Cause Marketing

Dear Friends: What follows is an address I made yesterday to a nonprofit coalition. I spoke without Powerpoint, otherwise I just post the slides on Slideshare. What follows is the text of my speech about nonprofit positioning in a time of great need. Warm regards, Paul If like me, you believe that charities (or, nonprofits, or causes) have a vital role to play in the American civil society then you have to acknowledge that charities are being pressed from two sides right now and that many face existential crisis. On the one side because of cutbacks in funding from government and donors, budgets are down and probably going to get worse before they get better. On the other side…especially for causes provide direct services… the needs have never been more pronounced. Now maybe sometime soon the economy will rebound and we can get back to normal, whatever that means. But I don’t think normal means what it used to mean. Nine years ago a colleague and were speaking to a group of nonprofits g...

The rental car agency Avis , for years the perennial second banana to Hertz , used to promote itself with the tagline, “when you’re number two, you try harder.” Avis long since changed the slogan to “At Avis, We Try Harder.” The old tagline was advertising as a syllogism. It made an argument rather than just a declaration. The nonprofit featured in the ad to the left, After School All Stars is in Avis’s position and maybe even further back than that. The big dogs of after school programs are Boys and Girls Clubs of America , a federation of more than 4,000 clubs serving about 4 million boys and girls, and 4-H , with 90,000 clubs and 6.5 million members. After School All Stars is an after-school and summer program in 450 schools in 13 cities across the United States, with an especially strong showing in Chicago. It was founded by Arnold Schwarznegger in 1992 as the Inner-City Games Foundation and subsequently broadened its focus to include arts and academics in addition to health and f...