Home Dept and Habitat for Humanity Shack Up

In the last few months The Home Depot, has made a giant right turn in its charitable endeavors and landed in bed with Habitat for Humanity in a five-year, $30 million sponsorship deal, a little more than a year after CEO Frank Blake got his job. It’s a familiar place for Blake, whose wife, Mrs. Liz Blake is a Senior Vice President at Habitat for Humanity.

Mr. and Mrs. Blake told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they recused themselves in the negotiations between the two parties. I’m sure they did. And to be completely accurate, the relationship is actually between The Home Depot Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3), and Habitat for Humanity. Moreover Mr. Blake doesn’t hold a position on the Foundation’s 10-member board which consists entirely of Home Depot employees; I counted one executive vice president, three senior vice presidents, and six lesser lights.

But to be frank, a CEO doesn’t need to have a vote to influence how the vote turns out on a board where everyone, in effect, works for him or her.

What’s the big deal, you say? After all, Habitat for Humanity is a well-respected charity with a mission to build decent shelter for the poor. Since 1976 they've built 250,000 homes that shelter 1 million people. And there’s a certain strategic fit. Strategic enough that Lowe’s, The Home Depot’s principal competitor, has been supporting Habitat for Humanity since 1996, and has donated more than $20 million over the last four years.

But even though there’s no indication of impropriety between Mr. and Mrs. Blake and The Home Depot and Habitat for Humanity, it still sorta rankles.

For one thing, prior to this deal The Home Depot Foundation had previously concentrated on low-income multi-family housing and urban forestry, also strategically appropriate. That support will likely evaporate in whole or in part.

In terms of its corporate philanthropy efforts the company itself has had long-standing relationships with KaBOOM, and the Red Cross and the Hands On Network. With sales declining at The Home Depot, those organizations are all likely to watch as the #20 Home Depot car a contender in the NASCAR racing series, with Tony Stewart at the wheel… and a Habitat for Humanity bumper sticker… blows right by.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were Home Depot employees who were rankled, too. Suppose you were The Home Depot guy or gal that negotiated or managed the KaBOOM relationship, for instance. It would be no picnic going to your contact to say that the relationship was changing and they were getting less money because Habitat was going to get more. And how, exactly, would you answer the all-but-inevitable question about whether or not the fact that Mrs. Blake… ahem… sleeps with Mr. Blake had anything to do with the change?

And I’ll bet Lowe’s was more than a little rankled. Frank Blake told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “I actually called Robert Niblock [Lowe’s CEO] and said: ‘This is something we are considering. If it’s an issue for Lowe’s, let me know.’ He did exactly the right thing, saying it was for charity.”

Wouldn’t it have been fun to be a fly on the wall during that phone call?

I’ve been around CEOs who still do things for a particular charity even though one or more of their competitors does, too. Tom Smith, who was the CEO of the Food Lion grocery chain was a standout in that regard. But sponsorship and cause-related marketing campaigns from multiple competitors are more often the exception than the rule.

Even with all the recusing going on and the personal calls to competitors, The Home Depot’s action still seems cheap and tawdry to this outsider.

Can a Handheld Game Really Give Your Brain a Workout?

There’s a certain extravagance to the claims made the makers of two handheld games from Nintendo and Radica. Use our products regularly, they suggest, and not only will your brain get a workout, but you may even be able to turn back the clock on your gray matter!

Reporters and critics who had initially given a pass to Nintendo’s ‘Brain Age,’ and by extension the less ambitious Radica ‘Brain Games,’ are now looking at these games with a more gimlet-eye.

In my latest post to my blog on informal learning called The Learner’s Guild, I look at the two games and draw my own conclusions.

High-Dollar Cause-Related Marketing

Inspiration Bracelet for the Parkinsons Unity Walk

Thanks to Lance Armstrong and his Lance Armstrong Foundation, we all know how to do a bracelet campaign. You pick a supplier from the hundreds or even thousands out there. You try to find a color and a saying that seem emblematic of your cause, and you sell it for $1 at your charity’s events or online.

[BTW: Today, Tuesday May 13, is LiveSTRONG Day]

If by now plastic/silicone/rubber bracelets seem a little ‘me-to’ then consider this bracelet campaign from New York City artist-sculpture David Stevenson benefiting the Parkinsons Unity Walk. When you buy the sterling silver bracelet at the left called ‘Inspiration’ for $175, 40 percent (or $70) goes to Parkinson’s Disease research.

The Unity Walk, which takes place each April in Central Park, was inspired by Marlene Kahan, executive director of American Society for Magazine Editors, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2004.

The Unity Walk people commissioned the bracelet from Stevenson, and the fulfillment is handled through Stevenson’s website.

This marks another in an increasing number of what I call high-dollar cause-related marketing donations, say amounts from $20 or more. When I started in cause-related marketing a typical CRM donation from a packaged goods campaign might be a nickel ($0.05). But I’m seeing more and more of this high dollar cause-related marketing.

I’m not alone.

As I write this, in the handy little poll from Vizu in the column to the right, 31.6 percent of respondents say they’ve seen cause-related marketing donations of $20 or more for the purchase of a single item.

How can you capitalize on this trend?

1. Start by looking for (and finding) items with a higher perceived value. Don’t forget who your audiences are.
2. Pay close attention to your costs. In a plastic bracelet campaign, it would be no big deal for most charities to keep in inventory $10,000 worth of plastic bracelets, which might cost $2,500-$3,500 and could sit in your supplies closet. But $10,000 worth of sterling silver bracelets at $175 a pop amounts to just 57 bracelets, which you’d probably have to keep in a safe or vault.
3. The lowest cost approach may be the arrangement Unity Walk has with David Stevenson. Stevenson has his own website and ecommerce ability and handles production and fulfillment, too.
4. If you can’t find an arrangement like that… although Stevenson does takes commissions… consider a hybrid approach whereby you add it to your charity’s existing site (or put up a dedicated microsite), and allow the producer to fulfill it.

IBM CEO Survey: Large Increase of Investment in Corporate Social Responsibility Likely Over Next 3 Years

Buttonhole a CEO

CEOs worldwide plan to increase their investments 25 percent over the next three years to better to better understand and reach socially-minded customers, according to a worldwide survey of CEOs released this month by IBM’s Global Business Service Unit.

On February 22, I wrote about IBM’s case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) based on a survey of 250 CEOs. This second, larger survey of CEOs called the “Global CEO Study” tallied results from 1103 CEOs from 40 countries and 32 industries using face-to-face interviews.

That 25 percent increase in investments represents the largest percentage increase of any trend identified in the study.

Among other pertinent findings:

• CEOs believe that customer expectations around corporate social responsibility are increasing, and that CSR will play an important role in differentiating enterprises in the future. More than ever a company’s CSR profile matters to customers. And while ‘green’ initiatives are top of mind, the CEOs say customers are increasingly demanding socially-minded products, services, and supply chains.
• The survey also finds that socially aware customers evaluate an enterprise’s CSR profile before making purchasing decisions.
• CEO concern about environmental issues has doubled over the past four years globally, but is most pronounced in Asia/Pacific and Europe, followed by the Americas.
• CEOs also revealed that CSR reputations are also an important tool to attract and retain employees. They are also recognizing that their organizations are being held mutually accountable, along with the public sector, for the socioeconomic well-being of the regions in which they operate.
• Overall, the CEOs see opportunities in CSR and are using it to their competitive advantage. They indicated that CSR is critical to maintaining current market share.

What does this mean to you, kind reader? It means that if CSR is important to your organization you've got another tool in the box.

It means that if you’re ever in an elevator with a CEO or have the chance to buttonhole one at, say, a charity gala, you’ve got a conversation starter. As in, ‘did you see IBM’s CEO survey?’ They found that worldwide CEOs plan on increasing CSR spending 25 percent over the next years. Does that line up with what your company is doing? Can I come see you sometime about how we might benefit one another?’

I welcome this larger survey of CEOs and am anxious to see the topline report.

While opinion surveys like this one are a coin of the realm, I’ll issue my usual wise-headed caution. Opinion surveys represent a snapshot in time. Or, to mix the metaphor, human opinion is like a river and as Heraclitus (see above) said: “You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing upon you.”

How interesting would it be to come back to those same CEOs (or their successors) three years hence and ask them to bring a spreadsheet of their actual spending on CSR?

Learn Something and Never Forget It

It sounds like a cheap e-mail come-on, or the hyperbole of a late-night informercial, but it is possible to learn something once and never forget it again.

It's based on science first identified 123 years ago by a rigorous German researcher, and improved upon by a brilliant Polish scientist and eccentric who turned the discovery into software.

After you master it, you can sell your library of books on eBay, because you won't need them anymore!

But for the Polish scientist, Piotr Wozniak, there's been a catch. To read more about 'Informal Learning and the Eternal Memory' go to my other blog, The Learner's Guild.

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer

New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Look past the weak ‘proceeds’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years.

Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is quickly headed for its nadir.

And lesser critics would be wrong.

Cause-related marketing has now penetrated every continent (save Antarctica) and visited every clime.

Cause-related marketing is a big tent and getting bigger. And as the stakes of the tent get pulled further back and the acreage under the fabric gets ever larger, cause-related marketing grows ever more diverse.

And now the cause-related marketing tent is big enough and varied enough that it encompasses the sophisticated and the unpretentious, the artful and the artless, the splendid and the dorky.

So I say “bully to Shoshanna and her odd little cause-related marketing campaign.”

Cause-Related Marketing and High-End Interior Design

By now cause-related marketing has penetrated almost every kind of market. Here’s more proof that cause-related marketing finding a home at the high end: when you buy a rug from Dan Golden Inc., a New York City designer and maker of high-end hand-tufted wool rugs, the company will buy a sheep for a family in a developing country from Oxfam.

Golden’s work, which is sometimes in the form of the cheeky ‘rug-cartoon’ like the piece on the left and sometimes more straightforward, sell at retail starting around $3,000 and range north of $13,000 depending on the size.

The Dan Golden website is, naturally, rather artsy and the mention of the campaign is quite subtle. But that befits the audience and the artist. Since Golden’s rugs are made of sheep’s wool, a sheep is the right animal to donate. It can be sheared and the wool sold or bartered. Sheep can also be milked.

The cause, too, is a good fit even though Oxfam is not known primarily for its animal donation efforts. Heifer International has long been the leader in that approach. But Heifer is in Little Rock, Arkansas and is just a little churchy. Oxfam was founded at Oxford, UK, and the U.S. branch is headquartered in Boston. The much larger Oxfam also has strongly progressive bent in its approach to humanitarian aid, which is appropriate for Golden’s customers.

Dan Golden, Inc. could do a little more and still remain understated.

Here’s one idea: Golden could purchase the wool from the families who have received the donated sheep and then produce a specially-designed rug inspired by those families (or their sheep!). Golden could then sell that rug at a premium, with an extra donation built in. Or, Golden could donate one of them to Oxfam for auction at a gala, and sell the rest in the regular fashion.

Heck, if I were at an Oxfam gala I’d bid for a Dan Golden rug that was made of wool from sheep that had been donated.

Of course I’d loose the bid to the guy in the Brioni tux with the trophy wife dripping with Van Kleef & Arpels diamonds, but you get the picture.

A New Blog I Can Highly Recommend

Dear Kind Readers:

I can recommend a new blog on the topic of Informal Learning; mine!

In it I'll review ideas, products, trends, tools, techniques and whatever else catches my eye on the topic of Informal Learning.

What is Informal Learning? Frankly it's hard to categorize. But that book you read on green gardening techniques or that show you watched on PBS about aircraft carriers both qualify.

You may do it with a career goal in mind like mastering Photoshop or just because you prefer to engage the gears in your mind rather than let it stall out in neutral.

I'll post at my Informal Leaning blog at least once a week.

I hope you'll join me there!

Warm regards,
Paul Jones

What is a 'Replacement' Campaign in Cause-Related Marketing?

In commenting on Tuesday’s posting about the “Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing," Carolyn asks: “Can you give an example of a ‘replacement’ campaign?

As an outsider, it can be hard to definitively identify a replacement program. But there are some earmarks. The most telling may be the language in the ad. When you read something like; “When you buy [our product] you help us make a donation of $250,000 to [cause].”

Or, as in the case of this ad from a free-standing insert (FSI) from Proctor & Gamble’s April brandSAVER, which reads:

“Now P&G has set a goal of donating 50 million more liters through brandSAVER. For every coupon you redeem from the April issue of brandSAVER,
P&G will supply a liter of filtered water to someone in the developing world who desperately needs it. And you can help just by redeeming coupons for the products you already bring home to your family.”

Let me be clear, without talking to the P&G folks I don’t know if this is replacement campaign or not. But I suspect that it is.

Carolyn, thanks for the question.

The Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing

At Alden Keene we use a handy-dandy chart we call “The Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing” that helps us build cause-related marketing campaigns for our clients. That’s the same chart I send you when you sign up for the Cause-Related Marketing GoogleGroup.

Until now, I’ve never published it on the blog. But the time seems ripe to share a version of it with all my readers. The chart we use is in graphic form and has more information. But what follows is substantially the same.

I need to give props to Professors Michael Jay Polansky and Richard Speed of the University of Newcastle and University of Melbourne respectively in Australia, who published it in their paper called “Linking Sponsorship and Cause-Related Marketing.”

Without further ado, The Five Flavors of Cause-Related Marketing:

• Broad-Based. A large campaign, perhaps one the runs year-round, and generally has no limits on the donation that might be made. Example: the General Mills Box Tops for Education effort.
• Limited. A campaign where the amount of donation is capped. For instance: Five pence goes to charity for each litre of petrol pumped up to ₤100,000.
• Market focused. A campaign that targets a specific market. Example: A credit card issuer gives $3 to charity every time a new customer signs up for their card.
• Replacement. In this type of campaign the donation has already been made or pledged to the charity and the fundraiser serves to replace that donation.
• Multiphase. In a multiphase campaign, there may be several steps leading up to the donation. For instance, the Silk Soy Milk campaign that requires you to enter a number from the carton’s green cap, and which also enters you into a sweepstakes.

That’s the wide-world of cause-related marketing in five bullet points. Everything in cause-related marketing is just a variation on one of these themes.

Cause-Related Marketing Tombola

In the UK a tombala is a revolving drum typically turned by hand and used in lotteries or raffles. Tombala also describes a small-scale lottery, like at a community event.

Today we have two things in our tombala. The first is a campaign from Denmark that uses glass bottle recycling to raise money for nonprofits. The second is from Cox Communications in the United States that is part Yelp.com, part AngiesList.com and a fundraiser for charities at the same time.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Bottle
As a kid growing up I earned money by taking glass bottles back to stores for the $.o5 cent deposit. The beverage bottling companies put the kibosh on bottle deposits in most of the 50 states (and worldwide, for that matter). Still 11 states have bottle deposits. Worldwide bottle deposit laws are in force in parts of Canada, parts of Australia, in Germany, Scandinavia and Denmark.

Now in Denmark when you return bottles to the retailer Coop Denmark’s 14 Kvickly xtra stores, you can choose to have the deposits go to two charities, UNICEF Denmark or DanChurchAid. Since the campaign started in September 2007 it’s generated more than 120,000 Krone, or about $25,750.

That seems modest, but bear in mind that the campaign is taking place in just 14 stores and has been going on for only 7 months. This is a "fortune at the bottom of the pyramid" territory.

As I mentioned bottle deposits are only required in 11 States, but because they include two of the most populous, California and New York, about 30 percent of the U.S. population lives in places with bottle deposit laws. In other words, there’s a large enough population base living in States with bottle laws that this campaign could certainly be successfully adopted in the United States.

Kudzu.com Fundraiser

Cox Communications, the third largest cable television provider in the United States with operations in 15 States has recently launched a website cheekily called Kudzu.com that has an interesting cause-related marketing component. [Kudzu is hardy vine that was introduced to the South from East Asia. Now the whole Southeastern United States is covered in Kudzu!]

Kudzu.com is a search service to help locals identify service providers like landscape designers to help you control the kudzu climbing over your fence, or plumbers. But you can also find restaurant reviews and the like, as with Yelp.com. There’s a ranking system for providers, a little bit like Angie’s List. But unlike Angie’s List, there’s no subscription fee. Kudzu.com is free.

Review sites don’t have any value unless there are reviews posted there. So to sweeten the pot when you write a review, Kudzu.com will donate $.75 cents to your charity of choice. Kudzu .com wants charities to encourage people to write plenty of reviews as a fundraiser for their charity of choice. The headline reads “Easy fundraising without candy bars and magazines,” a nod to the kind of fundraising that is common for youth organizations in the United States.

The reviews on Kudzu.com are strongest in Cox’s market areas. But the fact is, Cox certainly wants Kudzu.com to be nationwide. So a Kudzu.com fundraising campaign could take place anywhere in the United States.

No word on deadlines, donation caps or the like.

It’s the End of the World as We Know It

...And Keith Richards Feels Fine


Today is Earth Day and in honor I review the current Louis Vuitton campaign for The Climate Project, Al Gore’s nonprofit wherein some 2,300 volunteers in the United States, Australia, Spain, India, the UK and Canada deliver a version of the Nobelist’s famous climate change slideshow.

Strictly speaking this isn’t cause-related marketing. If you buy the Vuitton suitcase in the photo a donation is not made to The Climate Project. Still, I think there’s value for cause marketers to study this advertising campaign meant to call attention to Vuitton’s efforts on environmental sustainability and to the mission of The Climate Project.

A quote from Al Gore on the Vuitton website puts it this way, “The Climate Project has made great strides in educating people all over the world about climate change and the solutions that will be necessary to solve the crisis. We welcome Louis Vuitton as a valuable partner in advancing this message.”

The art to the left is a billboard from Boston.com, but I first saw the ad in Time magazine’s April 2008 Style & Design issue.

In the magazine the copy reads: “Some Journeys cannot be put into words. New York. 3 a.m. Blues in C. Keith Richards and Louis Vuitton are proud to support The Climate Project.”

Luis Vuitton, the French leather goods company and fashion house, is currently running several versions of the campaign in luxury magazines. There’s also one with Steffi Graf and Andre Agassi in an embrace. But the art in that version… both shot by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz… is entirely too romantic and fresh looking and, well, boring.

By contrast, you can’t take your eyes off this image of the marvelously dissipated and leathery Keith Richards, age 64.

At the risk of parsing this out too far on Earth Day, I wonder if the two photographs don’t represent two different views of where we stand with climate change.

On the one hand there’s the almost dewy version with Agassi and Graff; two fit, youngish, beautiful people, the parents of two small children with a hopeful lifetime ahead of them! In this version there’s plenty of time to change.

Then there’s the view represented by Richards’ photograph; rich, indulgent, squandered and almost certainly nearly dead. In this version time is all but up.

Happy Earth Day!

Cause-Related Marketing Meets Microfinance

Kiva.org and Advanta.com Mix it Up

You’d have had to have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia the last year or so to have missed the run up of microfinance. Between 2004 and 2006 more than $4 billion of capital flowed into microfinance institutions. All told experts say the total loan microfinance loan portfolio may be as much as $12.5 billion. And of course the father of microfinance, Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Microfinance is now so respectable, so effective, (so profitable!) that it’s already enjoying its first global backlash.

Actually that first sentence is hyperbole. Because even in Ulaanbaatar… far from almost anywhere on the vast, frigid steppes of Mongolia… microfinance is thriving such that the earliest recipients of micro loans there are now complaining about taxes and government bureaucracy! And May 29-31, 2008 the Conference of Microfinance Institutions will convene in Ulaanbaatar, the eleventh such annual conference.

Now Advanta, a credit card issuer to small businesses in the U.S. and Kiva, a nonprofit charity and the cool kid of microfinance, have joined hands to offer an interesting cause-related marketing campaign and a damn cute website.

Called KivaB4B, it works like this:

When a business makes a donation to Kiva using its Advanta credit card, Advanta will match that donation up to $200 a month. The campaign also serves to promote the Kiva affinity credit card.

I couldn’t find anything that said if the promotion had a predetermined end date or if there was some other kind of cap on Advanta’s matching dollars. Also, because of billing cycles and such, the Advanta matching money isn’t likely to go to the same Developing World entrepreneur as the cardholder’s donation.

Pretty cool, eh?

As an old telethon writer, I can promise you that matching donations work like crazy on the hoi polloi. Every time we ran a corporate match the phones would explode in 200 U.S. and Canadian markets. No doubt major donor fundraisers would testify of the same effect with the well-heeled. People in all classes give more readily when they know their donations will be matched.

The KivaB4B website is wonderfully egalitarian, useful and elegant in a Spartan way. The pages are divided vertically, with each entity getting half. When you click on a link, the link on the other side also lights up and both halves of the page display the information from their perspective.

I like it. It’s inventive and the execution is terrific. And the cause of ending poverty in the Developing World is increasingly resonant among the populace in the Developed World. The harping critics be damned; microenterprise isn't perfect, but it works. I especially like the way the KivaB4B site draws equivalency between small businesses the world over.

I’m a little surprised that Advanta didn’t add an extra piece to incentivize small business owners to adopt the Kiva card. I don’t know what Advanta’s new customer acquisition cost is, but a one-time donation of $25-$50 to Kiva for each new card signup seems like an appropriate number.

Finally, there’s no mention made of it anywhere in the materials, but the Kiva branded credit card probably generates a donation to Kiva itself to underwrite their operating expenses. Nothing wrong with that. Kiva has a very small staff and relies heavily on volunteers the world over. It’s a wonderfully efficient charity. But it still has expenses.

I hope other credit card issuers are taking note of this promotion.

Space Available Ads

Recessionary Advertising Opportunity for Nonprofits

You don’t have to look at the official figures from Magazine Publisher’s Association (MPA) to see that magazines are in a recession right now in the United States. And that may mean opportunity for your nonprofit.

• I just got a renewal offer from Fast Company for a $5 subscription, for instance. As in dollars, not Euros.


• Another unnamed business magazine kept sending me issues months after my subscription had lapsed.


• And while it’s hardly scientific, I’m certain I’ve recently seen more ‘space available’ ads going to nonprofits than in the past.
  

The official numbers bear out the gloom for the industry. While individual titles vary, overall the magazine business is in a funk. Among the hundreds of titles tracked by the MPA’s Publisher Information Bureau, overall revenue was down 1.2 percent in the first quarter of 2008 versus the first quarter of 2007. Overall circulation was down 6.4 from first quarter 2008 versus first quarter 2007.

The opportunity is in what’s called ‘space available advertising.’ Magazines (and newspapers for that matter) have long offered nonprofits free ad space based on availability. That is, if they didn’t sell all their adspace, they’d fill it with an ad from a charity free of charge.

Because of the economic downturn (and maybe recession) right now in the U.S. not too many publications are selling all their ad space.

There’s a catch, of course. Charities have to provide the ads in multiple formats; the publication won’t do it for you. Moreover, every magazine you target will have different requirements. And, not surprisingly, when the people who design pages look for ads that fit the available space they’re more likely to choose attractive ads over ugly ones. In other words, it’s probably best to leave your ad's design to professionals.

Your ads will need a call to action, but you probably can’t get away with direct ask for donations. But check with the magazine first to see what they will and will not allow. And if you’re a charity in Knoxville, Tennessee serving teenage mothers, you’re not likely to get into Time Magazine. Although you might get your ad into the Knoxville News Sentinel.

When you prepare your ad, learn the lesson from the Care ad above. The ad was in one of the big three American newsmagazines... Time, Newsweek, or US News... earlier this month, I'm not sure which. At the very bottom is a line that reads: “Space generously donated by this publication.”

Perception is oftentimes reality in this world and it’s better not to let any of your audiences believe that you paid for adspace that might normally cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Add that little line and your charity looks efficient and the publication looks like a hero.

Starfish Televison Network, 1 Year Later

Every couple of months it seems I hear of another television ‘network’ that is devoted to airing programming from and on behalf of nonprofits.

Inevitably the network delivers its signal entirely online. Often as not the network enjoys a flash of publicity before ultimately flaming out.

But the Starfish Television Network, a 501(c)(3) charity which broadcasts over the air (via Dish 1000, channel 9408) as well as streaming live on the Internet, is approaching the important one-year milestone.

The management at Starfish, for whom I’ve done work in the past, knows very well what the Network's shortcomings are. They need some “appointment” television shows. That is, programs so compelling viewers will come back every week to watch them. They need wider carriage. And, it goes almost without saying, they need more money.

And of course there’s the usual chicken and egg problem that all nonprofits face in their early years. They have good ideas for programs, but currently lack the money to pull them off.

But to survive even a year means Starfish has got key people and important processes in place. Moreover, the people on board at Starfish are overwhelming TV people rather than Internet people. Collectively they have a very strong idea of what quality television looks like.

And while every person there expects that in perhaps 10 years Starfish will be an Internet only network, they still have get from here to there. With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan, while the ‘medium may be the message,’ not too many people watch message television just because of the medium.

Getting the money to run Starfish is by no means inevitable. But they do have some fundraising momentum behind them.

As for the carriage issue, Starfish is challenged by the coming of HDTV in two respects. First of all, HDTV requires more bandwidth. As a result carriers that might have added Starfish to their channel lineup for free in the past are hard pressed to do so now. Secondly, rare is the nonprofit that shoots and edits their programming in high definition. Meaning Starfish will remain standard definition for the foreseeable future.

That said, the TV people at Starfish have a few tricks up their sleeves to increase carriage even in the HD world.

If your cause would benefit by having programming air on Starfish, contact Linda at 801/567-3180.

If you have scads of money you’d like to throw at a charity that benefits a world of good causes, contact Todd at the same number.

And remember, because Starfish broadcasts on-air as well as online, its potential audience is much larger than any of the Internet-only nonprofit TV networks. So your programming can be seen by a larger audience and your donations go further at the Starfish Television Network.