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TO introduce a wider audience to Water Is Life, an upstart aid organisation that provides potable water to villages in developing countries, DDB New York startled even everyone.
The advertising agency, which accepted Water Is Life as a pro bono client in 2012, placed paper cups in dispensers next to sources of polluted water, including a leak in a Brooklyn subway station and dared New Yorkers to drink up. None did. Some of the paper cups read, "Ingredients: Cholera, Hepatitis, Typhoid, Fecal Matter, Salmonella, E. coli." DDB then filmed the reaction shots.
Matt Eastwood, chief creative officer of DDB New York, acknowledged that he had intended to "shock" his audience in part because: "You are not just competing against other charity brands or public service announcements. You are competing against advertising and marketing from everybody."
Rob Baiocco, a marketing consultant and chief creative officer of the Bam Connection, who donates his services to several nonprofit organisations, expressed similar sentiments. "It's so hard to stand out these days," he said..
Christmas cards from charities burst out of your mailbox. Dubious police fraternal organisations call on Sunday mornings. The cashier at the supermarket demands a dollar for the chain's charity partner. Say no and get a disapproving smirk. On your walk home, you dodge college students raising money for the environment or hungry children. The British call the street collection agents "chuggers," an amalgam of charity and mugger.
Relentless fund-raising from the growing ranks of nonprofit organisations is causing some donors to tune out or turn angry.
To get noticed in what Baiocco refers to as the "world of competing sorrows," some charities now resort to provocative advertisements and unconventional marketing. "We are all fighting over smaller and smaller pieces of the pie, so we have to get crazier, wackier and louder," said Nathan Hand, director of advancement at the Oaks Academy in Indianapolis.
But some philanthropy consultants, academics and historians ask whether the quest for the next viral video or news-making stunt actually advances a non-profit organisation's mission or simply wastes its resources.
One skeptic is Robert C Osborne Jr, principal of the Osborne Group, a fund-raising. Because many charities have low donor retention rates, he argued, "they would be far better off just communicating directly to their current donors and letting them know how previous donations made a difference."
HumaneWatch, a project of the Center for Consumer Freedom recently splashed the initials "WTF?" on a billboard in Manhattan. The initials evoke a vulgar expression but they stand for "Where's the Funding?" in the ad, which criticises the budget priorities of the Humane Society of the United States.
The ad counteracts diminished attention spans, Berman said. "If you don't have a good first five seconds, it's over,"he said.
The visionaries behind one of the most memorable slogans in advertising history weighed similar concerns. In the late 1960s, the New York Urban Coalition used the tagline "Give jobs. Give money. Give a damn." to raise awareness about racial inequality.
The word "damn" was a "huge deal" then, Melillo said.
Humor always helps, says Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising.org. Since 2009, her nonprofit advocacy organisation has highlighted sobering issues, such as workplace discrimination, by releasing whimsical Mother's Day videos.
The group's latest video introduced "mom dances." In the number called "I Fed My 3 Kids and Still Got to My Meeting on Time!" an actress in business attire vogues down a runway and shakes her head, spraying Cheerios from her hair. She brushes out most of the morsels before happily snacking on a leftover in her locks.
It can be beneficial to have a powerful international advertising agency on board. Another Water Is Life video produced in 2013 by DDB New York followed a Kenyan boy named Nkaitole on the trip of a lifetime. The preschooler plays soccer in Kenya's national stadium and frolics in the ocean for the first time. Eastwood of DDB New York hoped to highlight the fact that one out of five Kenyan children dies before the age of 5, often because of waterborne illnesses. The video, he said, poses the question, "What if a 4-year-old had a bucket list?"
"It doesn't show a single kid dying of thirst," Eastwood said. "It makes you want to donate rather than make you feel forced to donate."
The bucket list video helped raise $37,000 for Water Is Life in the month after its release this year.
Guerrilla marketing campaigns can also backfire. Front Steps, which runs a homeless shelter, and BBH Labs collaborated on Homeless Hotspots. Participants of a conference could get online by effectively renting a homeless person outfitted with a mobile Internet transmitter. A donation of $2 for 15 minutes was suggested. The stunt met with public scorn.
©The New York Times News Service
