Category Archives: Social Responsibility

Highlight the strengths of your mission

stand out[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book, Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Remind your readers continually of what is innovative about your mission. No one likes to reinvent the wheel or be part of something garden-variety. Show that you play a special and essential role in your field: a role that cries out for involvement from your readers.

Ask_yourselfAsk yourself: How is your mission unique within your field, and how does that give you a special niche?

Your mission may be to implement an entirely new solution to an age-old problem that has been haunting your community. Or maybe you are striving to improve or expand what already has begun to work. Either way, identify what it is about your mission that makes it extraordinary.

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Examples

1) Por Fin Nuestra Casa (Spanish for “finally, a home of our own”) has the mission:

“To raise the standard of living for families who currently reside in dangerous or substandard conditions.”

Not so unique, you might think. But they then flesh it out:

“We advance this cause by creating shelters from low-cost recycled materials. PFNC utilizes surplus shipping containers resulting from the United States’ consistent trade deficit. These containers serve as the building block of PFNC housing, but go through an extensive conversion process to make them a home. PFNC offers an affordable housing solution that is scalable and fully portable. Each PFNC unit includes First World amenities for a price of less than $10,000 (US).”

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Spotlight your mission repeatedly

Stage_Spotlight[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book, Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Have you advanced your organization’s mission today? Your readers are eager to know about it!

Every marketing or fundraising piece you write needs to speak to the advancement of your organization’s reason for existing in the first place. That is, every page should remind your readers that you never forget what you set out to do in your community.

Every values-driven organization has a specific mission to make a positive difference in the world. My guess is that you already know what yours is. You may not have memorized your official mission statement, but you are clear on the essence of your organization. Your mission, after all, is a key part of your organization’s brand..

To each of your readers, your mission, or perhaps some particular aspect of it, is the heart of the matter. They want to hear that it is central to everything you do. They want to know that your work continues to be relevant to their lives and the life of their community, even as times and circumstances change.

There is no shame in reminding yourself of your organization’s mission statement once in a while. Some people I know even plaster it on the wall or make it their screensaver to keep it at the top of the mind and on the tip of the tongue.

Your mission should inspire and motivate support and commitment from those who share your concerns. Your organization’s name alone should cause your mission to spring to mind.
However, if you—and your colleagues—do not revisit your mission statement regularly, and ideally fine-tune or update it on occasion, you can get stuck in out-of-date patterns of branding. This is true for both start-up organizations (whose missions are usually still evolving) and more established groups. For instance, a client organization of mine had focused for decades on the needs of all low-income families, but recent demographic changes in their county compelled them to focus on new immigrants, with their associated cultural and linguistic challenges.

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Now Available: List of Green and Sustainable Business Networks

green earthNot long ago, my friends and colleagues on LinkedIn generously offered their suggestions to help me compile this sample list of green and sustainable business networks around the world. And the great news? Each organization listed links to its website.

These networks cover a wide range of green topics—such as energy efficiency, environmental protection, sustainability, environmental ethics, and waste management—across a wide range of fields. You’re bound to find a way to network  with other environmentally responsible professionals involved in anything from nail salons to  buildings to education to investments to health care—and everything in between.

Networks on the list vary from international or national organizations to U.S. state or community-based ones (e.g., in Austin, the Bay Area, Boston, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon).

I hope this resource inspires you to spark your own connections —through these networks or the thousands of others like them.

You can view the full list (including a printer-friendly version) HERE.

Thinking Beyond the Green Market: How Green Entrepreneurs Can REALLY Change the World

[Dalya’s Note: This guest post was written by Shel Horowitz, lead author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.]

green worldHow many times have you heard some green entrepreneur telling you to buy a product because it’s good for the earth? The problem with that approach is that it only reaches one of the three markets that green communicators need to attract.

“Good for the planet” attracts the Deep Green crowd: people who are heavily motivated by messages about doing the right thing. People like me.

But even though green consciousness is growing rapidly, we don’t have enough of those folks to change the world; and in many cases, are also not enough to create a sustainable business. Green entrepreneurs also need to reach two other audiences:

Lazy Greens: people who are mildly disposed to do the right thing. They’ll buy your stuff—but only if it’s at least as easy, cheap, durable, convenient, and functional as the product it’s replacing. They have a philosophical sympathy with greening the planet, but they have relatively low knowledge and they don’t want to be inconvenienced. To get them to buy, not only do you need to make it just as good as or better than what they’ve been buying all along, you also have to put it right in front of their faces in the shopping channels they’re already using.

Non-Greens: these folks aren’t convinced that the planet is even at risk. They may consume news from media that routinely present the handful of climate-change-denying scientists, and may have bought the line that there’s a wide scientific debate on climate change. Or they may even come from an “I’ve got mine, and I don’t care if you get yours” attitude.

And to reach those two kinds of people, you cannot motivate with guilt or shame. “Shoulds” simply don’t work. You have to motivate them positively. You have to show that your product is better.

For the Lazy Greens, you can even wrap these benefits in the environmental cloak: your offering is better because of the green features. A hybrid car offers better gas mileage and silent operation because it uses an electric motor. An LED light bulb burns so much longer and uses so much less electricity because its energy-efficient design converts more electricity to light instead of heat. An organic local tomato tastes so fresh and is so good for you because it’s grown without chemicals and is not picked unripe to be shipped thousands of miles.

For the Non-Greens, the education part has to come later—after they’ve already used and loved the product. Then we can begin to show them the advantages of a green lifestyle. But first, they are going to buy on value, not values.

Smart marketers reach all three audiences. A great example is Marcal, a manufacturer of recycled toilet paper, napkins, and paper towels in the northeast United States. Located just outside New York City, the company creates these products from that city’s abundant supply of discarded junk mail. For the Deep Green, Marcal’s Small Steps packaging emphasizes saving trees. The Light Green not only gets a panel of “Environmental Facts” that note the absence of harmful chlorine and other chemicals, but also an invitation to compare with other vendors. Most importantly, the Light Green finds Marcal on the local supermarket shelf, right next to the virgin-paper brands. The Non-Green can ignore all that, and buy Marcal because it’s a high-quality paper at a very affordable price.

Which would you rather read? “Electronic Privacy Expert Releases New Book” or “It’s 10 O’Clock—Do You Know Where Your Credit History Is?” People will THANK you for letting them read press releases, book jackets, sellsheets, web pages by Shel Horowitz (author, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, six other books; internationally syndicated columnist) Bye-bye boring copy! Green and Profitable.

Go beyond promotion for its own sake

[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

When you are writing to make a difference, your two-fold goal is both to promote your organization as a part of a socially responsible solution AND to educate your readers about key things they need to know in your issue area.

Constituent education is often the first step in marketing, especially if you are tackling a complex, often misunderstood problem that involves many variables, processes, or actors. Most of your readers are not specialists in your area, but their interests make them want to know more. You would be wise, then, to build an educational component into your organization’s branding.

EXAMPLE:

As a socially responsible business, you offer environmentally friendly laundry services to people in your neighborhood. While your customers obviously know their need for clean clothes, many of them may not be aware of the hazards of chemicals often used in the dry cleaning process. Your marketing, then, would need to include information about why you offer green services, as well as how you do so.

In this world of information overload, we all could use a guide to the most critical aspects of the issues important to us. We also want to hear about how we can personally get involved, presented in a way that we can relate to.

And that information is precisely what you and your organization excel at providing! Give it to your readers—repeatedly and consistently. The more value you can deliver, the more they will see your organization as worthy of their support, investment, or patronage.

Promoting your brand and appropriately educating your community go hand-in-glove.

bonus tipBONUS TIP:

Just remember that you can never be 100% objective, no matter how hard you try. While your readers know you have a perspective, they also expect you to be clear and honest with your facts and opinions, and to explain your frame-of-reference.