The NonProfit Times - December 15, 2008 - (Page 5) THE WORLD’S BEST FUNDRAISERS CAUSE MARKETING DANA FARBER CANCER INSTITUTE Getting Sponsors To Go To Bat For Kids When you have 96 percent name recognition, you must be doing something right. “In New England, we’re such a household name. We’ve been able to capitalize on the strength of that,” said David Giagrando, director of corporate partnerships at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, an official charity of the Boston Red Sox. People might be familiar with The Jimmy Fund, a fundraising arm of the cancer center, and the logo on Fenway Park’s famed 37-foot left field wall, the Green Monster, visible during nationally-televised baseball games. “The greatest strength with our brand is in New England, but we work nationally, with national companies joined Dana Farber in 1999, raising about $1.5 million a year.Today, cause marketing and sponsorships raise $10 million annually. “It’s a lot of work to implement these partnerships, because we don’t just sit back and take money.We work from concept to implementation to fulfillment with whatever partnership or promotion it is,” he said. There are about a dozen major partnerships a year, some of which repeat, but Dana Farber gets as many as 50 inquiries a year from businesses interested in partnering. Giagrando and his staff of six review each proposal for its potential, examining the company, its history and reputation.“What’s important is to maintain the only thing we ONLINE GREENPEACE INTERNATIONAL Eight Countries, Six Languages If you market a campaign as global, you better show people it’s global. That was the motto brandished by Greenpeace International during the planning stages of the nonprofit’s global “The Great Whale Trail”tagging campaign. The accompanying Web site had the same global objective, with the added and very ambitious goal of combining activism with fundraising – online. “What we’re doing, in a sense, is inventing the wheel,” said Ryann Miller, fundraising innovation consultant at Toronto-based HJC New Media, which partnered with Greenpeace to develop the online peer-topeer fundraising aspect of The Great Whale Trail campaign.“This is not direct marketing. This is not direct mail. So, it’s a lot harder for us to project what a campaign is going to end up looking like. We’re still seeing what the potential is.” The Web site (http://secure.greenpeace.org/visitor/index.php?event_id =main), said Miller, is modifiable by each participating Greenpeace national regional office (NRO), but the main points remain congruent throughout. The custom-built platform includes a sidebar located on the right side of the page, which displays three ranking lists, “Latest Donors,” “Global Top Fundraisers,” and “Top Fundraisers,” each updated automatically.“We built this tool and this campaign so that it would work in each and every country office,” said Miller. Still in the early stages of the project (it was launched at the beginning of November), Greenpeace International New Media Fundraiser Alexandra Merory, based in the Netherlands, said the group is not ready to share how much has been raised. She did speak to the uniqueness of the effort, and to its sometimes-unexpected successes. “The Great Whale Trail tagging project has been an important project as through the scientific research,” said Merory by email. “We approached the issue in a new way, and through the social network fundraising we allowed supporters to engage with the campaign in a different way.” According to Merory, the nonprofit managed to roll out the peerto-peer fundraising in eight countries with very different markets, and in six languages.The participating countries include places where whaling is a big market, such as Japan and New Zealand, but there were also a few surprises. “Happy” surprises, said HJC’s Miller. “Hungary is a great example of a smaller regional office that is more nimble, and eager to take a chance and a risk,” Merory said of the landlocked eastern European nation. Greenpeace’s NRO in China also found success with the effort, as evidenced by the reigning “Global Top Fundraiser,” Joe Wu of China, whose individual Web page (all in Chinese except for the dollars raised) shows that Wu garnered eight sponsors and raised $1,050 (as of Dec. 13). Traffic to the group’s Google Maps Web page, which uses satellite tracking to show the migration of threatened humpback whales has been impressive, said Merory. (Note: the posting of the whales’ location is delayed to ensure whalers cannot locate them) And as a not-so-side note side note, a contest to name one of the whales resulted in “a huge viral explosion,” she said, with more than 115,000 votes cast worldwide for the winning name,“Mr. Splashy Pants.” The contest was cited on several Web sites. People created their own “Vote for Mr. Splashy Pants”groups on Facebook; and, the “Mr. Splashy Pants” Web site earned the top spot on the user-generated site Reddit.com. “This goes back to the psychology of it all,” said Miller. “If you tell me that a campaign is global, I want to see that it’s global. It fosters a much greater sense of connection and interaction with people around the world, united for this one single cause.” – MARLA E. NOBLES Programs range from sharing proceeds of products to point-of-sale collections of contributions from customers and sweepstakes. and with companies that want to work with this region. We’re creative with how we position the brand in a national program, focusing more on cause than brand. The brand speaks for itself locally,” said Giagrando. The program’s aim is to create “long-term sustainable relationships with growth opportunity.”The longest cause marketing partner is Stop & Shop supermarkets, which has been involved for 16 years. Other causemarketing partners include BJ’s Wholsesale Club, Blockbuster, Burger King,Dunkin’Donuts,Hyundai,HomeGoods, Jiffy Lube, Model’s Sporting Goods and Taco Bell. Programs range from sharing proceeds of products to point-of-sale collections of contributions from customers and sweepstakes.“We’ve found the greatest successes are ones that engage the customer at the point of sale because it capitalizes on traffic,” Giagrando said. The cause marketing effort was in its infant stages when Giagrando have which is our brand image,” he said. “It’s hard to say no because we want to raise significant dollars but you have to balance workload and the value of the name and not undersell ourselves,” Giagrando said. “What we want to do is maintain the value of our name so that we can put the highest price on it, so we can raise the maximum amount of money.” What distinguishes Dana-Farber/ The Jimmy Fund from other cause marketing efforts, Giagrando said, “is the amount of service to our partners and the amount of counsel and the proactive nature of our strategies. Most of the programs are ideas we came up with to implement. It’s not enough to sit back and say, ‘We’re a good cause, do something with our name.’ “We want to be strategic with who we work with, how we work, and what the yield is for both parties,” Giagrando said,“but also never forgetting to raise money to conquer cancer.” – MARK HRYWNA DECEMBER 15, 2008 THE NONPROFIT TIMES www.nptimes.com 5 http://secure.greenpeace.org/visitor/index.php?event_id=main http://secure.greenpeace.org/visitor/index.php?event_id=main http://secure.greenpeace.org/visitor/index.php?event_id=main http://www.Reddit.com http://www.nptimes.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.