Brian Reich, EchoDitto

In February, this space explored how candidates and campaigns were using, or in some cases not using, the full potential of online technology to wage politics in this 2008 election cycle. This month, as a follow up, I will offer some thoughts about how nonprofit organizations can take full advantage of the communications opportunity created by technology and offer some lessons and examples.

If you are in charge of marketing, recruitment, engagement, or fundraising for an organization, you spend most of your time looking for some tiny advantage, something to generate buzz and differentiate your offering from the crowd of other organizations. The online audience, meanwhile, seems to spend little time differentiating between the work of one organization or another, or what technology or platform they are using to communicate. Instead, the audience is looking online for the most relevant story or entertaining clip, the website that can answer a question they have or the product that meets a specific need.

How will you get their attention, and, more importantly, sustain their interest? What will drive the transaction -- whether it’s a sign up, a donation, or someone ‘friending’ your organization on a social network -- that you want? The answer is relatively simple: it's meeting the expectations of the audience by providing the best information, experiences -- and stuff.

And how do you do that?

More and more, your bag of marketing tricks includes sophisticated social media elements, such as blogs, podcasts, video, and social networks. Pioneering organizations are finding new ways to demonstrate the importance of the work they are doing in the community and drawing the attention of their audience in the process. The key to their success is demonstrating that their commitment to their work is genuine and represented across the total operation of the organization -- and, of course, that you are getting the work done.

Simply put, when that audience sees how the issues relate to them and that your organization is committed to addressing the needs of a community they are a part of, or an issue they care about deeply, they are far more likely to pay attention to your overall messages.

The new communications opportunities created by technology can help make sure that message is delivered to the right people at the right time.

Don't take my word for it, look at the numbers. The 2007 Cone Cause Evolution Survey showed that, not surprisingly, advertising and the Internet are the two main ways Americans prefer companies to communicate their social issues and practices (45 percent and 41 percent respectively). Americans are also using technology proactively to learn about and support social issues and causes. In fact, more than one in five (22 percent) have used the Internet or other technologies to engage in grassroots activism. Others are searching for information on issues (37 percent) or are forwarding important messages to family and friends (38 percent).

In an age when technology has given the audience near complete access and control over the information they receive and share, no matter where it originates, the challenge for organizations in marketing their commitment to a cause has changed as well.

To be successful, organizations need to share, clearly and consistently, the societal impacts of their efforts; they need to provide hands-on experiences that the user can explore and understand, and they need to demonstrate their commitment over time, not just when they think the media will be watching.

Too often, the decisions that organizations, especially non-profits, make when it comes to online marketing are dictated by "shiny object syndrome," a terrible affliction that results in a marketing path based on whatever is newest or generating the most buzz of the moment, instead of what will truly be effective.

For example, when a non-profit hears about the launch of the Facebook Causes application, they respond instantly: "Wonderful! We'll launch a profile." Or when an Executive Director hears that the leadership at another organization is starting a blog, she demands, "We must do that too."

These decisions are often made without consideration for what the audience will respond to, and what will help meet your communications goals.

Let’s look at how a few organizations -- two nonprofits and one major product company -- and how they have embraced serious issues and enhanced their online marketing in the process. The organizations that we highlight have used a variety of online tools to communicate, resulting in successful marketing for each.

Dove Real Beauty: Be the Cause
You are probably familiar with the Dove Real Beauty campaign. The campaign is best known for its real-women models and more recently a 75-second viral film showing the transformation (they say "evolution") of an average looking woman into a supermodel.

The effort gave Dove an opportunity to position itself as selling more than soap: they now give permission for women to feel good about themselves and to look and act beautifully, however they choose to define it. More importantly, Dove is teaching 8 to 12-year-old girls about the importance of identifying beauty within themselves, focusing on the pre-teen years before the peer pressure to be like the mythical supermodel drives them to unhealthy habits.

On the functional end, the campaign for Real Beauty website employs all of the right strategies and tactics. It has a compelling call-to-action, it positions the educational resources on the site as the main focus, and it's easy to send the website to a friend.

More than a year after it launched, the site continues to be updated, in part by soliciting recommendations for campaigns from the audience. And there are discussion forums and action kits where parents and kids can discuss their anxieties and find peers who share the same feelings.

This site has generated major buzz, and deservedly so. It is authentic, genuine, and true to the Dove brand, while also tackling a serious issue with confidence and appropriateness. In short, Dove is sending an important message to young women and backing it up with meaningful support. They will sell more product as a result of this campaign, but that's not all they accomplished. Dove also made it clear to the user what is most important about their campaign effort: them.

Start: Facilitate the Cause
In 2006, 65 percent of American adults were overweight or obese, and physical inactivity was acknowledged as one of the leading risk factors for heart disease and stroke. With research showing that even moderate amounts of increased activity in any form could have an enormous impact on the quality and length of life, the American Heart Association (AHA) saw an opportunity to prioritize "adult inactivity" as an issue to combat.

This meant creating awareness, raising funds and engaging people in healthy behaviors. The result was Start!, a campaign focusing on simple lifestyle changes and providing innovative tools and resources to implement these changes.

Start! promotes walking -- the activity with the lowest dropout rate -- as the gateway activity to living longer, stronger, healthier lives. The premise is simple and based on solid scientific evidence: for every one hour of regular exercise, individuals can gain two hours of life expectancy.

A big part of what was communicated happened online.

The site offers users a basic online fitness and nutrition program, allowing them to track daily physical activity, such as walking or biking, and daily caloric intake. Users can also receive daily tips, weekly articles, and recipes. More than 43,000 individuals registered for Start! and to date, the group has walked nearly 6 million minutes and more than 350,000 miles.

To help expand its reach, the AHA enlisted the online support of some of their sponsors, as well. Healthy Choice, for example, launched Start! Making Choices, which includes videos, recipes and other tools to make it easy for users to commit to a healthy diet.

Alliance for Climate Protection: Teach the Cause
The Alliance for Climate Protection was founded by Al Gore to lead a 3 to 5-year campaign to convince people from all walks of life about the urgency and solvability of the climate crisis. The Alliance is creating a campaign to deliver this important message that surrounds people in their daily lives online and through partnership businesses and organizations.

The Alliance has recently launched its “We” Campaign, a glossy, television-centric effort to mobilize the masses in favor of climate change. Long before that, the first piece of the effort was the launch of an in-depth website, in coordination with the Live Earth concerts, to help people take meaningful, measurable action to address the climate crisis. The site presented dozens of recommendations for how people can take action to reduce their carbon footprint in a way that engaged users who have significant interest in learning more about how to address the climate crisis, but little working knowledge of the terminology of the environmental movement. It went beyond sound bites and platitudes to offer users a wealth of opportunities to learn how to change their behavior.

The centerpiece was a collage and tag list to allow users to explore content based on their interests instead of being directed down a specific path of action with traditional navigation. The campaign also featured online, social media and mobile components that reached audiences worldwide as well as event tools and a carbon impact calculator.

The site featured more than 200 individual pieces of written and video content and a series of podcasts featuring noted environmental journalist and advocate Simran Sethi. Content was distributed through MySpace, CurrentTV, Participant Productions, Zwinky and MSN.

Conclusion
The rapid technological and societal change that we are currently experiencing (and will surely experience for some time to come) has created new challenges for organizations.

Executing an effective nonprofit communications effort begins with aligning the interests of your audience with the details of your issue or cause, but it doesn’t end there. Online, you have to do more than just post some information, a logo, or send an email to show your commitment.

Users expect to immerse themselves in an issue. They want to have some choice in what methods the organizations they support use to address critical issues. They want to see that their efforts, not to mention their donations, are having a real, measurable impact. They thrive on the substance, and that gives nonprofit organizations a competitive advantage over everyone else seeking the user’s attention online.

The same tenets of good marketing and communication apply here as well, online or off, cause or no cause. The projects we outlined above didn't do anything revolutionary; they told stories, they made activation easy on the user, and they aligned their interests with their audience.

If you can do that, you will succeed.