Social Media Week Miami: Welcome to Social Good 2.0

By: Kyrsten Cazas, Community and Visibility Specialist

 

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to accompany ThinkInk’s own Chief Visibility Officer Vanessa Horwell to Social Media Week Miami, where she participated in the “Social Good 2.0: Leveraging the Power of Social Media to Promote and Grow Your Cause” panel discussion. Vanessa, along with fellow panelists Daniella Levine of Catalyst Miami, Noel Hyatt of the Broward Education Communications Network, Elianne Ramos of Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) and panel moderator Lynn Ponder of WebCityGirls, discussed how nonprofit organizations can benefit from the power and reach of social media to effectively deliver their messages and fulfill their missions.

Take a look below at Vanessa’s responses to some of the key questions asked during the panel.

Also be sure to check out @ThinkInkPR and @ThinkTankPR for great photos and helpful tips from the panel (I was live-tweeting) and you can even watch the full panel discussion here.

 

How should a nonprofit pick which social media tools and channels to use?

The most important factor is identifying what kind of exposure you are giving your nonprofit and that you are accurately portraying it. Whatever you do on social media reflects your brand (yes, a nonprofit is a brand), so ensure that your engagement style matches your organization’s brand, goals and general attitude.

Also make sure you do your research, look at different social media platforms and highlight the unique characteristics they have and what they can offer your organization. This will help you map out how they can help your nonprofit grow and get more exposure.

And instead of tapping in on all channels – because there is such a thing as overexposure – find out which social media tools your target audience is using today. One way to do this is by monitoring and tracking certain keywords associated with your organization and its mission through free social media monitoring tools. Also take the time to look back at what has and has not worked for you in the past.

How do you build a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube?

“Fishing where the fish are,” nonprofit organizations can reach their target audience by monitoring what other organizations they are following and through what platform. Once you find the right platform, be active and communicate with your ‘followers” regularly so you stay on top of their newsfeed and their minds, by:

·         Writing blog posts about topics that affect your nonprofit and those whom you serve;

·         Inviting those who have received your services to contribute guest posts telling their own personal stories;

·         Creating videos to help bring your message to life;

·         Conducting interviews and featuring those who have great stories to tell or those who play a pivotal role in your mission;

·         Sharing pictures and video from events that you’ve held;

·         Posting updates regularly to keep your presence known;

·         Asking questions to get your followers talking about your organization.

The average donation through social media increases each year.  How can a non-profit get creative with fundraising outreach in social media?

Each year the average donation given through social media increases: in 2010 it was $38, jumping to $55 in 2011 and again in 2012, to $59.

Here are some great tips for fundraising outreach using social media from a PR perspective:

•        Raise more funds by keeping followers active and regularly promoting fundraising events.

•        Give donors the ability to share their donation activity on their own profiles.

•        Keep the process seamless; donors should be able to give with no more than three clicks from your site.

•        Offer as many payment methods as you can.

•        Material rewards can help drive crucial funding. For example, giving away apparel with your organization’s logo can really help market your cause.

What are 5 things nonprofits can do that they might not be aware of, such as remembering to seamlessly link offline and online efforts.

·         Don’t get overextended - Sometimes doing a little bit of everything leads to nothing being well done. Look at your resources and let that guide you as to what channels you choose.

·         Timing - Tweets or Facebook posts should be scheduled to catch people in their ‘downtime.’

·         Ask questions - If your post or tweet ends in a question mark versus a period, you can expect about five times the amount of likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.  This is because social media isn’t about monologue - it’s about dialogue. So instead of just making a statement, ask a question and invite your audience to join a conversation.

·         Be responsive - Respond to questions, tweets, posts from followers in real time.

·         Content - Your audience may not care about your organization as much as the cause you represent, try and balance out your updates by focusing more on the cause/goals your organization is working towards.

·         An Extra Tip: Collect data - Use social media to collect email addresses through online sign-ups this will give you more contacts and show you who is truly interested in your organization and your cause.

Do you agree with Vanessa when it comes to social media and using it as a marketing tool for nonprofit organizations? Comment below with your thoughts and additional tips, we’d love to hear from you!

What’s Happening In Miami’s Nonprofit Scene? A Lot!

By: Christian Williams, Social Enterprise and Visibility Specialist

Your favorite cause lover is here to let you know about who’s been making waves in South Florida’s nonprofit scene recently!

The University of Miami’s School of Communication earned some brownie points with me when they announced their PhilAdthropy marathon. Advertising and public relations students are preparing to pull a 25-hour all-night marathon to help charities with advertising campaigns. The endeavor provides the students with invaluable experience, and helps nonprofits grow by providing them with promotional materials that they possibly could not afford otherwise. The event is this weekend, February 8-9^th and I’m excited to see the work that the students produce.

I’m also excited to see the organization, Girls Who Code, expand into Miami! The national nonprofit works to close the gender gap in technology and engineering. The year-old organization pairs younger girls with top female engineers and entrepreneurs from the technology industry for 300 hours of mentorship and intensive instruction in robotics, web design and mobile development.

So how about a huge round of applause for UM’s School of Communication and Girls Who Code - thanks for your support and hard work for causes in our local community!

Image Source: Marlena Skrobe/Sun Sentinel

Image Source: The Next Web

Greenwashing and Eco-Fatigue: Bogus Green Claims do Everyone a Disservice

By: Kyrsten Cazas, Community & Visibility Specialist

Green·wash (grēn'wŏsh', -wôsh') – verb: the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.  – TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc., 2007.

Last year, Britain’s Channel 4 released a documentary that investigated claims by the California-based Fiji Water company that, as a way to reduce its carbon footprint, it would plant four square miles of trees in Fiji between 2007 and 2010.

But investigators found that, as of mid-2011, the company had only planted 1.4 square miles of trees with no evident plan to fulfill its promise.

By then we’d all heard of Fiji Water, which the company touts as being “drawn from an artesian aquifer that lies hundreds of feet below the edges of a primitive rainforest” in an “isolated and idyllic setting.” Its claims of environmental friendliness and pretty illustrated bottles have landed Fiji in the hands of some much-photographed celebs, on the tables of many ritzy restaurants and even on some prime-time hit TV shows.

But plain old common sense can tell anyone that Fiji Water’s claims are dubious, at best. Fiji Water is collected on an island way out in the Pacific Ocean. Which means that it is collected thousands of miles from pretty much anywhere; the closest large market for this water, Australia/New Zealand, is, at its closest point, about 1,300 miles away. Just imagine the volume of CO₂ emissions it must take to fly and truck this stuff to, say, Manhattan, London or Miami?

An overload of green marketing – as well as an epidemic of misleadingly-labeled or marketed products (clean coal, anyone?) – has left consumers feeling the effects of eco-fatigue for several years now.

After all, how much eco-hype can a weary mass of befuddled consumers take? It doesn’t help when Stanford University tells us that much-hyped pricey organic foods – which pulled in about $29.2 billion last year – aren’t any more nutritious than regular foods, although they do reduce exposure to pesticides.

But still, this eco-fatigue is reflected in changing consumer attitudes toward “green” products.

A recent Green Gauge survey by GfK shows that 93% of consumers say they’ve changed their household behavior to save energy, but are less willing this year to pay more for products labeled as “environmentally-friendly” than they were in 2008.

So consumers have spoken and it’s going to be much harder for deceptive marketers to greenwash products. The Federal Trade Commission recently released new rules that require marketers of “green” products to back up their claims with hard data – including proof that a salient benefit isn’t canceled out by toxic aspects of production or distribution.

And it’s about time, too.

Greenwashers who deceive consumers do everyone – including their own brands, when the deception is discovered – a huge disservice. They are particularly harmful to the genuine environmental movement which is trying to address real dangers, such as the climate change, pollution and deforestation that threaten our planet – and ultimately the survival of our species.

Who feels as strongly against greenwashing as I do?  I would love to hear from you, and especially if you’ve been the victim of greenwashing.

The Ugly Side of NPOs’ and NGOs’ Branding Machines

By: Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer

Two years ago, Susan G. Komen for the Cure – which has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent months due to the huge amount it spends on nebulous “awareness” efforts – made headlines by essentially saying “we own the words ‘for the cure’ and we own the color pink.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve discussed the pinkwashing of October, the commercialization of the breast cancer movement and Komen’s politicized – and self-defeating – attempt to pull funding from Planned Parenthood.

Over the past few years, the nonprofit giant has also received much criticism for seemingly prioritizing its branding efforts – it spends a great deal of time and money suing other charities that use “for the cure” or similar variants or which use the color pink – over its original mission to help find a cure for breast  cancer.

This problem is also besetting the big nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are often among the first groups on the ground wherever there is a disaster, whether natural or man-made, that cuts off the flow of basic services and leaves behind large numbers of human casualties.

Nonprofit Quarterly reported recently that the huge amounts of money and in-kind donations rounded up by the best-known NPOs and NGOs frequently get tangled up in bureaucratic webs spun by organizations bent on “branding” their efforts and making sure they get the credit, particularly in the press, for the aid.

Unfortunately this renders their missions moot, as those most in need after a disaster – those injured, those left homeless, families of the dead – have to wait that much longer to get help. It also, ironically, cancels out the organizations’ branding efforts when negative media stories arise.

With post-disaster humanitarian assistance ever more politicized and convoluted, concerned with press coverage and hobbled by competition for funds, it’s clear the system is broken and increasingly inadequate in responding to disasters – especially those that aren’t big enough to command the whole world’s attention.

Obviously, we need some fresh ideas. And the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies has come forward with a bold proposition: an emergency response fund that cuts through the red tape and channels aid quickly based on where it’s needed most, not on how much press a disaster is likely to get.

And isn’t that the whole point of emergency aid organizations? Yes, of course, they need to promote and fund themselves, but not at the expense of their stated missions, something the American Red Cross was criticized for after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake.

The general fund idea has worked before. Over the past two years the CBHA tested the idea with a pilot program, the Emergency Response Fund, which has funneled 48 grants to 12 crisis areas in a speedy fashion, unhindered by NGOs’ and NPOs’ branding concerns. 67 percent of those funds went to local groups, which often – though not in every case, naturally – are the best-positioned to get money and supplies flowing right after earthquakes, floods, nuclear meltdowns and other crises hit communities around the world.

Of course, there are some difficulties that would have to be worked out to implement a similar fund on a global scale. The aid giants – which still do commendable work despite their myriad problems – would have to be convinced to go beyond self-interest and participate. And donors would have to be convinced to give up control of where their donations go.

So the CBHA faces an uphill battle if it wants to get all the usual disaster-relief actors (governments as well as NGOs and NPOs) on board with this great idea. But, given the results of the pilot program, it’s something we need to try. Disasters and their victims can’t sit around waiting for self-proclaimed savior groups that can’t seem to get their act together. The longer aid groups squabble over control of branding and of the media narratives, the larger the body count on the ground.

And that’s an untenable state of affairs.

Response to this initiative will tell us which groups are truly committed to the causes that are their purported raison d’etre – and which are hopelessly hampered by an obsession with image. 

Good Goes Social: How Panera Bread Got Customer Service Right When It Didn’t Even Have To

By Christian Williams, Social Enterprise Specialist

I’ve been a huge fan of Panera Bread for a little over a year - ever since I got hooked on their macaroni and cheese. I’ve never tried their clam chowder though (I’m not much of a clam guy), but it must be good from what I’ve heard – and just as good as a Panera Bread store manager’s idea of customer service.

Panera Bread took the Facebook community by storm earlier this month when Brandon Cook posted a story of his dying grandmother’s request for Panera’s clam chowder. The story explained his effort to get the clam chowder for his grandmother regardless of the fact that it wasn’t a Friday (the only day of the week that Panera sells clam chowder.) The young man contacted his local Panera branch and was put in touch with a manager named Sue, who went out of her way to get clam chowder to Brandon’s grandmother.

His mother, Gail Cook, soon reposted the story to Panera Bread’s Facebook page, and the story went viral from there. Since the story was posted to Panera’s page on August 8^th, the post has gotten a whopping 760,263 likes.

32, 643 comments have also graced the heartwarming post. Most of the comments include an outpouring of support and well wishes for the ailing grandmother as well as many messages of thanks to the Panera Bread manager, Suzanne Fortier, for her selflessness and willingness to assist a customer in need. Many of the comments are from college-aged students like the younger Cook, which makes me even happier.

My take on it:

We all love a good news story. But when a customer goes out of their way to tell that story themselves because they were so greatly impacted by it, it means so much more. Brandon Cook didn’t need to write about his experience at Panera Bread – just like Suzanne Fortier didn’t need to go out of her way to make a single serving of clam chowder for an ailing woman.

The actions of both Brandon and Suzanne show that doing a little can do a very long way, especially when it comes to communicating good deeds through social media.

Now, every time I eat at Panera Bread, I’ll always associate the experience with feelings of kindness and the joy of one human helping another. And that feeling is addictive, just like Panera Bread’s food don’t you think?

An Internet Hot Spot’s Cold Response: When Calling Something an ‘Experiment’ is no Safeguard from Critics

In one of the early scenes from the dystopian 70s cult classic Soylent Green the camera shows a largely homeless and grotesquely overpopulated New York City street whose riotous masses are cleared with dump trucks – called scoops – treated more like rubbish than people. And in later scenes the audience learns not only is prostitution legal, but the women that come with the little remaining luxury property that’s left are called “furniture.” Nice.

If only treating people like objects was confined to Charlton Heston-starring science fiction.

Instead, the recent marketing misstep by BBH Labs, the innovation arm of the international marketing agency BBH, has brought us all a notch lower on the “soylent slide.” Earlier this week, at the annual tech-fest better known as the SXSW technology conference, BBH Labs hired 13 volunteer homeless people to stand in as human mobile hot spots. Carrying Wi-Fi devices and wearing t-shirts that read: “I’m [name] a 4G Hotspot,” the volunteers were enlisted to help prevent the overload of the existing mobile network, a common occurrence at tech-crowded events. It was also intended as a conversation starter – homeless workers would have an opportunity to speak with mobile users about their plight and discuss America’s homeless problem. And who knows, maybe a chance encounter would aid their employment and housing prospects?

In fact, Saneel Radia, the director of innovation at BBH Labs, who was quoted in a New York Times story about the Austin, Texas event, seemed utterly surprised by the public backlash.

“We saw it as a means to raise awareness by giving homeless people a way to engage with mainstream society and talk to people,” he said. “The hot spot is a way for them to tell their story.”

Somehow I think that positive outcome is unlikely, especially when you start with turning homeless people into an awkward marketing ploy while treating them like glorified telephone poles –albeit telephone poles with enough of a human voice to request that their 4G “customers” consider a donation to help them survive. While it’s true that these unlucky 13 did volunteer for their services and were paid for their efforts (more on that later), the program speaks to the worst kind of human exploitation. It’s one thing to know your actions are exploitative and nevertheless carry them out based on some flawed “greater good” logic, but it’s another level entirely when you’re oblivious to that cruelty.

The marketing carelessness also highlights another disturbing trend related to technology, a term that Chris Klauda, a vice president at D.K. Shifflet & Associates, a travel and hospitality market research company calls, “isolated togetherness” – people in close physical spaces, but remaining disconnected from the “real world” and are instead solely focused on the goings on in their virtual worlds via their smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.

As the technology through which we all communicate continues to advance, becoming more immersive, digitally interactive, and mobile, it’s critical we – not as public relations professionals but as moral, caring, and empathetic members of the human race – remember that treating people with respect isn’t just about asking for someone’s assistance or paying them for their efforts in some endeavor. Nor does calling a marketing misfire a “charitable experiment,” excuse BBH Labs from their decision. That kind of qualified and dare I say bullsh*t language serves no one. In fact, it’s the kind of language PR professionals rely on so often that gives our industry a bad reputation and further fans the flames of the media mess at the heart of this blog post.

For their efforts the 13 volunteers, selected from the Front Steps homeless shelter, earned themselves free t-shirts, $20 a day (which based on an 8-hour work day amounts to $2.50 an hour or about the same legal minimum wage in 1976, and $4.75 below today’s legal minimum), and the opportunity to collect some extra donations.

But if you ask me, and the many others who were similarly disturbed by this story, I think they all got a lot less than they bargained for. Consider this “charitable experiment” a dismal failure, and hopefully one that will not be re-dressed and re-hashed for the next South by Southwest technology conference.

They may not have been called furniture as in Soylent Green, but these 13 volunteers definitely served as a 2012 appliance.

Shame on us all.

An Organization With Terminal Cancer

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of The ThinkTank, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 2/10/12.

Here’s something that almost anyone from any side of the political spectrum can agree upon: the past week has been heinous for Susan G. Komen. And it has shown that the organization most known for its staunch (some, like me, would say steamrolling) support for finding a cure and raising awareness for a single type of cancer -- breast cancer -- above any other has a cancer all its own. It’s a cancer common to any group that has become bloated with a false sense of self-righteousness and one whose arrogance and hubris causes it to stray from its stated (if overzealous) mission and become embroiled in a politicized mess.

What I'm talking about, of course, is this week's announcement that Karen Handel, Susan G. Komen’s vice president of public policy, jumped before she was pushed. A speedy resignation with no severance package, Handel excised herself from the organization before mounting pressure within the group would have forced her imminent departure.

Her resignation caps a week of intense public backlash over Susan G. Komen's decision to first cut and then hurriedly restore about $680,000 in funding to Planned Parenthood, a provider of reproductive health services, including contraception and abortions.

In her resignation letter, which has been posted on Forbes, Handel goes to great lengths to explain how the situation got so out of control. Her defense? Komen is in the business of saving lives. Anything that distracts from that goal is a disservice -- thus the decision to pull funding and divorce itself from a controversial organization that might be spending money illegally, like funding abortions.

In October 2011, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I wrote about how the "pinking" of America was diluting the message of curing cancer and replacing it with corporate capitalism and too much consumption. I also took issue with Susan G.’s near-bullying tactics as they related to how the fundraising and marketing gargantuan has left smaller cancer-fighting organizations to fend for themselves, and how they aggressively muscle out any group that seeks to challenge breast cancer as the only cancer worth raising money for.

This latest misstep only adds to my great concern that Susan G. Komen, for all the good it has admittedly done for breast cancer awareness, has become a monopolistic and politically compromised organization. If she were alive today, I wonder what Susan Goodman Komen -- whom the organization gets its name from -- would think. After what must have been a grueling fight for her life, finding a cure and staying true to the organization's mission and goals would be more important to her then whether or not grant money was going to another group similarly charged with helping save the lives of young, often poor women -- an organization that happens to provide abortions.

Letters of resignation aside, let's not forget that Karen Handel is a former Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, whose campaign promises included cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, and was Georgia's 26th Secretary of the State.

On Sunday, the Huffington Post reported that it had obtained an email exchange between Komen leadership confirming that Handel had the sole authority in crafting and implementing the Planned Parenthood policy.

Does this not have all the makings of a woman hell-bent on achieving a personal goal and using a behemoth organization which itself had become too politically connected, as cover to achieve her aims?

Yes -- the organization did reverse course in barely 72 hours, and restored the funds. It also made changes to its grant awarding guidelines that say only organizations under criminal investigation would be denied funding. But like a true cancer, this organizational one has already done much damage -- to those who truly believed in the structure of non-profits being “doers of good,” to those who held Komen as saviors of women, and to the brands who’ve invested heavily to be part of Komen’s shiny pink halo.

The upside to all this? Susan G. Komen’s misdeeds have opened up an enormous pathway for all the non-profits around the country, breast-cancer-related or not -- to start reclaiming their place in consumers’ hearts, minds and wallets.

And as for the PR advice, first administered by Ari Fleisher and now Ogilvy, all I can say is that it will take a lot more than some clever PR tactics and new positioning to rebuild this country’s trust in the Susan G. Komen brand and its “values.”

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of The ThinkTank, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 2/10/12.

Is There a (Nonprofit) Doctor in the House?

Dust off the leather bag, pack your stethoscope – or your laptop and creative team – and call in the PR doctor, we have nonprofits to assist!

That’s the sentiment expressed in a recent survey conducted by Catalyst Consultants Collaborative, a Miami-based nonprofit organizational think tank, and a collection of Miami-Dade County not-for-profits, as data reveals that for all the good nonprofits do in their local communities, much more can be done to effectively transmit and communicate their message. Maybe this seems a bit obvious, but concerns like this fall directly in the purview of public relations, like our company. Time to call in the troops.

The survey, released in October 2011and conducted in July 2011, collected data from a representative sample of 223 South Florida nonprofit organizations. The surveyed nonprofits were founded from as early as the 1930s right through to the 2000s with annual revenues ranging from less than $250,000 to $3 million. Areas served included education, science and technology, to environmental protection and civil rights, to advocacy, and religion, among others. Clearly, Catalyst they covered all bases when more than half of the nonprofits surveyed said that failing to get their message out was a top concern.

Yet in something of a contradiction, the survey also found that nearly 70% percent of surveyed nonprofits reported an increase in the demand for their services over the last three years and over a third, (37%) saw significant services demand hikes. Common sense would dictate that the busier your organization is, the more people would know of the good work you do. Right?

Wrong. It should be, but it’s not always the case. The good news is that, nonprofits have an array of tools at their disposal that can help them to improve their visibility and messaging – tools that can be further enhanced and implemented by a working with companied who understand the needs of nonprofits, not just Public relations. Recognizing this need, the Nonprofit Brand Institute, a source of news and services for the nonprofit industry, recently compiled a “visibility getting started list” that may steer nonprofits in the right visibility direction:

• What’s in a name? Plenty. It may seem obvious but visibility starts – and continues – with your nonprofit’s name. Choose a simple, catchy name that unambiguously says what you do. Successful nonprofits have a tendency to outgrow their original ambitions and their name is no longer relevant to their cause or only expresses part of what they do. Does that sound familiar?
• Go from laundry list to vision: Nonprofits are usually excellent at explaining what they do and how they do it in various written and digital mediums, but are less skillful at inspiring everyday people to join their cause. Trained writers, hired internally or through your PR partner, are an excellent solution.
• Technology, technology, technology: With 40% of Americans owning smartphones, checking their email and accessing the mobile web, a mobile web presence, either in app form or website is critical. Social media, be it Facebook or Twitter can also go a long way to get your message out, especially to younger adult demographics.
• Learn the ABCs of QR Codes: QR codes, like the older barcodes, are scannable icons that allow smartphones to directly access your site. The easier it is for someone to access your site, the greater the chances a visitor will become a donor –and a free promoter of your cause to other potential donors.

So while improving a nonprofit’s visibility may be a little more complex than taking “two Aspirin and calling the doctor in the morning,” and it may involve reaching out to a professional communications team, embracing these simple and effective tips are a great way to start.

Singing The Blues For Pink

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of Thinkink, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 10/25/11.

For a color whose name doesn't even get top billing on the visible spectrum of light, pink has certainly developed potent staying power. From the Pink Panther to pink Cadillacs, and everything in between, this dainty mixture of red and white has also come to symbolize a less benign issue: the hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-a-year-fight against breast cancer - the third deadliest cancer in America today and No. 2 killer of women.

Are you surprised I didn't say it was the No. 1 killer of women and the second deadliest cancer in the United States? You can thank the power of marketing for shifting those perspectives.

Not only has breast cancer taken more than 240,000 lives since 2005, according to Cancer.org, it has also commandeered an entire month through powerful -- some would even say extreme, marketing influence. For the past 25 years, October’s ghosts and goblins have had to share the stage with the specter of breast cancer and its increasingly corporate-like kissing cousins – Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the inexorably linked Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.

While no one can deny the impressive global awareness and funding these organizations have brought to the breast cancer cause – Susan G. Komen alone raised about $420 million in 2010 – am I the only one who thinks that all the merchandising: the pink ribbons, the pink-clad NFL teams, the Bank of America pink checking accounts, the pink armbands, pink lunchboxes, pink Kitchen Aid food processors and whatever else has been Pink'd for October is diluting both the issue at hand and, in reality, siphoning more money toward profits than for research for an actual cure, and skewing public attention away from other serious cancers -- or other causes, period?

When was the last time you paid attention to cervical cancer, or colorectal cancer? Why don’t any NLF teams wear ribbons to support Male Breast Cancer – something that kills, on average, 450 men per year?

Pinkwashing: Where Does All the Money Go?

In 2002, Breast Cancer Action launched a side project called “Think Before You Pink,” whose goal was to raise awareness over the types of companies that chose to go pink, and “encourages consumers to ask critical questions about pink-ribbon promotions.” Doing battle with so-called “pinkwashing,” their motto is “raise a stink.” Here, too, donations go to cancer research. The organization asks consumers to do some research before a pink product is purchased, for example:

• How much money from your purchase actually goes toward breast cancer? Does it say so plainly on the box or packaging?
• Does the company you’re purchasing from have a cap on the amount it sends in donations regardless of the number of pink-related sales?
• Are funds being raised through direct purchase, or is a clever marketing scheme disguising the fact that you need to purchase additional merchandise from the company in order to make a donation?
• How, specifically, is your money being spent?

I was reminded of the need to research when I received an email from Etsy (a site for artisanal wares), promoting all things pink but without any visible endorsements. Showcased vendors were promoting their wares with descriptions such as, “This apron knot dress is a great way to show support for all those around us touched by Breast Cancer and a fashionable and fun way to show your support for the fight for a cure.”

I don’t know about you but I don’t that think fun and breast cancer belong in the same sentence, and it’s precisely this sort of overreach that at first confuses consumers (who exactly am I giving to?), then moves onto cause fatigue (not another pink promotion!!), and finally cause alienation (what a sell-out; I want nothing to do with that brand).

Have Sponsorship Dollars, Will Go Pink

Susan G’s overreach, too, seems to have gotten the organization into several snafus, the most notable when it partnered with Kentucky Fried Chicken to sell pink buckets of chicken to franchise operators, where 50 cents of every purchase went to the “For the Cure” campaign. Seriously, KFC?

Needless to say, the public and media backlash was acute, and the partnership short-lived. Is a pinkwashed KFC really going to unclog all those red blood vessels? Fried chicken is a well-known contributor to obesity, critics said, and obesity is also linked to cancer. How can a campaign be genuine if, on one hand, money goes to a worthy cause and, on the other hand, unnecessarily shines the spotlight on a fast food chain driving its sales and profits?

The truth is, it can’t.

Then there was the perfume brouhaha where independent testing of the chemicals in Susan G.'s Promise Me perfume revealed that some of them might be linked to cancer. For its part, the foundation released a statement saying that the levels of questionable ingredients fell “well within the guidelines of the International Fragrance Association,” but that out of an abundance of caution, the perfume’s formula was being tweaked.

Of course, the plot thickens when you consider the driver behind this story was cancer charity rival Breast Cancer Action. Is it possible their constant nitpicking is also part of their own marketing campaign called "my charity is better than/more deserving than yours?"

For consumers, it becomes very tiresome and, if that example raises questions of agenda bias on Breast Cancer Action’s part, this one won’t. Earlier this year, Stephen Colbert took Susan G. Komen to the court of public opinion when he teased the group’s million-dollar-plus effort to squash nonprofits that allegedly appropriated the “For the Cure” slogan. Who can blame these smaller nonprofits wanting to cash in on what's become a multimillion-dollar marketing machine.

To Komen’s credit, the organization makes no bones about its size, its influence or the way it does business.

“It’s a democratization of a disease,” said Komen CEO Nancy G. Brinker, in a recent New York Timesarticle about the pinking of professional football. “It’s drilling down into the deepest pockets of America. …America is built on consumerism. To say we shouldn’t use it to solve the social ills that confront us doesn’t make sense to me.”

Raising awareness is all well and good, and Americans have huge hearts and pocketbooks when it comes to giving, but why must that awareness come with a pair of New Balance sneakers or a Kitchen Aid blender?

The truth is that it shouldn’t. Since when did we start needing to get something in order to give?

Let’s Reconsider Our Disease Consumerism

Pink’s 2011 October reign is almost complete. Soon we’ll be on to November, which is officially recognized as Lung Cancer Awareness Month. You remember lung cancer, don’t you, the No. 1 American cancer killer that took nearly a million lives in fours years? It’s got a color and a ribbon, too, though it shares its pearl-colored badge of honor with multiple sclerosis. Only its marketing budget can't compete with pink.

As we close out the final months of 2011, why don't we leave the color spectrum and our "disease consumerism" aside? Perhaps my singing the blues over pink may convince others to think about the effect that one cause's marketing efforts have had on so many others.

From breast to colorectal to pancreatic and prostate to ovarian, esophageal and all the insidious rest -- cancer kills indiscriminately. Choose whichever form of runaway cell growth you want and re-focus on the color of money instead: donate all that you can directly to treatment and screening sources of these other unadvertised cancers – having done your research first, of course.

Trust me. That blender – pink or otherwise – can wait. Because all cancers and life-threatening diseases are equal-opportunity killers, even if the marketing budgets of the nonprofits that support them aren't.

The following article by Vanessa Horwell, Chief Visibility Officer of Thinkink, originally appeared on Marketing Daily on 10/25/11.