty years of his life investigating and writing about the archetypes. Among the numerous archetypes that he identified and described are those of birth, rebirth, death, power, magic, the hero, the child, the trickster, God, the demon, the wise old man, the earth mother, the giant, many natural objects like trees, the sun, the moon, wind, river, fire, and animals, and many man-made objects such as rings and weapons. Jung was a successful and active therapist. An inor-dinate number of his clients were successful, middle-aged, and unhappy. This drove much of Jung’s study and he is one of the most authoritative thinkers on what is now referred to as the mid-life crisis. Jung thought that the first half of a person’s life is consumed with adapting to the world and the second half largely preoccupied with getting to know one’s self. (i.e. Maslow’s self-actualization). Jung’s prescription for self-knowledge was that one should become intimate with one’s unique conscious-ness, personal unconscious, and collective uncon-scious. He offered that idea with practical suggestions like keeping a journal of one’s dreams, regular medita-tion/retreat, and wide exposure to stories, myths, and symbols. As Hall and Nordby explain, “simple nursery rhymes and games satisfy children, but they do not satisfy the individuated adult. He needs the more complex symbolism of religion, literature, the arts, and social institutions.” We’re moving one step closer to practical tips for marketers here. “Jung contended that man’s history is a record of his search for better symbols, that is, for symbols that real-ize fully and consciously (individuate) the archetypes. In some periods of history, for example, the early Christian era and the Renaissance, many good symbols were born – good in the sense that they fulfilled many sides of man’s nature. In other periods, notably the

present century, symbolism tends to be sterile and one-sided. Modern symbols … consist largely of machines, weapons, technology, international corporations, and political systems.” (Unsourced quotes above from A Primer of Jungian Psychology) In his book The Brand Gap Marty Neumeier argues our modern symbols, most created by powerful orga-nizations, carry significant meaning in modern life, “Cognitive scientists estimate that more than half the brain is dedicated to the visual system, adding weight to the argument that a trademark should be strongly visual. Yet it can also involve other senses, including smell, touch, taste, or hearing. …When conceived well, an icon is a repository of meaning. … Brands such as Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, IBM, Virgin, IKEA, BMW, and Disney have become modern icons because they stand for things people want – i.e. joy, intelligence, strength, success, comfort, style, motherly love, and imagination.” For those among us who don’t put much authority into the theories of the mind, there’s hard science concern-ing the brain that undergirds the argument I’m form-ing here. The maturation of the mind, the understand-ing of one’s being, isn’t only a conceptual process, it’s a biological process, too. From Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All The Rules: “In 1990 Congress and the president declared the nine-ties the decade of the brain. They authorized funding, sponsored conventions, and generally did everything within their power to help the scientific community unravel the mysteries of the human mind. … Accord-ing to Lewis L. Judd, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health: “The pace of progress in neuroscience is so great that 90 percent of all we know about the brain we learned in the last ten years.” … At birth the child’s brain contains one hundred bil-lion neurons, more brain cells than there are stars in the Milky Way. These cells will grow and die regularly throughout the child’s life, but their number will re-main roughly the same. These cells are the raw material of the mind. But they are not the mind. The mind of the child lives between these cells. In the connections between the cells. In the synapses. … During the first fifteen years of life, the carving of these synaptic con-nections is where the drama unfolds. From the day she

was born, the child’s mind begins to reach out, ag-gressively, exuberantly. Beginning at the center of the brain, ever neuron sends out thousands and thousands of signals. They are trying to talk to one another, to communicate, to make a connection. Imagine every-one alive today simultaneously trying to get in touch with 150,000 other people and you will get some idea of the wonderful scale, complexity, and vitality of the young mind. … By the time the child reaches her third birthday the number of successful connections made is colossal – up to fifteen thousand synaptic connections for each of its one hundred billion neurons. … But this is too many. She is overloaded with the volume of information whirling around inside her head. She needs to make sense of it all. Her sense. So during the next ten years or so, her brain refines and focuses its network of connections. The stronger synaptic con-nections become stronger still. The weaker ones wither away.”

Dr. Harry Chugani, the professor or neurology at Wayne State University Medical School, likens this pruning process to a highway system: “Roads with the most traffic get widened. The ones that are rarely used fall into disrepair.”…[though there is some disagree-ment between scientists about if this is genetic or environmental] whatever their nature-nurture bias, few disagree on the outcome of this mental pruning. By the time the child reaches her early teens, she has half as many synaptic connections as she did when she was three. Her brain has carved out a unique network of connections.”

As D.N. Perkins put it, “The Human Mind is the design that designs itself – and continually redesigns itself. Other mammals are designs but do little self-designing. We humans are so taken with design that we not only design and redesign everything around us, but even ourselves.” People today buy products, join organizations, or contribute to NGOs, at least in part, because of the need for self-actualization. The person who buys a Ford truck and a person who buys a Toyota Prius are making those respective choices because of who they think they are and the image (i.e. brand or identity) of an organization draws, like a magnet, likeminded personalities to itself. As David Ogilvy wrote in his

book Ogilvy on Advertising: “You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace. The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things – its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself. … Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year. … Take whiskey. Why do some people choose Jack Daniel’s, while others choose Grand Dad or Taylor? Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don’t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to dif-ferent kinds of people. It isn’t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image.”

We’re deep in the world of the irrational here. Bet-ter understanding irrationality, I’m arguing, is key for NGOs who want to connect with target audiences. Metaphor is a powerful force in persuasion. The Sydney Opera House, one of the most iconic buildings in the world, was built by Danish architect Jorn Utzon. Un-known at the time – and unbuildable when he pitched it – Utzon won the commission when he simply de-scribed his proposed building as a sail.

O N R A T I O N A L I T Y

“The brain does not learn or remember as though it were a central library of information. Rather it learns through a variety of expanding maps.” I. Rosenfield

Most of us like to think of ourselves as descendents of the enlightenment. We collect facts, arrange them in logical order, and make rational decisions. (Though Ben Franklin, a product of the Enlightenment noted: “Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of rea-son.”) Most non-profit communication works off this assumption. They “provide information,” “raise aware-ness,” and “educate the public ” about the relevant issues and, through exposure to this information, they expect people to make rational decisions to support their point-of-view.

One problem: This assumption is incorrect. Psycholo-gists have found that people are driven to irrational decisions by a variety of factors. There are, of course, people who are more rational than others in their decision-making process but structuring NGO com-munication around this assumption is limiting. In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath cite this study of how uncertainty can lead to irrational decision-making:

“In 1954, the economist L.J. Savage described what he perceived as a basic rule of human decision-making. He called it the ‘sure-thing principle.’ He illustrated it with this example: A businessman is thinking about buying a piece of property. There’s an election coming up soon, and he initially thinks that its outcome could be relevant to the attractiveness of the purchase. So, to clarify his decision, he thinks through both scenarios. If the Republican wins, he decides, he’ll buy. If the Democrat wins, [he then thinks through in his mind, he will also, as it turns out, buy the property.]…Seeing that he’ll buy in either scenario, he goes forward with the purchase, despite not knowing the outcome [of the election]. …

“Two psychologists quibbled. Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir later published a paper proving that the ‘sure-thing principle’ wasn’t always a sure thing. They uncov-ered situations where the mere existence of uncertainty seemed to alter how people made decisions – even when the uncertainty was irrelevant to the outcome, as with the businessman’s purchase. For instance, imagine

you’re in college and you’ve just completed an impor-tant final exam a couple of weeks before the Christmas holidays. You’ve been studying for this exam for weeks, because it’s in a subject that’s important to your future career.

“You’ve got to wait two days to get the exam results back. Meanwhile, you see an opportunity to purchase a vacation for the holidays to Hawaii at a bargain-base-ment price. Here are your three options: You can buy the vacation today, pass on it today, or pay a five-dollar fee to lock in the price for two days, which would allow you to make your decision after you got your grade. What would you do? “You may feel some desire to know the outcome of your exam before you decide, as did the students who faced this choice in the original experiment. So Tver-sky and Shafir simply removed this uncertainty for two groups of participants. These groups were told up front how they did on the exam. Some students were told that they passed the exam, and 57 percent of them chose to go on the trip (after all, it makes for a good celebration). Other students were told that they failed the exam, and 54 percent of them chose to go on the trip (after all, it makes for good recuperation). Both those who passed and those who failed wanted to go to Hawaii, pronto.

“Here’s the twist: The group of students who, like you, didn’t know the final exam results behaved completely differently. The majority of them (61 percent) paid five dollars to wait for two days. Think about that! If you pass, you want to go to Hawaii. If you fail, you want to go to Hawaii. If you don’t know whether you passed or failed, you … wait and see? This is not the way the ‘sure-thing principle’ is supposed to behave. It’s as if our businessman had decided to wait until after the election to buy his property, despite being willing to make the purchase regardless of the outcome.”

Uncertainty isn’t the only variable that leads to irratio-nal decision-making. So does complexity. Made to Stick also details another study, conducted by Shafir and a colleague, Donald Redelmeier, which demonstrates this in action.

“Imagine, for example, that you are in college and face

the following choice one evening. What would you do?

“Attend a lecture by an author you admire who is visit-ing just for the evening, or go to the library and study. Studying doesn’t look so attractive compared with a once in a lifetime lecture. When this choice was given to actual college students, only 21 percent decided to study.

“Suppose, instead, you had been given three choices:

Attend the lecture.Go to the library and study.Watch a foreign film you’ve been wanting to see.

“…Remarkably, when a different group of students were given the three choices, 40 percent decided to study – double the number who did before. Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This behavior isn’t ‘rational,’ but it is human.”

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, yes, but that’s college students. College students are irrational. Redelmeier and Shafir did another study with a group of physi-cians. The physicians were given a fictional patient who presented all the symptoms of needing a hip replace-ment. It is explained that all the courses of treatment have been tried but the hip pain persists. The physi-cians recommend hip replacement surgery. “Half of the physicians are presented with a wrinkle. The doctors are told the day before the patient is due for surgery they discover they’ve forgotten one type of medication: ibuprofen. The doctors are asked what they should do. The majority of doctors recommend cancelling surgery and prescribing ibuprofen. “The other half of physicians are presented with a similar scenario. Except in this case they are told that they’ve forgotten two kinds of medication: ibuprofen and Piroxican. What to do? In this case, the majority of doctors recommend allowing the hip replacement to continue.” Introducing complexity alters the outcome. Dramati-cally. Even among professionals.

In a talk at the TED conference MIT professor Dan Ariely describes another study in which people are offered a free trip to either Paris or Rome, all expenses paid. Roughly half the participants pick Rome. Half pick Paris. Again, the decision is altered with three possibilities. Choice A: A trip to Paris, all expenses paid. Choice B: A trip to Rome, all expenses paid. Choice C: A trip to Rome with all expenses paid, except for coffee which costs 2.50 Euros per cup. How does deliberately inserting a choice no one wants alter the decision-making? In the study, a clear majority pick the all expenses paid trip to Rome. By inserting an inferior choice, the all-expenses trip to Rome looks superior, not only to Rome with no coffee, but to Paris as well. Ariely did a similar study with 100 of his students. He asked them to choose between three possibilities for a subscription to The Economist.•16choseasubscriptiontoEconomist.comfor$59.00•0choseasubscriptiontoTheEconomistmagazinefor $125.00•84choseacombo-subscriptiontoTheEconomist.com and the magazine for $125.00

Again, notice the middle choice is a bad one. Why pay $125 for the magazine when you can get the magazine and the website subscription for the same price?

Ariely repeated the experiment but this time he elimi-nated the middle choice. This time the results were:•68choseasubscriptiontoEconomist.comfor$59.00•32choseacombo-subscriptiontoTheEconomist.com and the magazine for $125.00

Altering the complexity of the choices completely changed the decision-making behavior of the test group. This has strategic and tactical importance to marketers. Why do we then imagine we’re rational beings when so much of our behavior proves we make irrational deci-sions all the time? Perhaps because assessing one’s own rationality is difficult. A study by Cornell Professor David Dunning demonstrated that most incompetent

people do not think they’re incompetent. Dunning showed that incompetent people have a blind spot to their own incompetence. Apparently, the same skills required for competence are the same needed to recog-nize competence. We’re no better understanding what motivates other people, either. Take another example from Made to Stick.

“Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different way of presenting the bonus to the employees:

“Think of what that $1,000 means: a down payment on a new car or that a new home improvement you’ve been wanting to make.

“Think of the increased security of having that $1,000 in you bank account for a rainy day.

“Think of what the $1,000 means: the company recog-nizes how important you are to its overall performance. It doesn’t spend money for nothing.

“When people are asked which positioning would ap-peal to them personally, most of them say No. 3. It’s good for the self-esteem – and as for No. 1 and No. 2, isn’t it kind of obvious that the $1,000 can be spent or saved? Most of us have no trouble at all visualizing ourselves spending $1,000. …

“Here’s the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people (not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments.

“… In other words, a lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow’s basement – we may have a pent-house apartment, but everyone else is living below.”

So the question becomes: If people don’t make deci-sions rationally, how do they make decisions? Under-standing why people decide to support something or not to support something is an important factor in designing communication, no? Here’s more insight,

courtesy, again, of Made to Stick.

“In 1998, Donald Kinder, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, wrote an influ-ential survey of thirty years of research on this topic. He summarizes the effects of self-interest on political views as ‘trifling.’ … Kinder writes: When faced with affirmative action, white and black Americans come to their views without calculating personal harms or ben-efits. The unemployed do not line up behind policies designed to alleviate economic distress. The medically needy are no more likely to favor government health insurance than the fully insured. Parents of children in public schools are not more likely to support govern-ment aid to education than other citizens. Americans who are likely to be drafted are not more likely to oppose military intervention or escalating conflicts that are under way. Women employed outside the home do not differ from homemakers in their support of policies intended to benefit women at work. On such diverse matters as racial busing for the purpose of school desegregation, anti-drinking ordinances, man-datory college examinations, housing policy, bilingual education, compliance with laws, satisfaction with the resolution of legal disputes, gun control and more, self-interest turns out to be quite unimportant.

“These findings are bracingly counterintuitive. If people aren’t supporting their own self-interest, whose interests are they supporting?

“The answer is nuanced. First, self-interest does seem to matter, quite a bit, when the effects of a public policy are significant, tangible, and immediate. …But self-interest isn’t the whole story. Principles – equality, individualism, ideals about government, human rights, and the like – may matter to us even when they violate our immediate self-interest. …And perhaps the most important part of the story is this: ‘Group interest’ is often a better predictor of political opinions than self-interest.” Kinder says that in forming opinions people seem to ask not “What’s in it for me?” but, rather, “What’s in it for my group?”

Again, we’re back to Jung. People make decisions largely on who they think they are and who they identify with. Identity is an important factor in decision-mak-ing. “James March, a professor at Stanford University,

… proposes that we use two basic models to make decisions. The first model involves calculating conse-quences. We weigh our alternatives, assessing the value of each one, and we choose the alternative that yields us the most value. This model is the standard view of decision-making in economics classes: People are self-interested and rational. … The second model is quite different. It assumes people make decisions based on identity. They ask themselves three questions: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?” (Made To Stick)

There is a tendency for any organization to market to itself. During the planning and approval process key decision-makers are likely to say, “This doesn’t work for me.” The objection is irrelevant. The correct question is: “Does this work for our target audience?”

We all have communities we identify with and interact with. Part of the definition of a community is a shared set of symbols, ideas, and language. People who work at non-profits are often, by choice, anti-business. They don’t identify with businesspeople and, therefore, are prone to reject the ideas, symbols, and language of business. Likewise, many people at NGOs are spe-cialists on the issues they represent. Their immediate professional community is likely made up people of similar expertise. These are, potentially, blind biases that may, inadvertently, occlude communication goals.

What am I getting at here? Let’s say you are a biologist working at a climate change NGO. You run an impor-tant campaign and your research is respected among your peers as accurate and honest. The web team presents you with a campaign idea to sign up 500,000 people to join your cause. You read the copy and it seems a bit, well, loose. You wonder how your col-

leagues -- scientists at other NGOs, in academia, and in government -- might react. You request a host of changes to the design and copy. More facts are added. Language is edited for specificity. These things are done because you control the communications budget for the program.

What I’ve described is a common scene across the NGO world. It is the fundamental communicatioin mistake made by many non-profits. It empowers the wrong decision-makers who, understandably, make unconscious decisions to market to internal or peer groups -- groups who probably already agree with you already -- rather than to key target audiences.

The irony of this should not be lost on non-profit communicators. I’m arguing that, more often than we realize, our decisions are made by cultural clues or from a place of personal identity.

It’s important to communicate honestly and with integrity if you are an NGO. An organization’s ethos -- or authority -- is an enormously important part of any non-profit brand and should be protected at all costs. However, that statement goes for all the constituencies within your community, not just the specialists. Logos, or the facts, are an integral part to any argument, but the way they are communicated must be informed by the target audience, not by the identity/perception of those designing the message. Others will decide what your brand is. Others will help you reach your goals. Others may talk differently. Be an advocate. Bring the others into your community. One of the best way to do that, to establish commonalities, is through pathos. That’s what we’ll talk about next.

T H E L I M I T A T I O N O F F A CT S

The Canadian seal hunt is an annual spring ritual that takes place on the ice floes of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The sea freezes over and Atlantic Canada becomes an immense ice desert. Harp seals arrive and transform the seascape into a wildlife nursery. I’ve seen it up close many times but I remember my first trip most vividly.

We arrived in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island a few days before the hunt began. (I was working for an animal protection NGO.) We dropped our bags and lifted off in rented helicopters up into a luminous blue sky.

From the air, the thin ice near the shore looked cloudy and translucent, like a cataract. Further out, the ice was thicker, like a flat iceberg. White snow powdered the surface of the ice and below the water line the floes turned a beautiful aquamarine. Many of the ice pans were the size of a football field. Twenty miles out we saw our first seals. As our helicopter flew overhead it cast a shadow across the ice and adult seals scurried like frightened cock-roaches. Seals do note move gracefully out of the water. Many turned in confused circles. Others flopped across the ice in a frantic belly crawl. Eventually, most found water and slipped in like mercury. We landed and waited for the rotors to wind down. It grew quiet. Everything was pristine, white, and un-touched. Dozens of baby seals lolled in the sun. Most pups moved sleepily, their stomachs distended from a fat-rich diet of mother’s milk. Soft white pups hid behind chunks of ice. We fanned out and everyone in-stinctively wandered to an isolated area for a moment of private communion with nature. I found a spot next to a compression ridge and lay on my side listening to the bird-like trilling of the seal pups. Nearby was a hole, or lead, and I looked down into the ocean below. By shading the hole from the sun I could see deep into the water below. Sunlight, filtered through the ice, illuminated the dark waters with an eerie glow. Adult seals glided past, swimming upside down, and staring up at me. Their bodies glowed blue-green. Certain places have a visceral intensity that is difficult

to describe. A redwood forest or a grand cathedral seems to reduce everything inside it by its quiet insis-tency, immensity, and grandeur. Here we were walking on the frozen ocean where no human being had tread before. A temporary world that would soon be de-stroyed by the waters below or the wind and sun above. It’s not an exaggeration to say it felt otherworldly, a word whose literal meaning is “relating to an imaginary or spiritual world.” It was a specific place existing for a specific time. It was created by nature and would be destoyed by nature. But it was beautiful and complex, too. It was humbling to be there.

A few days later, the hunt started and I returned to ice. It was raining lightly and the sky was heavy and gray. The ice was broken up from the storm and looked like shattered glass floating on a black sea. From aboove it was a mosiac, like a stained glass window. There were several large ice floes and, at the edges, the ocean looked so dark and deep that the contrast with the white ice was arresting. We found a floe large enough to land on. Below us sealers moved across the ice like tired work-men, methodically clubbing and skinning seals. Trails of blood, like capillaries, crisscrossed the ice and connected to larger splotches, like burst blood vessels, where groups of seals had been skinned. This was how the sealers worked: Each clubbed and immobilized all the seals within a small radius and then dragged the bodies back to the center of the circle for skinning. Pelts went in one heap and carcasses in another. Car-casses were piled like dirty laundry. One sealer laid the dead bodies out neatly, like a military formation. A snowmobile with a trailer came by to collect the pelts. I was there with a group of reporters and a European parliamentarian. The reporters were filming and taking pictures and attempting to talk to the sealers. In re-sponse, one sealer cut off the flipper off a seal and flung it at our feet. He pointed his knife at us and said, in a French accent, “Something bad is going to happen to you.” The rest of the sealers ignored us and betrayed no emotional attachment to the events other than fatigue. The sound of the clubbing was slow and uneven, like the pounding of a chain gang.

We watched until the sealers killed all the seals on the

pan, returned to their boats, and moved to the next ice floe. Our group gathered around a pile of the dead, furless seals left behind. Steam lifted off the still-warm carcasses. No one spoke. Some took pictures. The parliamentarian curled into herself and began to weep in a slow heaving spasm. We sat there for a long time with our thoughts. After a while, adult seals cautiously resurfaced in the small leads and pools around us. After looking at us for a moment they disappeared back into the dark sea.

We returned to the helicopter and flew back in silence. Left in the wake of the sealers was a spoiled landscape of bloody ice, slush, and snowmobile tracks. Pools of blood mixed with rainwater and spread across the ice, transforming the white surface into shades of pink and red. To me it felt like the cynical destruction of beauty itself.

***

The facts are these: Every spring, the North Atlan-tic harp seal population migrates to the ice floes off Canada’s east coast to give birth to new pups. When the pups are about two weeks old, hundreds of thou-sands are shot and clubbed to death by hunters. It is the largest hunt for marine mammals in the world. The hunt does not provide food or nourishment -- though some seals end up in flipper pies and a small amount of seal blubber is made into Omega-3 capsules -- but it is primarily a hunt for fur. Seal fur remains a commod-ity in demand for the fashion houses of Europe and throughout Asia.

As facts, these details are not in serious dispute. How-ever, what they mean is furiously debated.One narrative holds that sealing is part of Canada’s rugged outdoor tradition. Sealers are hardscrabble fish-ermen from Canada’s poorest provinces who hunt seals as a way to supplement lost wages from already meager incomes during harsh winters. Supporters of the seal hunt concede the hunt is violent, but no more violent than Japanese whaling, American slaughterhouses, or any number of commercial enterprises that kill animals for human use. They insist seal hunting is an ethical business regulated by the Canadian government and conducted by professionals with the highest regard

for minimizing harm to animals. They hold that those who oppose this narrative are animal rights activists se-duced by the fundraising propaganda of NGOs. They cast their opponents as urbanites who have lost touch with the natural world and who are naïve to the harsh realities of nature – after all some of the hunted seals would otherwise be eaten by polar bears, killer whales, and sharks.

This viewpoint is accurate. You could argue for hyper-bole and stereotyping but, essentially, it sticks closely to the facts.

The alternate narrative is that Canada’s seal hunt is an anachronistic holdover from a bygone era. Opponents of the hunt point out that the hunt is gratuitously violent and hundreds, if not thousands, of seals are annually skinned alive or wounded and drown beneath the ice. This argument posits that civilized societies should respect the complexity of nature and strive to avoid deliberate cruelty to animals. While those who want to abolish the hunt concede that sealing is a modest commercial enterprise, they claim its profits are inflated by subsidies from the Canadian government, rather than legitimate economic activity. Supporters of this viewpoint hold that the seal hunt’s economic impact is negligible for Atlantic Canada, dubious in the face of climate change, and scientifically, ethi-cally, and morally corrupt. Those opposed to the hunt believe human beings should act as stewards of nature, encourage prudence, and exercise restraint whenever possible. Many of these people are animal rights activ-ists, though many are not. They claim their viewpoint is neither radical nor controversial as it is shared by a diversity of groups and personalities including the European Union, Vladmir Putin, and the U.S. Con-gress. They point out that killing a seal with a hakapik in America – a country with cultural values similar to Canada – is illegal under the Marine Mammal Protec-tion Act and would likely result in arrest.

Again, the facts check out. So, who’s right?

We live in a time of complexity. The tools we use to manage and understand complexity are overwhelmed. Political institutions are polarized and ineffectual. The mainstream media and internet seem to encourage a culture incapable of discussing complex problems.

Truth is ephemeral and even objective facts are chal-lenged by alternate interpretations. What you think about an issue like the seal hunt depends less on the facts and almost entirely on whether you identify more strongly with sealers, activists, or the seals. The facts are constant. The interpretation is variable.

Take this example: a hunter bends over a clubbed seal and, as he cuts away its fur, the seal begins to wriggle under the knife. Both sides acknowledge this happens all the time. Does the movement mean the seal is react-ing to being “skinned alive”? Or does it mean the seal is dead but merely exhibiting a “flipper reflex” like a chicken with its head cut off? Likewise, should a two-week old seal, which has molted its snowy white natal coat, revealing a thick coat underneath, be considered a pup (and therefore to be protected) or should it be classified as a mature animal (and therefore available for harvesting)? Who’s right?

The Canadian seal hunt is many things. It’s struggle

between protection and dominion over living crea-tures that dates back to The Book of Genesis. It is a fight between conservation and “wise use” of natural resources. It is an example how economic events and markets change over time and how vested interests resist that change. And though it is a certainly a politi-cal, economic, and environmental issue, it is foremost a struggle for meaning. It is a modern morality play. The seal hunt presents a moment where different people can see the same event – a seal being clubbed to death – and perceive two completely different, mutually exclusive realities.

There is no objective truth in situations like this. There is only my opinion and your opinion and the one that prevails is that which is most powerfully stated and draws the most support. That’s what this pamphlet is about. How non-profits can better argue for their missions. How a deeper understanding of what people believe, and why, can help advocates build support for their causes.

S T O R Y T E L L I N G

Have you ever asked yourself why stories are so inte-gral to human experience? Stories have thrived in hu-man culture since the conception of language because they help us understand who we are. They help us form our identity. If an organization’s brand is an idea shared between itself and its supporters, the material of that brand, the currency of that brand, is stories.

Jungian archetypes – universal, inborn conceptual frames – acquire meaning through stories. Most cause-related organizations are a wonderful repository of stories, often underused. Stories build cohesion and trust. Former Senator Bill Bradley defined a movement as having three elements:•Anarrativethattellsastoryaboutwhoweareandthe future we are trying to build. •Aconnectionbetweenandamongtheleaderofthetribe.•Somethingtodo–thefewerlimits,thebetter.Too often organizations fail to do anything but the third. (From Seth Godin’s Tribes) Where can organizations tell stories? The short an-swer: everywhere. Stories can come in many varieties. Edward Tufte-like infographics can tell a story. Social media and other web-based tools offer new possibili-ties for storytelling. Likewise, research has shown that photos with an element of “story appeal” are far above average in attracting the attention of readers. Story appeal means photographs in which the action isn’t immediately obvious. The viewer thinks to himself: “What’s going on here?” and goes to the caption or copy to find out. Another example is before-and-after photographs which fascinate viewers. “In a study of 70 campaigns whose sales results were known, Gallup did not find a single before-and-after campaign that did not increase sales.” (Ogilvy on Advertising)

Beyond photos and paid-marketing, there are ample opportunities for non-profit storytelling. Templates can simplify the process. Chip and Dan Heath found that the wildly successful Chicken Soup for the Soul series use three basic plots for “more than 80 percent” of their stories. They are:

•TheChallengePlot:ThestoryofDavidandGoli-ath is the classic Challenge Plot. A protagonist faces a formidable challenge and succeeds.

•TheConnectionPlot:TheGoodSamaritanstoryfrom the Bible. The lesson of the story is clear: Good neighbors show mercy and compassion, and not just to people in their own group. … It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap – racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise.

•TheCreativityPlot.Thethirdmajortypeofinspira-tional story is the Creativity Plot. The prototype might be the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring the theory of gravity. The Creativity Plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solv-ing a long-standing puzzle of attacking a problem in an innovative way. It’s the MacGyver plot. Notice these plots fall neatly into Jungian archetypes evoking well-known myths. I won’t delve much more into plot templates here – we will examine this more closely later. There are other models to consider. Ar-istotle has an opinion. Some claim there are only two basic plots: 1) A man rode into town and 2) A man rode out of town. An interview can serve as a narrative structure. A “day in the life of” can be a template and so can “a week in the life of” -- the later example be-ing the Book of Genesis. Christopher Booker makes a strong argument in his book The Seven Basic Plots. The main point is to find which structures work best for an individual non-profit and make those story templates foundational in the organizational vocabulary.

There’s another valid reason for communicating through stories, people remember them better. Chip Heath regularly verifies this through an exercise with his students at Stanford University. Heath gives stu-dents info on crime data in the United States. Half are asked to argue, in a one-minute speech, that crime is a serious problem. Half are asked to argue that it’s not. Heath divides the students into groups and asks them to make their presentations. After the speech he asks his students to rate the listeners on persuasiveness, delivery, and effectiveness. Not surprisingly, the best speakers are rated the highest. Next comes the twist. The exercise appears to be over and Heath plays a brief Monty Python clip to kill a few minutes and distract the students. Then, abruptly, he asks the students to pull out a sheet of paper and write down, for each speaker, every single idea they

remember. The students are flabbergasted at how little they recall. Keep in mind that only ten minutes have elapsed since the speeches were given. In the average one-minute speech, the typical student uses 2.5 statistics. Only one student in ten tells a story. When students are asked to recall the speeches, 63 percent remember the sto-ries. Only 5 percent remember any individual statistic. Furthermore, almost no correlation emerges between “speaking talent” and the ability to make ideas memo-rable. Even the poor speakers, the nervous ones, the non-native English speakers, resonate better than more polished speakers if they tell a story. In the late 1990s, the fast-food giant Subway launched a campaign to tout the healthiness of a new line of sandwiches. The campaign was based on a statistic: Seven subs under six grams of fat. It was Subway’s “7 under 6” campaign. At same time the campaign launched, Jared Fogle was a 425-pound college junior who wore pants with a 60-inch waist. He was diagnosed with edema, a condi-tion in which the body retains fluid because the blood can’t transport enough liquid; it often leads to diabetes, heart problems, and early heart attacks. Jared devel-oped his own all-Subway diet, a foot long veggie sub for lunch and a six-inch turkey sub for dinner. After three months on the diet he lost nearly 100 pounds. As soon as his health permitted, he began walking. Barry Krause, who was at Chicago ad agency, heard about Jared and tracked him down. He thought Jared’s story would make a good campaign and he presented it to Subway’s marketing director, who vetoed it in favor of a campaign focused on taste. In addition, Subway’s lawyers rejected it wanting to avoid liability by running disclaimers like “We don’t recommend this diet. See your doctor first.” Krause decided to make the Jared spots on his own, for free. He convinced one of Subway’s regional fran-chisees to run it. The first ad ran regionally on January 1, 2000, timed to New Year’s resolutions. The next day USA Today, Fox, ABC, and Oprah called want-ing to do stories on Jared. A few days later, Subway’s national office called Krause, asking if the ad could be aired nationally. In 1999, Subway’s sales were flat.

In 2000, due to the Jared campaign, sales jumped 18 percent. They jumped another 16 percent in 2001. At the time, other (much smaller) sandwich chains such as Schlotzsky’s and Quiznos were growing about 7 percent per year. Jared’s story became Subway’s most powerful marketing tool. The guiding metaphor of non-profit communication has been the librarian. Non-profits are highly ratio-nal. They’re the experts. They collect facts and present them to the world. Most use a card catalog-type model to organize their arguments. I’m advocating a shift toward the irrational, to the storyteller who draws lis-teners to his campfire. Not just any stories, but stories that explain what an organization stands for and who it is. Even Galileo, a hero of modern science, put on plays. Communicating these stories will both foster a culture of solidarity and allow the organization to expand the tribe. One of the central insights in this argument is that people make decisions based on who they think they are and the group they identify with. Non-profits have much to offer in this regard. How? By giving people a place to belong. By offering people a means to starv-ing children, or a way to protect nature, or to partici-pate in building a more just society. The story of the organization becomes the story of the tribe. We’re deep into Jungian thought here and at the top of Maslow’s pyramid. We all have a little of the irrational in us. The subcon-scious and the irrational are significant parts of the human personality. Likewise, they are part of every non-profit’s personality. Communicators need to learn to embrace it, build on it, and communicate it with confidence. There is an analog to political campaigns here. As the playwright David Mamet writes in his book Three Uses Of The Knife, “American political campaigns are, as understood by the attendant hucksters, structured as drama. The hero is the American People, in the per-son of the candidate. He or she creates a problem and vows to solve it. ... And we vote for, and follow with interest, that political hero who dramatizes our lives and relieves, for a while, the feeling of helplessness and anomie that is the stuff of modern civilization.”

In Mamet’s construction, our vote is our ticket into the drama, our entry into the morality play. Likewise, the job of non-profit communicators is to find appropriate dramatic structures for supporters, to bring them into the drama, to give them a role as hero -- or supporting player -- if only by proxy. “The power of the dramatist, and of the political flack therefore, resides in the ability to state a problem,” notes Mamet, a piece of advice that applies equally to non-profit communicators. “The Problem, the Mac-Guffin (MacGuffin being Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the thing that the hero, or the protagonist, wants and is working/searching for), the Godless Threat to the Body Politic, these have the power to excite our imagi-nation, and, as Eric Hoffer writes, only by so doing can one control the attention of groups (the mob, the electorate, the audience). “It is the nature of our reasoning faculty to order perceived elements of threat, to identify and structure them so that we can consider alternative methods of overcoming them, and implement the best plan. “That is how we perceive the world. That’s what we do all day. “The drama excites us as it recapitulates and calls into play the most essential element of our being, our prized adaptive mechanism,” adds Mamet. Likewise, this is the duty of the non-profit commu-nicator: To identify and structure the drama inher-ent within the organization’s cause-related work, to identify the central issue to argue, and to present it in a dramatic form, within a setting, within the charac-terization of a protagonist and antagonist, to frame the debate, as they say in political campaigns. It’s a an argument. Facts and figures aren’t irrelevant but they cannot become the dramatic structure or the organi-zation will not achieve the goal of moving its audi-ence and inciting it to action. People don’t support causes and they don’t support facts, they support other people. The best way to gain that support is to tell the stories of the people in the organization and the stories of the people the organization works to help. Every non-profit seeks to solve some problem or address an injustice in the world. Those are the stories to tell.

As far as storytelling advice, Chip and Dan Heath’s Made To Stick is full of examples from researchers about what kinds of stories will resonate with target audiences and what kinds of stories are best to raise money. They argue that certain elements such as: sim-plicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, and emotion anchor effective narrative. It’s a great book you should buy and read if you’re interested in this sort of thing. A New Brand World is another highly-recom-mended book. Other recommendations are: Good To Great, Aristotle’s Poetics, and, if only for fun Ogilvy On Advertising. The latter is straight out of Mad Men. I thought my copy should have come with a water stain from a scotch glass. The emerging field of behavioral economics and those who study the brain are great fodder for marketers. These include books like Nudge, Descartes Error, Thinking Fast And Slow, The Paradox Of Choice, Freakonomics, books by Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, and everything by Malcolm Gladwell.

E V E R Y T H I N G M A T T E R S

“God is in the details,” -- Mies Van Der Rohe Scott Bedbury tells a story of a conversation with a colleague at Starbucks, someone not directly involved with the task of branding/marketing/communicating.

“I asked him,” Bedbury remembered, “what was most important to Starbucks. What was the brass ring? Was it the coffee, was it the store, or was it the people?”

He thought for a moment and emphatically answered, “Everything matters.”

“Everything you do with your brand – every piece of paper, every ad, every press release, every product, even

the music callers hear when placed on hold – must connect consistently to your brand values. For some companies, especially highly decentralized ones, creat-ing and managing such connective tissue can be an enormous challenge because no one person is charged with brand unification; no one is minding the store. Brand cohesion does not happen by serendipity. It needs to be engineered. During its halcyon years, Nike had only one advertising department and one design center. Every product, every piece of packaging, every hangtag, every annual report, came through Nike De-sign. It also used a single agency to drive the core of its advertising program around the world.” (A New Brand World)

C O N C L U S IO N

My supposition has always been that donors don’t so much give to non-profit organizations as much as they give to the people (or cause) the non-profit serves. Another way to say this, in marketing language, is that non-profit communicators need to move beyond describing the benefits of the organization’s work, to articulating the benefits of the benefits. Every life is a narrative in search of meaning and a non-profit’s supporters’ identities lie, at least in part, in their passion to help others.

In Milan Kundera’s The Curtain the Czech author asks: “Isn’t ‘insignificance’ actually one of our greatest prob-lems? Isn’t that our fate?” It’s a question Kundera has explored since The Unbearable Lightness of Being and frequently brings him back to metaphor. (“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single meta-phor can give birth to love.”) Kundera writes of the small pleasures to be found in daily life. “The everyday. It is not merely ennui, pointlessness, repetition, trivial-ity; it is beauty as well; for instance, the magical charm of atmospheres, a thing everyone has felt in his own life: a strain of music heard faintly from the next apart-ment; the wind rattling at the windowpane; the mo-notonous voice of a professor that a lovesick schoolgirl hears without registering; these trivial circumstances stamp some personal event with an inimitable singular-ity that dates it and makes it unforgettable.” Non-profits can offer something of this to their sup-porters. Delivering meaning through the quotidian.As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Power of Myth (a deeply Jungian text) “if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.” To sum it up, this book advocates for non-profits to engage in these actions:

•Identifyinstitutionalvaluesandcreateaninstitu-tional plan, vocabulary, style, and set of symbols/meta-

phors that are consistent across all of the organization’s communication.

•Committoapoint-of-viewandmakeanargumentwith pathos, logos, and ethos.

•Usiestorytellingasafundamentalbasisforcommu-nication.

•Embracethedisciplinesofsubtraction,simplicity,and concreteness in communication.

•Createformal,institutionalprotocolsforcommu-nicators to plan and execute external communication. Many non-profits are unhappy with their communica-tions but chances are they have built an infrastructure to do what it is doing. Doing something different requires changing the machine.

Communication is at the core of what many non-prof-its do and how they understand themselves. If you’ve made it to the end of this essay, I hope I’ve offered up relevant ideas. My hope is that I’ve established a con-text for others to offer their ideas. I’ve put a few very basic forms on the last couple pages that might hlep structure some of your marketing work.

If you have any further questions feel free to email me at chriscutter@gmail.com.

The following are examples of various forms to use for defining a brand and presenting a communications strategy. This is not an unabridged list but represents forms I like to use. Keep in mind, the forms are not the answer. The best ones help encourage and organize ideas and thinking tasks. They’re a structure and guide. Use what works.__________________________________________COMMUNICATIONS PLAN FORMAT

A. Executive Summary: 2-3 paragraphs

B. Goals: 3 (at most) SMART goals

C. Strategy: Implementation of the goals

D. Tactics/Timeline: Temporal & Actionalbe

E. Evaluation: How will success be defined & mea-sured?

F. Assumptions: That the plan is based on

G. Needs: Resources, decisions, management tasks__________________________________________SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats): A useful framework for critical thinking__________________________________________

GETTING TO A BRAND IDENTITY

PURPOSE – Why does your organization exist? (time-less, inspirational)

VISION - (Your organization’s vision of the world it wants and its place in it that world that is readily understandable to educated lay audiences.)

MISSION - (specific and time-bound)

VALUES - (current, honest)

COMMUNICATION PLAN (PER AUDIENCE)

A. Audience:

B. Relationship objectives: (1-3, Outcome-oriented and measurable)

C. Current think -> Future think:

D. Key message(s): (1-3)

E. Assumptions:

F. Research needs:

G. Actions and programs:

H. Evaluation standards:

I. Assign resources

J. Example:

Audience:________________ Fiscal Year:________

Activity/ProgramDate Resources

Ex: event, newsletter, press conference, etc.

Resources used, own-er, budget

Jan

Feb

March

June

July

Ex: event, newsletter, press conference, etc.

Ex: event, newsletter, press conference, etc.

Ex: event, newsletter, press conference, etc.

Ex: event, newsletter, press conference, etc.

Resources used, own-er, budgetResources used, own-er, budgetResources used, own-er, budget

Resources used, own-er, budget

POSITIONING AND USPAgree on competitive advantage statement (USP)/mar-ket position: Build on mission, values, and beliefs

Examples using the (5 word test):Example #1:UniversityDiverseResearchWashington DC[add one word “Catholic” = Georgetown]

Example #2:Quality clothingHiking and campingCatalog shoppingOutdoor living[add one word “Maine” and = L.L. Bean]__________________________________________3 WORD BRANDING EXAMPLES FROM A NEW

BRAND WORLD

Starbucks Brand = “Rewarding Everyday Moments,” Nike Brand = “Authentic Athletic Performance” __________________________________________

OTHER EXAMPLES

Amnesty International: Prisoners of Conscience Audubon Society: Birds Volvo: Safety Disney: Family Entertainment __________________________________________

PRODUCTS, CUSTOMERS, OR OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE AS BRAND

Example from The Discipline of Market Leaders by Mi-chael Treacy and Fred Wiersema The book posits three value disciplines (Operational Excellence, Product Leadership, and Customer Inti-macy) and asserts that successful companies must be outstanding at one, while recognizing no one is good at all three. Companies that aim to be market lead-ers in all three areas end up being mediocre across the board.

“[T]he industries in which companies compete are

irrelevant. Customer-intimate companies will have the same characteristics and goals whether or not they are in the same industry. For example, Home Depot sells screws to do-it-yourselfers, while Cable & Wireless sells international telecommunications to businesses. The two companies have different products, customers, distribution channels, suppliers, and all of the other traditional business components. But they share value disciplines, and as a result they have similar operational priorities and strategic goals. They seek, for example, to understand and know the customer before trying to sell a product. And they will take a short-term “hit” (e.g., offering something free) in return for a long-term relationship. “Companies in different industries sharing value disciplines have more in common than companies in the same industry with different value disciplines. The systems and corporate culture of Nordstom and Wal-Mart, for example, are very different despite both being large retail chains.”

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