• Pondering the sustainable consumption conundrum, Joel Makower
  

• Best conversations of 2008, Conversation Agent

• Profitable philanthropy? The values behind figures, Triple Pundit

“You don’t need a stable of superstars to win, you just need winners,” concludes John Garrett, a Vancouver Canucks’ color commentator, in his irregular column on the team’s website. “Good teams find a way to hang in every game and find a way to come out on top in most of those. They do it as a group… When they face adversity, they face it together… They all pull on the same rope, in the same direction. There’s no magic here.” The struggling teams “have some unbelievable talent but play as individuals.” (Emphasis mine.)

What goes for hockey goes for your marketing. Forget the Long Tail (though it undeniably exists in some areas). Winning is a function of team work. A team of people. A team of tools and tactics. A team of products or services. Everyone and everything must contribute, all in the service of a single purpose: success.

Have a clear goal. Have a clear strategy. Have a clear mindset. Be a winner, and you’ll become one.

Marketing is no magic.

An alternative to measuring social performance with the Need » Goal/Objectives » Activity » Evaluation model is to form a strategic partnership with a nonprofit organization that is aligned with your company’s values and social goals, and measure your social performance by your share in that organization’s achievements. This method essentially outsources your social accomplishments to a public benefit corporation, which specializes in the delivery of social impact.

Though profitable philanthropy is no longer an oxymoron, think beyond donations or grants. A simple cash or goods transfer is just that; you can’t measure something you handed over. Outsourcing social impact is about investment, and investments are about getting a return. Similarly, cause marketing can yield tremendous benefits to a socially responsible business. If done well and for the right reasons, promoting a cause or partnership with a nonprofit, sponsoring, licensing, co-fundraising, and facilitated giving all work well for both sides. However, the objective is ultimately financial: raise funds for the nonprofit, increase brand awareness and sales for the business.

So what is a values-based business to do to outsource its social impact? First, choose a nonprofit whose values, goals, activities and outcomes align with your vision for your company’s social impact. Questions to ask:

• Does the nonprofit have a values statement it lives up to at all times, with its words and actions? Do its stakeholders’ words and actions confirm the nonprofit’s values? Does your business have the same, or at least very similar, values?
• Does the nonprofit have a concise needs statement? Does your company want to have an impact in the same area?
• Does the nonprofit state its goals and objectives for alleviating the community need? Does the nonprofit measure the outcomes of its activities (and report on them)? Is the Need » Goal/Objectives » Activity » Evaluation model in place?
• Does the nonprofit have a demonstrable history of success in achieving its objectives and delivering measurable outcomes? Do your respective organizations work toward the same goals? (This means you set social performance targets for your business. Of course, you can also partner with the selected nonprofit on developing them.)

After you’ve identified the right organization or organizations, determine the level of your commitment, which should be commensurate with the social impact you wish to accomplish. You can contribute finances as well as time (your or your employees’ sweat equity). This requires learning more about the nonprofit’s operations and services, particularly the cost structure of each activity. You will measure your social performance only on the portion of the nonprofit’s performance you supported. The larger your investment, the bigger impact you can claim to have achieved.

Finally, set up a rigorous reporting mechanism. Talk to the nonprofit’s long-term foundation funders to learn more about the ins and outs of reporting (but keep in mind foundations give grants). The more significant your investment, the greater the nonprofit’s accountability to you for its results. Ensure the nonprofit understands your commitment is not a donation, but an investment, which gives you a stake in the organization’s success. Agree on a reporting schedule and outcome benchmarks.

Keep the lines of communication open at all times. Transparency is key. Above all, enjoy yourself, you’re helping to change the world!

Image: kokjebalder.

How to measure social performance, pt. 1

How do you brand a hole-in-the-wall hot dog dive that has a MySpace page for a website and a drawing for a logo?

Zach’s Shack is a hot dog establishment on the eastern fringe of SE Hawthorne Street, one of Portland, Oregon’s busiest (and hipsteriest) shopping and entertainment districts. Surrounded by bars and restaurants, including another, fancier, New York-style hot dog joint, it’s open till 3AM and also serves beer (draft and bottled microbrews plus cheap PBR tallboys), Kettle chips and a few other snacks.

The decor of the tiny space is simple, with mostly wood furniture and concert posters all around. A handful of TV screens show sports (football, snowboarding). There’s a jukebox, table-top Miss Pac Man, back patio with a ping pong table, and a summer hot dog eating contest.

Customer reviews may be mixed, albeit leaning toward the positive, but that matters much less than people actually talking about the place. Everyone in town knows Zach’s Shack without advertising, and if they don’t, they’ll soon hear about it from someone. Zach’s Shack is a place that makes Portland what it is.

Answer: Serve the best hot dogs in town, have long opening hours, and make the place a platform for daily life stories.

Recharge on a long Sunday afternoon walk. Take your date for a cheap treat after the movie at the brew and view. Watch Saturday college football with the kid. Come for one - beer and hot dog - after a work day on the nearby condo construction site. Stumble in and grab a late, late night snack after the night on the town.

By focusing on its main product and keeping everything else simple, Zach’s Shack provides its customers with context, which they fill with their own meaning. It’s a place that is many different things to many different people, yet for all it’s a place for hot dogs, beer, and small events in their lives. The place is an event, creating simple memories and around-the-bar-table stories. The place is a story. Community needs events and stories, no matter how small.

Zach may have not thought of it this way, maybe he just wanted to make the best hot dogs in town. A strong product is a foundation of strong small business brands. And customers’ perceptions and experiences is what counts.

As every day of the year, Zach’s Shack is open this New Year’s Eve and into the early hours of the New Year. This hot dog eatery will celebrate the arrival of 2009 with hot dogs. What about you? Have a healthy, eventful, and prosperous 2009!

In their Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael W. McLaughlin define guerrilla marketing as “a full-time business that includes every aspect of a consulting practice…it applies to everything you do. The object of guerrilla marketing is to build and maintain profitable relationships…” What a great example of how someone’s definition of a concept fits someone else’s definition of a different, albeit related, concept; guerrilla marketing is sustainable marketing and vice versa. Interesting, but it doesn’t matter.

Concepts are empty vessels, labeled with names, which we fill with meaning. Christmas means different things to different people, though the core remains the same for everyone. The meanings of democracy are as diverse as humanity itself, yet everyone’s idea revolves around the same center idea. Marketing has different meanings for different people, but regardless of any adjectives preceding it, the main thing remains the main thing: marketing entails everything a business does to cultivate relationships with stakeholders.

In other words, marketing is your business and your business is marketing. No matter what umbrella label you attach to anything in your business plan or marketing strategy, it’s marketing and it must serve to build and grow relationships with your stakeholders. Preoccupation with labels on empty vessels detracts from filling them with meaning.

So call your clients to schedule new-year conversations. Email the people you met at the networking event before the holidays. Update your website with calls to action. Do less talking about doing and more doing toward your goals.

• Top 6 low- or no-cost green marketing strategies, Eco Metro

• An introduction into the world of personal branding, Personal Branding Blog

• The art of customer service, Open Forum

The great thing about Christmas is that aside from a few basic symbols and rituals, every nation and every family inject its own traditions into the holiday. So when my wife Lindsay and I were debating the menu for this year’s Christmas Eve dinner my sole contribution and only condition was: kapustnica [KAH-poost-nih-tsa].

Christmas tree. Presents. Midnight mass. Snow. Family. A lot of things offer themselves in association with the holiday, yet the first thing that came to my mind was the sauerkraut soup. It brings the family together at the dinner table, precedes gift giving, adds depth to the scent of pine or fir, and provides the ultimate comfort. Christmas is kapustnica.

The soup is a mainstay of Christmas in Slovakia. My Slovak cookbook lists seven different recipes from different parts of the country, and every friend or relative I have back in the “old country” makes it differently. All have a few things in common: sauerkraut, potatoes, and smoked meat. Sure you can have it any time of the year, but Christmas is when you must.

Kapustnica is Christmas. Kapustnica is family. Kapustnica is home.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

P.S.: Boil sauerkraut and dried mushrooms in water, let simmer for 20 minutes. Add sliced smoked sausage and diced potatoes. Add peppercorns, bay leaf, and caraway seeds. Cook on low. Fry fine flour in oil until light brown, add chopped onion and paprika, fry some more. Add to the soup. Cook everything on medium for 15 minutes. Dobru chut!

• Starting social media: Building on what you have, Altitude

• The rise of “retail blogs”, The Long Tail

• Why reinventing ourselves is the only way to survive, bizsolutionsplus

• Dealing with detractors, Altitude

• Offer a third choice, boost sales, Neuromarketing

Concurrent with its bailout bid, General Motors has been running a feel-good commercial for its much-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid vehicle due on the market in 2010. “Innovative” or “sustainable” aren’t words typically associated with GM. But the company deserves credit for 1) inventing The Long Marketing Campaign, and 2) demonstrating the irony of wasting (marketing) resources on a supposedly green product.

The Volt was announced as a concept car in 2007, and has since received a lot of attention. I expect it will continue to generate it until its target launch in 2010. That’s three years of publicity, advertising, and plenty of other marketing efforts. It’s The Long Marketing Campaign. Here’s what shifts everything into the realm of science fiction: we are being sold something that’s not even scheduled to exist until two years from now! We are being sold the future.

The transformation from the 2007 edgy concept design to the 2008 generic production design poses the question as to what else will drastically change about the vehicle - I hope the plug-in hybrid engine is still the goal. What’s more, schedules can change, which is a particular danger for what’s advertised as a totally breakthrough technology. And as these past few weeks have demonstrated, the company may not even exist two years from now…

Compared to all that, the irony that the vehicular green savior of the tanking brand would be consuming this many marketing resources is almost secondary. Seth Godin has pointed out how new marketing doesn’t fit companies stuck in the old marketing worldview. The same goes for sustainability: old companies like GM can’t do sustainability because they don’t get it. It doesn’t fit their old molds. The video should offer a hint: it aims to generate credibility and indicate forward motion, but it also underscores ossification of a brand.

The only thing that’s completely sustainable about all this is the entertainment value. GM may have also inadvertently invented The Long Joke.

How do you measure your company’s social impact (People), the most problematic and difficult pillar of the triple-bottom line to capture? The New Economics Foundation and Global Reporting Initiative have great resources on measuring social return on investment, a value-metric that can be very demanding to implement. What can small businesses do that’s simpler and more straightforward to assess their social performance? Borrow from the nonprofit sector’s process of measuring impact: Need » Goal/objectives » Activity » Evaluation. Let’s demonstrate on the example of People’s Food Coop, a single-store grocery in Southeast Portland.

In its member email newsletter today, People’s announced a workshop: “On January 21st we will have our first ‘Shopping on a Budget at People’s Co-op’ class in the community room. We are partnering with Growing Gardens to talk about how to cook delicious and nutritious meals under $12 [per] meal for 4 people.” The class is the activity.

People’s could define the need this way: “Many people are losing the capacity to eat delicious and healthy food required to nourish them through the current economic downturn and to contribute to the good of the community.”

People’s could define the activity’s goal as, “Increase the number of people who develop the skill to cost-effectively feed their family with wholesome meals required to cultivate a strong local community.” Defined this way, the goal

• aligns with the Coop’s vision: “a passionate community working together for sustainability, progressive land and animal stewardship, human rights, social and economic justice”, including, among other things, “access to healthful foods our customers can trust”
• is driven by the Coop’s mission: “cultivate a thriving local economy by integrating ecological responsibility, local food systems and cooperative ownership with equitable business practices in a lively community marketplace”
• can accommodate a range of other projects in addition to the workshop.

The next step is to define the project’s objectives. SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-limited) is the best yardstick for setting objectives. Assuming the class is the first in a series, People’s process objective - the what and the how of reaching the goal - could read, “By the end of 2009, at least 100 people will participate in the class on shopping and cooking a 4-person meal on a $12 budget.” The outcome objective - the change or the measurable impact on people served or stated need - could read, “By the end of 2009, 85% of the 100 workshop participants will be proficient in shopping and cooking a $12 meal for four people as demonstrated by receipts and surveys.”

To evaluate their progress toward achieving the objectives, People’s would need to track the purchases made by workshop participants and survey them on what they learned, both before and after the class, and ideally over the longer term, say 6 months.

Though this is a hypothetical example building on a real event, the Need » Goal/objectives » Activity » Evaluation model is simple enough for small businesses to start measuring the social impact of their operations now.

Credits:

• “Grantwriting essentials: Creating Winning Grant Proposals”, Portland Community College Community Education, 2005
• Image: Wikipedia