Most advertising is done in the name of commerce. Pure capitalism. But every now and again, agencies engage in (typically) pro-bono work for charities and non-profits. These are often seen as a great opportunity among the creatives to put their talents towards something other than the whims of the rigid and unfeeling marketing department of a Fortune 500 company; a chance to do some good in the world.
While it might be nice to work on a cause, in my opinion these can be amongst the most difficult campaigns that any agency team can develop. Non-profit work often shares many of the same challenges that working with a brand does, but with a host of other problems as well. Not only do they have to worry about cutting through and grabbing attention, but the way many chose to position, advertise, and set goals leave a lot to be desired. Combine that with a flagging economy that has more people looking at how they are going to solve their own problems, let alone the problems of others, and things are tough for agencies trying to move the needle for a pro-bono client.
One of the primary challenges that marketers face when they are working with non-profits is what I call “issue fatigue.” There is a moment from The Office (U.S.) that perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon. At the end of the episode Fun Run (Season 4, Episode 1) Michael Scott, overcome by his failure to complete a fundraising 5K run, unloads a rambling, stream-of-consciousness monologue on the hopelessness of trying to save the world: “There are people, all over the world, with all sorts of problems and afflictions and diseases; they’re deformed and they’re abnormal and… they’re illiterate and ugly. Symphonies don’t have any money. Public TV is bust. I can’t do anything about it. I can’t, you know… There is just one of me. And there are a thousand of them. And rabies wins.” Setting aside the absurdity of situation, Steve Carell’s character actually captures the feelings of a lot of socially conscientious Americans: There are an overwhelming number of causes that all are worth supporting, but there is only so much time, money, and attention to be put towards them all.
This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that technology and invasive marketing techniques make it easier than ever to bombard consumers with branded messages. In the case of cause related messages, this means people are flooded with stories of hardship from around the world that demand their attention. People simply feel they are being buried under the world’s troubles. While each individual issue may be manageable, when all the individual issues are out there vying for attention, they create a mass that seems impossible. It’s the same reason sorting an extremely disorganized room seems daunting until you break it into discrete sections. This is issue fatigue.
Issue fatigue isn’t the only complication for non-profit campaigns. They also deal with ad blindness. Just because you believe your ads will change the world, doesn’t mean that the viewing public treats them any differently than ads for Kleenex. By which I mean the same kinds of problems that face the big brands face all organizations trying to create effective communications: the average Westerner is bombarded with so many messages on a daily basis that they either learn to tune them out or become numb to their effects.
Non-profits are competing for people’s attention, and often money, in the same ways that companies are, but usually with fewer resources. So these campaigns then have two large barriers to tackle: they have to cut through the noise, and they have to do it cheaply. This tends to cause the work to gravitate towards splashy social media campaigns that will get supporters to use their social connections to circumvent the “ad-ness” of the work, and also provide large amounts of earned media as the piece hopefully goes viral and draws lots of people, and press, attention. This causes a lot of campaigns to begin to look very similar. Campaigns about child abuse, gay marriage, the Iranian revolution, Type 1 Diabetes, and the refugee crises in Syria have all asked people to change their profile pic.
Even if you get one of these ideas up and running, people are growing increasingly tired of participating in these campaigns. For one thing, appeals for support come very frequently on social media. But I already addressed this, somewhat, with issue fatigue. Another problem, however, is a growing feeling that these campaigns have little effect. While doing research about this topic, I interviewed a large number of social media savvy young adults from around the country, and even a few from around the world, about their social media habits. Many of them somewhat sheepishly admitted that they are skeptical about the real-world impacts of the “slacktivism” they were participating in through social media channels. When these fads wash across Facebook or Twitter, or when a particular hashtag gets trending, it shows that there is an increase in conversation and, it follows, an increase in awareness. But awareness doesn’t feed a starving kid or cure a disease.
In truth, these campaigns only seem to work because they allow for social signaling. People who wish to belong to a tribe quickly internalize the kinds of behavior that will align them with their tribe on social media, including which social causes they will support. It is increasingly common for this divide to happen along political lines. If the public persona you value is one of a progressive modern democrat, there will be immense, though typically not overt, pressure on you from your peer group to show it. Often, people do support the cause but would have defaulted to a more personal or silent/anonymous support were it not for the pressures these campaigns place on social media. The opposite is also true, where someone who has a persona of conservatism won’t advocate for a cause that is viewed as liberal, even if they support it, because of what the backlash might be in their social circles. Of course, for an advertiser, the important thing to understand here is that social signaling doesn’t do anything other than let people fly their tribe’s flags. It won’t create converts, as social signaling isn’t about inclusion, it’s about identity, and by extension soft exclusion. In other words, preaching to the choir.
So that’s what is stacked against an advertiser who might be working with a non-profit or issues focused campaign. Issues fatigue, disillusionment with slacktivism, and too much focus on unproductive social signaling. The good news is that there are always ways to combat these problems. It’s one of the things that advertising does best.
I think agencies and clients should realize that raising awareness is an empty goal. For starters, people underestimate the general level of awareness. The Internet has created an environment where people tend to be exceptionally well informed. It is rare for non-profits to be focused on an issue where people don’t have some level of awareness already, and the ones that do tend to impact very few people. I don’t mean to imply that there is anything wrong in campaigning for Addison’s Disease. Rather, that the vast majority of campaigns for non-profits will involve organizations, diseases, or news events (disasters) where people already have some familiarity. Last year, when I asked people about what was going on in the Middle East, basically everyone was aware that there was a mass exodus of people from Syria in the wake of conflict. The details, however, were a bit hazy. People know that oceans exist and that they have fragile ecosystems. They may not have heard of the Ocean Conservancy. Basically, it’s not enough to tell them that there are things out there that demand their attention. They already know that. The only reason to draw their attention to those issues is to provide greater detail, inform them of how they can help, and, depending on the client, associate the name of the non-profit with the issue in the context of how they can help.
This sense of purpose in the ad is something I can’t stress enough. As I touched on earlier with social signaling, there is a fair amount of preaching to the choir going on. Take, for example, a recent campaign for a social issue that garnered a lot of press attention: Plan Norway’s Child Bride. This type of campaign focuses on an issue where, in the country in which it was produced and distributed at least, there is no other side. There is no one to convert with the message because there is no one in the Western world who thinks its ok for a girl to be forced into marriage at the age of 12. The outcry in Norway was so large to the (fake) wedding that their Norwegian language website got over 500,000 hits, or 1/10 of Norway’s population. Of course, I realize when I say no one I’m exaggerating to make a point, but the truth is that these viewpoints tend to be so pervasive that the few people who are on the other side are so culturally heterodox that it is extremely unlikely such a campaign will change their mind. Advertising is a powerful tool, but it can’t make a Crest man into a Colgate one. It can’t work miracles.
So awareness isn’t the answer. But that doesn’t mean that campaigns like these can’t do something to help girls feel empowered in the West, or help girls in the Middle East escape child bride scenarios. The problem is in the goals of the campaigns. Most successful commercial advertising has a call to action. It might be the explicit “call this number to buy one now!” at the end of an infomercial, or the implicit “buying Heineken will make you seem cool” of more creative, brand advertising. Either way, this is something many of these issue campaigns lack. Good campaigns ask something from their viewers, if they buy in. Tell a friend is one, but as we’ve been over, awareness is an ineffective goal for many non-profits. Money, other resources, and time are all things worth asking for. The Red Cross likes money because it’s fungible and can be adapted to whatever challenges come along. Food drives like City Harvest take canned goods, a non-money resource, so that the donation is the actual thing the cause needs. Soup kitchens ask for your time, to help prepare and serve the food to the needy. Whatever end you have in mind, structure the campaign accordingly. And remember, money is not a panacea that can cure all ills.
You must get client buy-in, of course. And they may resist the idea that awareness is a weak goal and that money isn’t always the answer. I worked with an NGO (I’ll leave them nameless) as part of a project at Miami Ad School, and their request was to “generate awareness.” When I pressed them about what success for the campaign would look like, they said high amounts of earned media. It taught me a valuable lesson about dealing with clients, and that’s to make sure their goals are solid and to press back when you know they are wrong. This NGO worked with kids. Their goal should have been for the campaign to, at least in some small way, better the lives of the kids they were assisting, not an empty marketing goal like mentions in AdWeek or Time magazine. Those mentions can lead to a snowball of support that makes the kid’s lives better, but the latter should have always been the goal where the former was one of many possible tactics.
Companies have mission statements. So do most non-profits. Campaigns they run should be reflective of those mission statements. And each campaign should be a mini-version with its own goals. Agree early on about what the key performance indicators are and then stick to those KPI when creating the campaign. If you know that the ultimate goal is to help girls feel empowered, it opens up immense freedom about what you ask of the audience. If money is tight because of the economy, maybe a different tack will lead to equally good results. Instead of asking for money to be given to a girl-oriented cause, it could instead call upon successful women to take on mentorship of younger girls to ensure that their confidence as kids carries forward into the teen and adult years; ask for time in place of money.
One thing I think can really make an issue campaign a big success is putting a positive spin on things. This is to help fight issue fatigue. Part of what causes the fatigue is the feeling that so many things are going wrong all at once that there is nothing to be done. This is in large part because most non-profits of a certain type try their damnedest to pluck your heartstrings with the tragedy of a situation. Talking to people about this style of campaign taught me that pictures of miserable people looking plaintively into the camera don’t stop being depressing, but do stop eliciting donations. So do what advertisers do when one style of advertising becomes pervasive and cliché: change the paradigm. Focus on what positive effects the charity has, focus on success stories, focus on the giver more than the receiver, etc. Do something new, and work really hard to not be a downer about it. People are craving the positive.
Finally, never forget that the relationships an agency forges with brands and with non-profits can be mutually beneficial. Howard Gossage once said: “Advertising justifies itself when it is used for social purposes.” This is truer now than when he said it, decades ago. Brands are looking to stand for something, because consumers in this market make purchasing decisions on brand values, which are often reflected in the social and charitable work that the brand supports. Toms Shoes engages in a one for one program where each pair it sells in America is matched with a pair it gives away in the developing world to poor kids. The issue or non-profit might be able to get closer to their goals, which hopefully you’ve helped them define correctly, by pairing up with a big brand and getting them to pay the bill, rather than spending millions on media buys for traditional advertising. It is worth noting the #LikeAGirl from Always and “Inner Beauty” from Dove have probably done more for feminist issues this year than shock campaigns like “F-Bombs for Feminism.”
And, of course, a discussion of contemporary non-profit campaigns wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. I actually think the ice bucket challenge is proof positive of many of the things I’ve laid out so far. The goal of the campaign wasn’t awareness. The goal was to get people to participate in a fun, shareable activity related to ALS that would hopefully lead to a donation. Most videos, after the dump and before calling out 3-5 others to do it next, contained an appeal to visit the ALS Association website to learn more about what you can do to help fight the disease. The origin story of the campaign is that a nurse, somewhere on the East coast, had this idea to ask people to sit in ice cold water to feel what suffering from ALS does to the nervous system. This evolved into dumping ice water over your head, and then into a choice between dumping the water or donating money towards ALS research. Its final iteration had a call to action: either put up the money or get the ice water. Because of how the thing spread, it would appear most people did both.
Although the origins of the campaign suggest a more negative approach, what it eventually became was something else. Instead of making it about the suffering of ALS patients, it allowed people to participate without having their heartstrings tugged, without being confronted with the immense challenge such a disease can represent. This focus on the positive, or at least choosing not to focus on the negative, helped lots of people engage without feeling guilty or overwhelmed. It expertly circumvented people’s issues fatigue. It was also a fresh approach so people didn’t feel like they were just engaging in another form of empty slacktivism.
There was one final piece that made ALS so successful: the neutrality of its position. Not every non-profit can make the most of this, because not every non-profit has this luxury, but the ALS challenge succeeded because it didn’t trigger any of the negatives of social signaling, so its viral nature could spread across ideologies. Literally everyone agrees that degenerative neurological disorders are awful. This meant that people could spread it around their network without fear of what people would think. It also meant that celebrities, politicians, and other public figures of all stripes could be called upon to participate, and basically all of them would, in one way or another, because there was no reason not to. This really helped spread the message faster and farther, since those public figures, especially in aggregate, have a lot of influence. Obviously, not every campaign can pull this off. But if you can find a way to make your idea inoffensive, and viral enough to reach influencers, the sky’s the limit.
Working on campaigns focused on social issues, and working with non-profits of all kinds, can be more challenging than working with big brands in many ways. They have similar challenges to corporate brands. They struggle for break-through in a world crowded with branded messages. Client representatives can still be difficult to work with. People are people, so just because these groups are trying to save the world doesn’t mean they won’t have stubborn people focused on narrow-minded or problematic views of what their advertising should do. And, unlike big corporate brands, non-profits also typically have smaller budgets and more complicated relationships with consumers. Dealing with this isn’t easy. That being said, I think focusing on developing the right goals, and then getting the creative freedom to pursue those goals with the modern audience in mind, will serve an agency, and client, well when designing campaigns for non-profits.