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Archive for the ‘Non-profit marketing’ Category

Know Your Audience (Especially if You Accuse Them of Having Rosacea)

Thursday, March 24, 2011 —

I was recently mall-walking with a friend when we were approached by someone working at one of the center kiosks. Normally we would have walked right by, but we were just there to walk and he was offering us hand lotion. Hard to turn down, right?

After a successful hand scrub, hand lotion, and single fingernail shine, he looked at my face and asked, “So, what do you do for the Rosacea on your face?” It was blunt. It was a question. It was supposed to be engaging. But I was taken aback.

“Ummm I don’t have Rosacea.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, your face is red. That’s Rosacea.”

Um, this is winter in Wisconsin. It was cold. The wind was blowing quite briskly. I hadn’t worn a jacket while walking from the car to the mall. I also hadn’t put foundation on that morning. So, yeah my face was reddish. But do you really need to point that out? We stopped to try your HAND products. Don’t point out things that you think need to be improved on the rest of me. And, in my opinion, he should have worked his way there differently if I DID have Rosacea. If he had asked questions like, “oh, do you do anything to calm the redness in your face?” I may have been more interested in what he was trying to sell me.

Would this back and forth have insulted you? I mean, I was (albeit amusedly) insulted enough to ignore everything he said after that point. As soon as he jumped from our hands to my face without us broaching the topic, I was done and tuned out while he went over pricing for all the products we tried, some of which were actually pretty awesome.

My friend, while being just as taken aback as I was, thought his ploy might work on some women. She said that a lot of women purchase a product after being insulted to a point of realizing they need to improve something about themselves in order to look better.

But if you are selling to people who are not like that, you can’t backtrack after an insult.

With all that being said, please take the time to know your audience. And if you are in a place where you are trying to sell a product face to red-face, please use care in how you ask questions that will eventually lead to a comment about your product.

Think I’m wrong? (Not about knowing your audience, that’s a given.) If you think an insult works, I’d love to hear about it. Or if you have your own story about a time when you were insulted enough to be turned off of a product, please share that also!

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. She recently received her Communication MA from Marquette University. Follow Erica on Twitter @erica_g.

Tags: Communication, customer experience, marketing, Target Audience

Tri-Adathon 2011

Friday, February 25, 2011 —

Last week, we participated in our annual Tri-Adathon event. Tri-Adathon is a partnership between Catral Doyle creative co., Welke Group, and Clear Verve in which all three agencies shut down for an entire day to provide pro-bono work for Southeastern Wisconsin charities. The result was an amazing assortment of invitations, posters, logos, tag lines, radio spots, and marketing/PR plans. And, although we were EXTREMELY tired after getting only a couple of hours of sleep on Friday morning, it is definitely worth it when we present the work to a group of organizations that do so much good for our community.

At Clear Verve, we selected a lot of marketing plan and PR plan projects and did less design work this year. One comment we kept hearing as we presented our finished work was that it was good for the organizations to get a fresh perspective. We all get into habits, and sometimes it is hard to generate new ideas when you are trying to solve the same problems over and over again. Sometimes, our suggestions seemed pretty simple and we wondered if our ideas would be rejected as “too obvious” when they were presented. Instead, we found that the nonprofit usually had a “V-8″ moment. You know, one of those moments where you realize something and feel like you should have seen it before.

So, how can you avoid this trap? One of the best things to do is get an outside persepective. We know many nonprofits can’t afford to hire an outside agency, even with a nonprofit discount. That’s why we participate in Tri-Adathon. Unfortunately, not everyone can benefit from Tri-Adathon. This year, we received about 120 applications, and selected 32 nonprofits between the three agencies. If your organization can’t afford to hire someone to get an outside perspective, and can’t benefit from Tri-Adathon, here are some ways you can get new ideas:

Ask a family member or friend look at your materials. Don’t tell them what you’re trying to communicate. Older kids are great for this.
Put together a marketing committee or group of volunteers who can review projects for you
Approach a local university and inquire if there is small business/organization resource center, internship program or class that could be approached to provide an outside perspective
Ask yourself how every project ties back to your mission
Keep things simple. Don’t try to communicate too much with your copy points and visuals. You have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention so keeping messages simple will help you get a cross what you need more effectively.

We are working on a video highlighting our Tri-Adathon experience and will share it soon. Thank you to all involved in this year’s Tri-Adathon!

Tags: marketing, nonprofit, pro-bono marketing, Tri-Adathon

It’s Tri-Adathon Time Again!

Monday, December 20, 2010 —

It’s Tri-Adathon time again! A 24-hour pro bono frenzy!

Tri-Adathon is a 24-hour creative marathon which provides pro bono marketing communication services to Southeastern Wisconsin charities. It’s a joint venture between Catral Doyle creative, Clear Verve Marketing, and Welke Group.

During the inaugural Tri-Adathon, the aforementioned agencies completed a total of 37 projects for 22 Milwaukee-area not-for-profits in a 24-hour timeframe. This year, Tri-Adathon begins on the morning of February 17, 2011 and will wrap up just over 24 hours later with the presentation of finished marketing, graphic design, interactive, and public relations programs on February 18.

Tri-Adathon is seeking entries from not-for-profit organizations located in Southeastern Wisconsin that are interested in receiving pro bono marketing support (including PR or interactive services) from one of the participating agencies. Winning not-for-profits will receive solutions to their current marketing and public relations challenges. Potential support includes marketing strategy, graphic design, radio scripting, annual report design, event invitation design, TV strategy/storyboard, Web strategy/home page design, press kits, media plans, or interior design services. The participating agencies will work on individual projects and collaboratively on multi-faceted assignments.

Applications are being accepted until January 7, 2011 at www.triadathon.com.

The 2011 event is the second annual event with 88.9 Radio Milwaukee as a promotional sponsor.

Tags: 88.9 Radio Milwaukee, branding, Catral Doyle Creative, Clear Verve, marketing, nonprofit, Public Relations, Social Media, Tri-Adathon, Welke Group

Leveraging Community & Business Partnerships

Wednesday, October 27, 2010 —

We recently attended the second annual thought leaders luncheon for Easter Seals of Southeastern Wisconsin and had the opportunity to hear from Tom Kuntz, former president and CEO of Century 21 and co-author of Community & Business Partnerships. The book outlines a five step process for increasing a company’s revenue through business and community partnerships.

Century 21 has long been a supporter of Easter Seals donating over $100 million to this non-profit organization. Tom mentioned that he felt that Century 21 missed a huge marketing opportunity because they did not promote their involvement with Easter Seals.

Some companies are amazing in their support of non-profits and don’t always share with current and future customers. During his discussion, Kunz shared some amazing statistics from the Cone Trend Tracker Study released in March of this year. The survey explored consumer attitudes about nonprofit/corporate partnerships. The following are some key take-away points:

More than three-quarters (78%) of consumers believe a nonprofit’s partnership with a trusted company or brand makes a cause stand out.

59% of Americans are more likely to buy a product associated with a non-profit/corporate partnership

Consumers are highly attuned to nonprofit-corporate partnerships. As a result, they want to see the complete picture and seek details of partnerships (61%) before deciding to support the cause. Plus they want to see results – 75% want to hear about the effect on the social issue or the money raised for the cause. Fewer than half (45%) think nonprofits and companies disclose enough information about their partnerships.

Traditional media channels still resonate effective for nonprofit organizations to use to reach consumers with a message/call-to-action based on the study. The top nine ways are noted below:

81% by word-of-mouth from family or friends
80% through traditional media (e.g., newspapers, magazines, television)
74% in advertising
69% at events
66% in the store, on a package or at the register
64% through standard mail
59% through e-mail
49% through social media channels (e.g., Facebook, blogs, YouTube, Twitter)
29% on mobile devices (via text messaging)

When planning your community impact programs, are you leveraging your support and sharing what you are doing with customers and prospects? If not, this should be integrated into your strategic planning.

If you are looking for more information on the Tom Kunz book and speech, check out the BizTimes article and video interview.

Susan Schoultz is Client Service Director at Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve2.

Tags: community and business partnerships, Easter Seals, Tom Kunz

One Nonprofit’s Strategy on Facebook

Monday, May 17, 2010 —

This week’s post comes to us from guest blogger Caroline Anderson, Public Relations and Advocacy Coordinator at Meta House.

Meta House recently ran a successful fundraising and awareness campaign on twitter, as Clear Verve blogged about earlier. Afterwards, we were asked to participate in a seminar on ‘Social Media Strategies for Nonprofits’ at the BizTech Conference & Expo on Thursday, April 29. Our panel of four discussed various ways that nonprofits use social media like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and the audience seemed to appreciate hearing about our different approaches.

Clear Verve invited Meta House to guest blog and share our facebook strategy. Without claiming to know it all (especially because social media is always evolving…and no one likes a self-proclaimed expert anyway) here is the general approach that Meta House uses on Facebook. We hope that this blog will help other nonprofit organizations as they navigate social media!

Background on the organization: “Meta House helps women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction reclaim their lives and rebuild their families. Its model program meets the unique needs of women and their children, ending the generational cycle of substance abuse.” This is important to know, because unlike an organization that works with cute puppies or something else with easy crowd appeal, we are working against a stigmatized conception of drug addicts. By sharing their stories of recovery and the benefits of treatment, we help fight this stigma and increase support for our mission.

Frequency: We usually update our Facebook page about 4 times per week. If stretching to find news for an update, better to post nothing. If time is an issue because of other obligations one week, that’s ok. Conversely, if lots of exciting things are happening then we might post more…but we don’t want to flood News Feeds.

Audience: We have a diverse group of “fans” (now that we “like” pages, is the noun still “fan”?) including: Meta House clients, graduates, staff, volunteers, donors, sponsors, and new supporters of the organization. Some fans know a lot about us, and some may just have a general interest in women’s issues or addiction and treatment.

Content of updates: We try to post items that will be interesting for everyone, which isn’t always easy. We share about both big and small happenings going on in the various programs at Meta House – from a healthy baby being born to a topic discussed in one of our treatment classes. Our women and their children go on outings around Milwaukee, so we like to share about the fun places they visit, especially because most of it happens for free! Sometimes we put out timely requests if we need something specific, like diapers in large sizes or volunteers to help with a project.

Sharing other media: If we are featured somewhere else online, we share a link to it. After an event, we post photos and encourage people to tag themselves and friends. We have videos on YouTube featuring some of our graduates’ stories, and we post them in the hopes that viewers will gain a greater understanding and empathy for the women we serve.

Applications: We have a Causes page and have raised some money through that application, mostly during “America’s Giving Challenge” and when a supporter makes us the focus of their Birthday Wish. We tried to win on Chase Community Giving, but there was too much competition.

The person behind the updates: Remember how we said that we don’t know it all? Meta House was unsure of how to move forward with social media, as full-time staff didn’t have enough time and interns were too temporary. When I (Caroline) began working at Meta House part-time in September 2009, it was clear that it would be me or no one. I was hesitant because I had just spent three years with the Peace Corps in Cameroon, Central Africa and felt pretty disconnected from the fast-moving online world. However, I began learning by observing other nonprofits in action, attending trainings and webinars on the subject, and talking to new contacts. Christina Steder of Clear Verve also volunteered her advice! Slowly, I began to tweet and update the Meta House fan page. I’ve learned a lot from our followers- their responses are the best indication of what to adjust in your strategy.

We’ll end with a shameless request: please “like” us and suggest us to your friends as well! Thanks for reading.

Tags: Clear Verve, content marketing, Facebook, fundraising, marketing, Meta House, milwaukee, nonprofit, Public Relations, Social Media

Remaining True to Yourself

Friday, April 23, 2010 —

Many organizations, both for profit and non-profit, struggle with finding ways to get their prospective customers, donors, or volunteers engaged in their brand. Since engagement with the audience is one of the key metrics for social media success, organizations are now finding that it is important to combine traditional tactics with social media campaigns in order to attract an audience so that engagement can begin.

At Clear Verve, we believe that combining marketing strategies is almost always a good idea. Using multiple communications channels allows your business to use different types of messages. As an example, you can use one tactic to get people’s attention, and another to say what you want them to know. However, it is important to remain true to your organization’s main goals when planning any promotion.

Yesterday, April 22, was the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day. The Sierra Club, America’s oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization (their words, not mine) launched an Earth Day sweepstakes in which people would pledge to do something good for the Earth in exchange for a trip. At first glance, this sounds like a great idea. People get excited about contests, the registration form gives the Sierra Club the chance to harvest your contact information (unless you uncheck the box), and it was a great opportunity to increase the size of their twitter followers, Facebook fans, and email list.

The problem, at least in our eyes, with the contest was the prize. A trip for two to Hawaii. Not that we have anything against Hawaii. We’ve heard it’s beautiful, amazing, and a bunch of other really nice adjectives. The problem is how you get there. Here is an environmental organization putting two people on an airplane in order to build their social media fan base. Even if nobody is exactly sure how much air travel adds to our carbon footprint, we can all agree it probably doesn’t help. It’s kind of like PETA giving away leather furniture or a fur coat to people who pledge to become vegetarians.

We hope the Sierra Club’s Earth Day promotion was successful and that they attracted many new fans. It would be interesting to know if they heard any backlash about the plane trip. We think taking advantage of Earth Day, and holding a sweepstakes was brilliant. We’re not so sure if they kept their organization’s overall mission in mind when they planned the promotion though. What do you think?

Tags: branding, earth day, marketing, nonprofit, Social Media

Fundraising with Twitter

Monday, April 12, 2010 —

This week, we will launch a first for Milwaukee. On Friday, April 16, in conjunction with A Day for Meta House, Clear Verve has organized the first ever Milwaukee-area twitter-based fundraiser. Thanks to the generosity of Manpower and the vision of the people at Meta House, we hope to raise $1500 through retweets of the hashtag #Day4MH. Here’s how it will work:

During the tweetathon, Meta House will be using twitter to send out messages about their mission, the activities that will be happening at the breakfast and lunch events, and Manpower’s support for retweeted messages. Tweets will also be sent following the theme for the day – the ripple effect of addiction and recovery and how one person’s life affects many other’s – and asking people to share their messages of inspiration and the people who have impacted their lives.

Then, Milwaukee-area tweetathon participants are invited to attend a tweetup at iPic at Bayshore from 5:00 – 7:00 pm. Admission is free, but freewill donations will be accepted to benefit Meta House. Attendees can RSVP for the tweetup by clicking here.

If you don’t know much about Meta House, be sure to follow #Day4MH on twitter, you will learn a lot. They are an amazing organization, a nationally recognized treatment center that has been providing alcohol and other drug abuse treatment services designed specifically for women since 1963. Meta House helps women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction reclaim their lives and rebuild their families. Its model program meets the unique needs of women and their children, ending the generational cycle of substance abuse. Meta House knows that women are likely to have become addicted in response to the pain of traumatic life experiences. They also know that women succeed in treatment when they have a healing environment that understands the importance of their roles in society. For more information, visit www.metahouse.org.

So, how can you help?

We hope you’ll participate in this great experiment and help a wonderful organization make a difference in Milwaukee. Be sure to follow #Day4MH on twitter and take a moment to retweet a few times. Then, show up at iPic to meet the other Milwaukee-area tweeps who will help us raise up to $1500 for Meta House. We’re confident we’ll reach our goal and we hope you’ll be a part of it!

Tags: fundraising, Meta House, milwaukee, Social Media, tweetup, twitter

Bringing Haiti Home

Friday, January 29, 2010 —

In the wake of the Haiti disaster, the American people have shown incredible generosity. From star-studded fundraisers on television, to campaigns encouraging people to donate ten dollars by simply sending a text message, millions of people have stepped up to the plate and raised millions of dollars.

This is an amazing thing. I cannot even begin to imagine the suffering of the Haitian people as they have no food, no homes, and in many cases, no one to help them. It certainly makes my complaints seem insignificant. I may have a dent in the back of my van, but I also have a decent house with heat, indoor plumbing, and plenty to eat. (More than plenty, judging from the way my pants fit.)

However, this generosity makes me wonder. What would happen if we focused this hard on problems in our own backyard? Why don’t we? Are we numb to the decrepit houses we drive by on our way downtown? Do we fail to notice homeless people on the streets?

This is an issue nonprofit organizations struggle with every day. They work to find ways to make their cause relevant and urgent, to spur people to action because they want to make a difference. While the problems we face in Milwaukee are certainly not as sudden as a major earthquake, they are truly not any less catastrophic. Working on Tri-Adathon last week really opened our eyes to the incredible needs of Milwaukee not for profit organizations. There are many opportunities to contribute your time and talent or open your wallet to make a difference. What would happen if, as a community, we worked this hard to improve MPS, increase job opportunities, rehabilitate addicts, or cure a disease? Don’t you want to find out?

Next month, when Haiti is no longer in the headlines, remember there are problems right here in Milwaukee that need fixing. Pick one and do something. Need some help ? How about something that would take only 15 minutes a week? Check out It Starts With Us – a group that provides people with simple ways to work together to change the world with simple pay-it-forward missions that take 15 minutes or less. Or, do something on your own. Just like with Haiti, if everyone gave ten dollars or a little time, our contributions would make a big difference.