It’s simple.
Marketing a cause should be an easy sell. There’s a problem, and here’s an organization dedicated to solving it. Act now. Yet it’s not that simple.
In fact, simplicity, and a serious lack of it, is often the problem.
Selling a product is often comparatively easy because it’s so tangible. As marketers, we’re even trained to add dimension by assigning brand attributes and emotion to a product. With regard to causes, this is a trap.
We recently completed a project for Columbia’s Gills Creek Watershed Association. The association wanted a modest increase in its $15 memberships. Being a university town, there’s no shortage of conservation-committed individuals in Columbia. So that task at hand seemed easily obtainable, only we had a few obstacles:
- People aren’t aware of the organization
- People don’t know where Gills Creek is
- People don’t understand what a watershed is
Add to that the fact that the association was targeting environmentalists, developers, anglers, scientists and outdoorsmen on a variety of water-related issues from pollution to sediment. In short, there was message entanglement.
Creative team Lauren Bowles and Jason Corbin did a beautiful job simplifying the message to the most relevant common denominator, clean water. They also overcame budget obstacles by producing a poster for area retailers catering to the conservation-committed. Their work reminds me that if your messaging is not brutally simple, even the most worthwhile endeavors can fail.
