Archive for November, 2008

This just in via the Dane Stewards Yahoo! Group: The Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin is offering mini-grants of up to $1500 for projects that “contributes to knowledge about Wisconsin’s natural resources through education.” Deadline for applications is January 15.

Some grantmakers have a pretty liberal interpretation of “education,” that would cover social marketing and behavior change types of efforts. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but it’s worth looking into.

Click here to learn more and download the application form.

Whether you call it communications, public relations, marketing, fundraising, or outreach — economic turmoil is accelerating the move away from traditional media and towards the Internet. According to a recent survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa, commercial marketers are slashing their 2009 broadcast and print advertising, direct mail, and event marketing budgets — and beefing up their online marketing like email blasting and social networking, instead.

Why the shift? In troubled times, online marketing has two distinct advantages over traditional marketing:

1) It’s cheaper. Emailing 10,000 people costs way less than printing and mailing 10,000 letters. Way less. Ditto for putting ads on Facebook vs. TV ads on NBC.

2) It’s more precise. Online marketers have much more information available about how their campaigns are performing. To be blunt, if a campaign isn’t working well, they’ll know it sooner and can pull the plug right away.

So should nature protection and pollution control communicators follow their commercial brothers and sisters? Maybe. Sort of. I think it’s premature to pull the plug on those end-of-year fundraising letters. But if you’ve been planning a big TV or radio campaign, or if you have been hesitating to set up your first account on Facebook, Constant Contact, or PayPal, you might want to rethink that. Your peers certainly are.

P.S. For those of you who still cling to the newspaper as your preferred method for getting the word out, think what those sinking print ad budgets will mean for the financial health of your local rag. Ouch.

If you know any smart, well-meaning Alabamans with a little computer savvy and a desire to make a difference, the Alabama Environmental Council is searching for an Online Networking Volunteer to handle the care and feeding of AEC’s MySpace and Facebook sites, as instructed by AEC’s online communications staff. It could be a great foot in the door for the right person.

Contact Jenny at the Alabama Environmental Council to learn more: Jenny@aeconline.org.

Teens who believe in abstinence until marriage are more likely to become unwed mothers than other teens, notes Clark Williams-Derry over at the Sightline Blog. He draws an interesting lesson from that on an issue closer to home:

Convincing people that you’re right about an issue–say, the scientific consensus about the threat posed by global warming–can seem vitally important, but in the end may be somewhat beside the point. People may well agree with you, but still not act in accordance with those beliefs.

Williams-Derry is right on. The weak connection between agreement and action is a frequent topic of this blog. And of course, an abundance of social research finds the Americans frequently agree – and infrequently act — on the nature protection and pollution control issues that occupy your mind all day.

If agreement alone lead to action, conservation groups would be turning members away, rain barrels would be as common as driveways, and politicians would quake in fear whenever you called. And for that matter, nobody would smoke, litter, neglect their children and pets, or cheat on their taxes, either.

So why do we work so hard in our communications to get people to agree with us even more? Williams-Derry counters:

In the long run, you have to move the debate beyond beliefs, and into incentives: lining up the economic and social incentives such that the right choices are the easy, natural ones To do that, we need smart and effective policies.

It’s the word social that caught my eye, which I why I emphasized it. I write a lot about choosing words and pictures to send social messages to people, but I’m intrigued by the concept of a social incentive. So Mr. Derry-Williams and all you readers out there… what is a “social incentive” and how do we offer them?