January 2005

Diane and Nicole: I agree with you that corporate love might be difficult to achieve. We certainly won’t achieve it if we don’t try. And, my belief is that it must begin in the Boardroom and in the CEO’s corner office. It gets executed in the website, the sales literature, the publicity releases, the blogs, the ads, the direct marketing, and in the salesperson’s pitch. But it begins with an attitude of caring at the top. And then it is executed one-by-one as each of us performs our jobs.

I use the word love because it cranks up the emotional level of this discussion to a higher level. Change is tough, but until we do change then all the CRM (customer relationship management) systems we invest in are a waste. Even the phrase CRM is wrong. As a customer do you want to be managed?

If we are smart, we accept that the customer is in charge. They will see right through us if our love for them is not genuine.

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Communicating for non-profits is tough, indeed — every bit as hard as selling a refrigerator or an enterprise software application.

I was the volunteer chairman for communications for the Cincinnati Area of United Way for over a decade. I loved the challenge of working with local business leaders and assisting people who needed a helping hand to get up and on their feet.

My main observation might surprise you — PR generated name recognition but did not connect the brand name to a consistent value proposition.

When asked in surveys what United Way was, a common response was that United Way was a division of the National Football League … this because the NFL for years donated TV commercials to show how their players worked with United Way in their local communities to help the needy.

Since UW had no budget authority for advertising, it relied entirely upon publicity and special events. And the PR professionals on staff were (and are) excellent. They produced reams and reams and reams of publicity across all news media. This successfully placed the words “United Way” into a high level of unaided awareness across the city. But, very few “ordinary people” could tell you what United Way did.

My conclusion. Unproven, but one that I think is right. All the reams of stories were about positive news and readers were looking for negative news. They skimmed the UW articles without reading what UW actually did. The name registered, but not the deeds.

United Way in every community is the citizen-led means of distributing our collective donations to people who need it most.

Without advertising to supplement this terrific years-long publicity performance, it was difficult to get a repetitive value message into the public eye. Repetition is essential in driving value proposition messaging. If publicity is the only tool to work with, then a strategy must be put in place to drive frequency of a value prop.

This is not easy when editors, reporters and announcers are in charge of delivering our messages … but we must become very good at guiding such messaging through the media strategically.

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