Midway through last week’s Cause Marketing Forum (CMF), during Katrina McGhee’s great talk on personal branding, I noted that a significant number of the CMF presenters—representing both causes and companies—were explicitly emphasizing one key practice. These cause marketing leaders focus on their strengths. They understand their organizational strengths and partner with others to mitigate their organizational weaknesses. In contrast to the trends earlier this decade when it started to feel like major cause marketers were shifting to owning self-made cause platforms over building partnership portfolios, this strengths-based approach is facilitating significant creativity and impact.
Instead of adopting a certain trend in structure or activation, today’s cause marketing leaders are focusing on what will work for them. For some, that is creating an owned national platform with local and agency partners providing support. For others, it is forging one or more partnerships of complementary opposites who each bring what the other needs. Through collaboration, they are then able to achieve the business and social impact results that they could not have achieved on their own.
Four Examples from Cause Marketing Forum 2016:
A few examples (of many, many more) that I found particularly instructive from last week’s event:
1) Aria Finger, CEO of DoSomething.org, highlighted how they use their deep understanding of what makes young people tick to ensure that their partnerships are meaningful (and hip).
- 2) Ido Leffler, Co-Founder and CEO of Yoobi, spoke of Yoobi’s core competencies (product, design, and creativity) and their need to find retail and cause partners to bring their vision for business and social impact to life, saying “We do what we do best and we partner with others to do the rest.”
3) Michael Meyer, Vice President of Donated Goods Retail and Marketing at Goodwill Industries International, spoke about how the organization is using its brand strength and retail footprint to provide value for partners, in return for the new audiences and distribution channels that partners like Uber and The Container Store provide.
4) 2016 Halo Award Best Digital Campaign Gold Winners Samsung and Autism Speaks Canada provided countless examples including the profound use of Samsung’s technological strength along with Autism Speaks Canada’s expertise and credibility in serving families living with autism. Together, they created and promoted an app that uses the rear-facing camera on a mobile device to help children with autism practice working on eye contact.
Whether we are designing a platform, portfolio, or single partnership, we must first get real about the strength of the currencies, competencies and capabilities that we have in the context of what we want to accomplish. Then, we need to fill the gaps through custom alliances that both expand on others’ strengths and fill a gap for them.
Thanks and kudos to each of the phenomenal cause marketers who presented and won awards at last week’s event.