Exploiting the Faces of Need

A recent study, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, finds that children’s charities would receive greater donations if they depicted sad-looking children in their appeals.

Their working theory was that people ‘catch’ one another’s emotions…something that’s been shown again and again in many other studies… but which had never been applied to charitable appeals.

They tested their thesis in a series of experiments, including a behavioral test where they showed subjects randomly-selected charitable appeals and gave them money to give.

In the other tests researchers tried to zero in on the emotional state of the test subjects.

The paper, called ‘The Face of Need,’ was authored by Professor Debora Small of The Wharton School and Nicole Verrochi, a PhD candidate, who openly wonder why charities don’t use sad faces of children more often.

I’ve got a few answers.

1. It’s potentially exploitive. For years some charities have been willing to say, in effect, ‘donate or this child will die.’ It may be true, but it’s still emotional blackmail. Pictures of sad children will deliver that message without having to say it.
2. The pictures of children in heart-wrenching situation might quickly lead to donor-fatigue. I’ve got pictures of my youngest when she was in the hospital on her third birthday and desperately ill with pneumonia. While it was quite an ordeal at the time, she’s better now. Still, I can’t bring myself to look at those hospital pictures. Imagine, then, getting nothing but sad pictures of children from every children’s charity that solicits you.
3. It could lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ of bad taste. It’s not hard to find children in really miserable states and snap a photo. My daughter, for instance, was miserable in one of the best children’s hospitals in the United States. But if a goodly number of children’s charities decide to apply the Wharton findings, we’ll almost certainly see children in ever more desperate situations. It will become a kind of sad-kid porn.

Disagree? Agree? Feel free to weigh in.


Tip of the hat to Jeff A. for suggesting the National Lampoon cover art.

Orkin's Fight the Bite is Cause Marketing that Fits the Cause and the Sponsor

Research and experience demonstrate that cause marketing works best when customers can easily see and understand a logical fit between the company and the cause.

Too often when I tell audiences this, I struggle to find good examples, although I can always think of really bad examples.

Orkin’s Fight the Bite is a good example.

When you buy Orkin’s mosquito service, the pest control franchise will make a $10 donation to Nothing But Nets. One hundred percent of each $10 donation will go to purchase and distribute insecticide treated mosquito nets to people in Africa.

In 2008 Fight the Bite generated $135,000. Orkin has guaranteed a minimum of $150,000 in 2009. Malaria, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, infects 350-500 million people each year, and more than 1 million people die each year from the scourge. Ninety percent of deaths due to malaria happen in Africa, with a disproportionate share of the deaths occurring among young children. Estimates put the loss of GDP in Africa due to malaria at 1.3 percent.

Children who survive a bout with malaria are at greater risk of learning impairment and brain damage. University of Minnesota researchers found that one strain of the disease… cerebral malaria… causes cognitive impairment in one in four survivors.

While there are malaria treatments, there is not yet a vaccine. And African strains of malaria are increasingly resistance to drug treatments. For now the most successful strategy is to spray the insides of home walls with insecticide and ensure that everyone at risk sleeps under an insecticide-treated net. Combined those two measures are about 90 percent effective at stopping malaria in the home in Africa.

Malaria has long since been eradicated in the United States and Europe and much or Asia. But mosquitoes in the United States do carry the West Nile Virus, which sickens tens of thousands but kills relatively few compared to malaria.

Orkin’s pitch is that by ordering up its mosquito service you thereby eliminate the threat of West Nile in your yard and help preserve lives in Africa. And that’s not an exaggerated or inflated claim.

There’s plenty to like about this campaign. The logic of the campaign is persuasive and the relationship between Orkin and the net campaign is clear. It also has the appeal of helping to save the lives of young children. And, as I’ve pointed out before, in the developed world children are the universal cause.

If anything, Orkin undersells the fact that malaria kills many more children than adults. In Africa, 90 percent of those who fall victim to malaria are children. The lives the nets are most likely to save therefore are those of young children, and there’s no reason not to make that clear visually and in the text.

Finally, it would be a disservice not to mention Orkin’s partner Nothing But Nets. Nothing But Nets is a grassroots effort run under the auspices of the United Nations that had its start when sportswriter Rick Reilly wrote about malaria in Africa in a May 2006 issue of Sports Illustrated. In the time since some 2.7 million nets have been purchased for distribution in Africa.

Tip of the hat to Kate L for suggesting this post.

Help Me Name the New Cause Marketing Index

Kind Readers:

On Monday, June 15, the NASDAQ OMX Group Inc. stock exchange announced that it had developed a new index of stocks meant to track corporate sustainability performance.

Called the 'The NASDAQ OMX CRD Global Sustainability 50 Index' (TNOCGS50I), the index tracks the triple-bottom line of 50 global companies.

I read this and thought: I need to develop a stock index of companies that do cause marketing.

But first I need a name.

So you'll notice at the top of the column to the right a poll to help name the cause marketing index of stocks.

I've listed basically the first four ideas that came to me:

1. The first is a play on the standard-bearer of stock indexes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The DJIA... aka 'the Dow'... is named for two of the founders of the Wall Street Journal; Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Since my name is Paul Jones the first option is a sort of guerilla marketing play on the DJIA, only nicknamed 'the Paul.'
2. The second is a play on my company name, Alden Keene, which spins off the tongue at least as easily as NASDAQ.
3. The third and fourth options are more generic.

Please vote for your favorite option.

Two last things:

• If you don't like the options, by all means e-mail me your choice to me at aldenkeene at gmail dot com. But be aware that I will almost certainly favor options that feature my name or my company's name. I am a marketer, after all.
• Lastly, I haven't figured out how to feed the index into the blog. But I expect that Yahoo Pipes can probably do what I need it to do. If you can offer help on using Yahoo Pipes in this way, please let me know. For that matter, if you know of a better way to do this I'm all ears.

Warm regards,
Paul

Professor Eikenberry, I Respectfully Disagree

A few years back a colleague and I wangled a trip to northern Italy to speak on the topic of cause marketing. One of the other presenters was an American like us, but all of the attendees were European, predominantly Italian. We were there preaching the big, bold cause marketing of the type practiced at Children’s Miracle Network and it plainly made a few of the attendees uncomfortable. Some openly told us that they found the practice gauche.

We finished our presentation with some Q&A, which lasted past our appointed time. So we took the discussion into the hallway. I remember in particular one fellow from Rome. He was the executive director of a children’s charity that he felt had potential popular appeal but which had fallen out of favor politically and had lost funding. Domestic charities in Italy and much of continental Europe are funded directly by local and national governments. He needed a new fundraising approach that could make up for some of the funding that was no longer coming from the government and thought that maybe cause marketing could help fill the void.

I thought of that Italian executive director as I read Professor Angela Eikenberry’s censure of cause marketing in the Summer 2009 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

(That's Professor Eikenberry on the left. Read Joe Water's well-considered response to Professor Eikenberry here.)

Called ‘The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing,’ Professor Eikenberry’s thesis is threefold.

That cause marketing:

• “Individualizes solutions to collective social problems, distracting our attention and resources away from the neediest causes, the most effective interventions, and the act of critical questioning itself.”
• “…devalues the moral core of philanthropy by making virtuous action easy and thoughtless.
• “…obscures the links between markets—their firms, products, and services—and the negative impacts they can have on human well-being.”

Professor Eikenberry also openly wonders if cause marketing doesn’t negatively affect the donations of time and money to worthy charitable organizations.

I’ll address that first. All of the evidence Professor Eikenberry cites is anecdotal or impertinent. It would be a simple matter to compare Americans’ donations to charities before the age of cause marketing (say 1983) versus giving after the age of cause marketing. The necessary data is available from The Center on Philanthropy at the University of Indiana and from IEG.

My bet is that even though the funds raised by cause marketing is a flyspeck compared to total charitable giving in the United States, that overall giving has increased since the coming forth of cause marketing.

I’m not implying causation here. Quite the opposite. I expect it’s likely that modern Americans are more attuned as donors of money and time than their cohorts were in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. My guess is that instead of driving charitable fundraising up or down, cause marketing is just enjoying the ride.

But on to Professor Eikenberry’s main points.

I confess I don’t understood what Professor Eikenberry means when she writes that cause marketing ‘individualizes solutions to collective social problems.’ Or, at least, I don’t understand how cause marketing is any more guilty of individualizing solutions than normal charitable giving when something north of 80 percent of all charitable donations in the United States come from individuals and bequests.

If I buy a carton of Yoplait, send in the lid and thereby make possible a 10 cent donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, how exactly is that gift more individualized than when an annual donor, say, writes a check for $200 to a hospital, or a ballet company, or a church, or the scouts, or a food bank, or a disease or relief charity? Especially since that annual donor was almost certainly solicited for that gift. Nevermind that the solicitation didn’t take place in our modern temples to consumerism, the grocery stores, which Professor Eikenberry evidently deplores.

Cause marketing today is lot like the American form of the democratic republic. It’s loud and brassy and more or less effective. Would that we could be ruled by the benign but well-born and ethical king or queen that Aristotle famously endorsed. But, alas, this is the government we have.

Likewise, American charities that can’t make their case to their stakeholders are in a world of trouble. Our system of funding charities, as constituted, has all the pity of Darwinian natural selection. Cause marketing is a reflection of that reality, not a cause of it. Certainly our system does not feature a benign tyrant whose job it is to assign the public’s resources to the neediest of causes.

Is it regrettable that St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is effective not only at its mission, but at cause marketing (and, really, all elements of fundraising)? I don’t see how.

And as my Italian friend demonstrated, even in the advanced welfare states in Europe, where government officials do decide what resources go to which charities, good causes get defunded because of politics. It’s not my specialty, but I’d be surprised if in fact there aren’t scads of state-supported charities in Europe that are popular with government officials and bad at their missions.

Finally, my American colleague, the fellow who I had co-presented with in Italy is now a university fundraiser. About 18 months ago the third oldest university in England brought him and another fellow-countryman, to inject a little American-style fundraising savvy into the university’s sleepy development office. This in a country where government funding has always underwritten the entire higher education system.

Even during the current economic climate he’s killing his fundraising goals there. That’s because his donors recognize what Professor Eikenberry seemingly does not. So long as it’s not ill-gotten, it’s not where the money comes from or who the upstart fundraiser is that counts. It’s how the money is used.

Prostate Cancer Foundation Bunts a Blooper Into the Infield

In baseball, a bunt is a small hit that goes no farther than the infield.

And bunt is what the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) did with this ad that I’ve seen recently in Newsweek and BusinessWeek magazines.

The ad’s call to action is that you go online and pledge “as little as” $1 for each home run hit during Major League Baseball play between Thursday, June 11 and Father’s Day, a holiday celebrating fathers that falls on Sunday June 21 this year.

Why? Well 186,500 men in the United States are stricken with prostate cancer each year. And, “in the time it takes to play nine innings” nine men die of the disease, about 30,000 men a year.

The PCF estimates that 143 home runs are likely to be hit over the 11-day period between June 11 and June 21. But while the body copy says you can pledge as little as $1 per home run, in fact, you can pledge as little as $0.25 cents.

While these kinds of scoring-linked promotions are common enough, they’re usually set up so that a sponsor makes a donation whenever a pre-designated number of three-point shots are made by the home team in basketball, for instance. In such cases, at the end of the game the announcer inside the arena intones that “the insurance agents of Allstate just made a $500 donation to Big Brothers and Big Sisters.”

It’s satisfying to hear that some sponsor is on the hook for another donation to a worthy cause. But when it’s you who’s on the hook, as in this promotion from the PCF, are you hoping for a lot of home runs or relatively few?

Given that, this would be a better promotion if there was some kind of match from a fat cat corporate sponsor, whereby for every dollar you pledge the sponsor matches all or part of it.

I don’t see what the headline or the illustration has to do with the call to action. If PCF wants to trumpet its researchers that’s fine. But it’s self-defeating to force a relationship between prostate research, MLB, and a donation plea in one ad.

Moreover, I ask myself why the illustration draws equivalency between an unnamed hitter from an unnamed team and unnamed researcher in a white coat, both of which look like stock photos.

PCF has secured the support of 10 big leaguers. Why not feature a picture of big-leaguer Ken Griffey Jr., one of PCF’s supporters, and recount a scenario that describes how teamwork won an important game?

I’m puzzled also by how Major League Baseball is treated in the ad. The language makes it seem like the MLB is a hesitant participant at best.

It seems like PCF is trying to brand Father’s Day. It would make sense. The breast cancer charities have successfully branded October and the heart charities have branded February. June is probably open to be branded for prostate cancer. But Father’s Day is just one more element in an ad that is already too cluttered.

I question why the body copy leads with a question, which is almost always a weak approach. For readers it’s too easy to respond to such questions with a question of their own: “Who cares?”

Then there’s the callout quote in orange, directly above the logos: “When everybody does their part, the whole team wins.” True enough. But I don’t think ‘team guilt’ really works for people who aren’t yet part of the team.

Finally, this campaign cries out for a contest element. I imagine something like when you make a pledge, you enter to win a trip to the All Star Game or even the World Series. These kind of contests require an alternate (read: free) form of entry. But that’s OK because those entries can be the start of a mailing list.

This ad and this campaign could be home runs. Too bad the PCF decided to bunt.