“Yes, we disabled the alarms on the Deepwater Horizon. Oh, like you’ve never hit the snooze button? http://ow.ly/2fQ6x” 1:57 PM Jul 23rd @BPGlobalPR

Today British Petroleum announced a new CEO, Robert Dudley, an American, meant to appease the millions of Americans without livelihoods now, and the millions of environmental activists up in arms about the devastation in the gulf.

He said they would remain strong on their pledge to pay reparations to the citizens of the gulf, AND KEEP DRILLING. Well, it seems like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has struck again.

So the concept of CSR, as far as I see it, is that you throw some volunteers or money at a relief effort for a tragedy that you may or may not have caused and suddenly you have purchased the indulgences to act exactly as you please, with no need for morals any longer.

What is even more unconscionable is that this is the second such disaster and CEO musical chairs that has been caused by BP in the last five years.

Yes, in 2005, BP had a big blowup at a Texas City oil refinery and some leakage of oil in Alaska as well. So their then CEO, John Browne, was forced to step down, and Mr. Tony Hayward took his place. We all know how well THAT worked out.

My favorite line from The New York Times Article today is, “Mr. Hayward, asked how he felt about the oil spill given that he pledged to improve safety standards in light of the Texas City explosion, said he “was determined not to have a repeat” of such an accident but “sometimes you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus.””

Wow. That is really incredible. Mr. Hayward is STILL NOT ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY for this oil spill. You’d think that if you were BP CEO, you could improve safety standards. That it would be, kind of, your job. Especially since you just stepped in after a previous disaster when your oil equipment wasn’t safe enough, and pledged to “not have a repeat” of the accident. And now he’s going to continue to work for BP, and get his over $14 million dollar payout.

What is wrong with our concept of corporate social responsibility? Basically, everything. But we shouldn’t stop there. We also need to take away corporate personhood, and do as Ecuador has done, and make Mother Nature a person in court with equal rights.

I was reading the Philanthrocapitalism blog yesterday, which is written by an Economist editor, Matthew Bishop, and he asked, “Is CSR evil”? He calls it “Short Term Thinking” that plagues companies. That’s so understated that it’s almost insulting. How about we call it, “We’re going to Rape, Plunder and Pillage your entire life and you don’t have a choice”? I guess that doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

We need to start asking, why aren’t we instilling the golden rule into our accountants, stockbrokers, CEOs and MBAs?

Why are we making “at will employment” the rule, giving people no legal recourse to being fired? Why aren’t we protecting our workers, strengthening our unions, and making safety standards real, instead of just paying lip service to them?

It’s not “short term thinking” we need to eliminate, Mr. Bishop, it’s the sociopathic lack of any concern for anyone other than the company and its image.

We need to dissolve British Petroleum and stop our dependence on oil. We need to FORGET OUR BRANDS and start trying to SAVE OUR WORLD. Thank you Leroy Stick, for putting it so succinctly.

Why aren’t you more angry? What can you do about this?

See more pictures of the spill here

BP Kills. Don't give them your money.

If you are in charge of or collaborate with nonprofit marketing at your organization, ask yourself these simple questions.

How do we communicate?

How do we measure it?

What lifestyle trends or factors affect our donors?

Do we seek feedback? How?

Do we collaborate with our donors? How?

Our donors love us because:

Our donors dislike us because:

Our donors like other nonprofits in our cause area more because:

What do they do better?

Do donors rely on us to educate them?

On what?

How are we currently doing this?

Once you have identified the basics of your current marketing plan, start to think about identifying your audience for your new marketing plan.

1. Demonstrated behaviors – What do people do?

2. Self reported behaviors – What do people SAY that they do?

3. Attitudes, Values and Beliefs -Lifestyle – What are some things that people value in your community? What attitudes do they have? What beliefs would make them give or not give to your nonprofit?

4. Needs and Preferences – What do people need in your community? Are they craving connection? Do they want to help someone and see or hear that it made a difference?

5. Demographic Data – What are the zip codes where you get most of your donors? Where are some zip codes that have a lot of wealthy people? Could you get some demographic details from your local SBA or chamber of commerce?

6. Professional, Social & Service Orgs they belong to – Do your donors belong to the VFW? The American Legion? The Moose Lodge? A Mosque? A Synagogue? Do they look to these groups to help provide them with opportunities to give and to volunteer? How can you get a speaking engagement at some of the organizations that they belong to?

7. Influencers and Promoters – Who are some influential people in your community? Look at the Book of Lists from the Business Journal. Other ways to find this out include looking at the biggest charities, community organizations, and corporations in your community, and finding out who their top leaders are.

8. Creating Audience Personas – Look through your database. How much information do you track about people? Do you track how they heard about you? Do you track some of the organizations they belong to? Do you track their demographic data? If you start to gather this information, you can start to create a persona of your current donor base. Once you’ve narrowed down who currently gives to your nonprofit, and who you would like to give to your nonprofit, you can create audience personas.

This is best viewed full screen.

You’ve heard about the spill in the gulf. It’s the worst environmental disaster America has ever seen. BP’s topkill didn’t work. The region is devastated. Dolphins, Whales, Birds, fish, and other marine life are dying or dead. Denuded of its wildlife, this new diseased gulf means that the livelihood of thousands of fishermen and women will be gone.

And who is to blame? BP, AKA British Petroleum. This crisis is beyond belief. And their clumsy attempts to repair the damage are pitiful. Their reprehensible behavior that caused this disaster means that humorists everywhere are having a field day with their name. And this includes twitter. A twitter account that’s getting a lot of attention lately is @BPGlobalPR. They have 99,000 followers, and the spill happened less than 2 months ago. They are making t-shirts, and all donations are going to Healthy Gulf.org. What can we, as nonprofit marketers, learn from the success of BPGlobalPR?

1. Humor works. Look at Jon Stewart. He talks about all of the terrible things that happen in the world, and he makes people laugh about it. Humor is a wonderful way to get people to care about your cause.

2. Imagine having 91,000 more people that cared about your nonprofit and wanted to help. Would some of them become donors? You bet.

3. What can you do, today, to inject humor, irony and snark into your nonprofit marketing?

We all have our little tricks for making do, for getting by with less. Here are mine. What are some of yours? Leave a comment!

1. Marketing: Go to the same printer every time, negotiate a lower price based on your loyalty and the urgency of your cause.

2. Ask a major corporation if they’d like to sponsor the publication of your annual report, and put their logo in it. Great exposure for their brand tied with yours.

3. Use the downturn to negotiate a lower price for t-shirts, pens, buttons, etc.

4. Get interns to do graphic design for you.

5. Free Publicity: Try getting an interview on your local community radio station, KOOP in Austin Texas, or Kaos in Olympia, Washington. If you’re in England, try University Radio York, and if you’re in Vancouver, Canada, try CO-OP Radio.

6. Go to your local tv station and get a free interview with your nonprofit leader. Portland Community Media is one place I’d recommend for Portland Oregon.

6. Appeals: Batch your fundraising appeal letters. Send out 150 at a time. Test out different messages, graphs, charts, quotes, pictures, see what works with who. This way you can avoid an appeal letter that bombs.

7. Get volunteers to stuff envelopes for you. If you’re in Canada, post an opportunity at Volunteer.ca. If you’re in England, post what you need at this site. Try Workforce Solutions in Austin, Texas, and Steps to Success is a good one for Portland, Oregon.

8. Get a pitney bowes machine to put the correct postage on your letters and packages. This will save you money in that trip to the post office.

9. Events: Get space and food donated for events. Use your board member connections.

10. Getting things done: Get free advice from wise people at SCORE, the Service Corps Of Retired Executives, everything from starting a nonprofit to running a marketing plan. You can take a class or get free counseling. I’ve used their services and I recommend them!

11. Grants: Need to research grants? You can view the Foundation Center Database for free. Go to your local cooperating collection to view grants for your charity.

12. Major Donors: Get free annual reports from similar nonprofits and find out which corporations care about your cause.

13. Also, get the Business Journal’s Book of Lists to find out which new companies to approach for supporting your cause.

14. Data entry: Do you need a database? How do you choose which one to use? Check out NTEN’s unbiased free survey of donor management databases to see which ones have the features you need.

15. In-Kind: Get a local coffeeshop to donate meeting space or coffee to your next meeting and promise to put their logo in your newsletter.

16. Get free yoga for your nonprofit by asking a local yoga studio to give a demo at your next staff meeting.

17. Negotiate with a new bakery or office supply store to tell people about their businesses, and give discounts to your employees or donors, and get free baked goods or office supplies.

18. Get donated auction items.

19. Post volunteer opportunities everywhere you can (local high schools, colleges, universities, volunteermatch.org, idealist.org, etc). Each volunteer hour is worth $18!

20. Use a new avenue for messages: If your nonprofit is almost at its goal, text message your most loyal supporters, asking for help in this last push.

21. Bonus: Get reduced price software from TechSoup!

Thanks for reading!

What are some of YOUR money saving tips?

Have you ever sent aid overseas? Did you send money? Toothpaste? Socks? Books? What happened to your donation? Where did it go? Why were you sending it?

One thing I learned when I was volunteering at nonprofits overseas is that people don’t necessarily need what you think they need.

I lived in Jakarta, and volunteered in a small mobile health clinic that went to different Jakarta slums. I thought that Indonesian women would really want condoms. I asked my friend. He said, “Do you want to die? The village heads rule. And if it doesn’t go through them, we won’t be allowed back.”

We then proceded to treat people with a host of diseases, all stemming from lack of access to clean water. So what did they really need? Water filters.

Totally not what I was thinking about, at all.

But you know, I’m not alone in my cluelessness. Recently there’s been some uproar about the damage that sending clothing to Africa can do.

Foreign aid can hurt more than it can help. The world is a lot more complex than we think it is. If we flood the market with free clothes, who will buy clothes from the village next door? They can’t compete with free.

There are different phrases for what foreign aid can do to decimate a local economy. Lethal generosity. Toxic Giving. The Myth of the Naked African Child. Dead White People’s Clothes.

I think Lethal Generosity should be the Oxford phrase of the year.

We see this in governmental aid as well as in well-meaning individual donors who just want to send a pair of boots to Haiti.

We need to ask, “Who is getting the government contract to give “aid” to these people while making tons of money off of this crisis?”

And we need to ask our donors who want to send aid to somewhere in crisis,

“Is there someone in a local or neighboring community that you could pay, thereby stimulating the local economy, creating jobs, and increasing the prosperity of the region, instead of expensively sending a lot of things you have lying around, flooding the region with cheap, free or useless pieces of “foreign aid”?”

We could have stimulated the economies of the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico if we had helped agencies or vendors in these countries give aid to Haiti. But instead we foolishly spent a lot of money and time getting our supplies to Haiti. Just like we’ve done in countless other disasters.

Let’s stop thinking like savior supermen for a minute here and realize that regions can do a lot of their own aid, if we do a little research and work to increase their pipeline efforts.

Where do you find them?

You want people high up in a corporation, so that they can approve thousands to sponsor your event, or a year-end gift to your organization, if they have left over marketing dollars in their budget. You also want people who have used your services, who are passionate about your mission.

Go to the Business Journal’s Book of Lists for your city.
Who are the biggest employers?
Who are the fastest growing companies?
Who are the richest companies?
And Who are the biggest givers in your city?

Pick one high ranking person from each biggest employer to call. 20-30 calls, max.
Pick one high ranking person from each fast company to call. Ditto
Pick one high ranking person from each rich company to call. Ditto
And finally, pick ten high ranking people from the most philanthropic businesses to call.

You should call at 7am on a Thursday morning, to get past the gatekeepers.

Ask the person if they have heard of your cause.
Ask them if they would like to hear what you do.
Ask them if they are interested in serving on a nonprofit board.
If not, ask them if they know anyone within the organization who would be interested.
If not, ask them if they know anyone outside of the organization who would be interested.
If still not, pick someone else from that company to call.

And you can always call back and ask for other things, such as:
Ask them if their company would be interested in doing a day of service for employees, or ongoing volunteer activities for employees.
Ask them if they have an employee giving program, or if they’d like to start one.

Keep going. Every no leads to a yes. I’m proud of you for asking.

PS. If you’ve got another way of finding nonprofit board members, I’d love to hear it. Please leave it in the comments below. Thank you!

Follow Wild Woman Fundraising on Twitter!

One of my favorite authors, Barbara Ehrenreich, a breast cancer survivor and author of “Nickeled and Dimed, and most recently, “Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” calls this phenomenon “Welcome to Cancerland.”

Before putting your pink yogurt in your mouth, have you ever asked yourself, “How much of this actually goes to stopping breast cancer?”

Well, perhaps you should “Think Before You Pink.” They’ve compiled a list of questions to ask yourself when buying a “cause-related” product. A $4.95 yogurt might only give 50 cents to your cause of breast cancer. Is that really an effective way to support a cause?

Cause marketing. It’s why corporations give to your cause. You think that maybe they really believe that you’re making a difference and want to help?

Think again. It’s good business for them to support you. Check out this marketing report. It directly affects their bottom line when people see them doing good. It can be known as white-washing, green-washing, or pink-washing. Their brand is washed with your brand, making them more attractive to consumers. So you’ll buy toilet paper that is “green.” or yogurt that is “pink.” This knowledge can arm you in how to make the ask for corporate sponsorships and donations.

Dust off your donation policy. Who do you accept donations from? Who is anathema to your cause and why? If you’re an organization that has vowed to stop cancer, you’re not touching big tobacco companies. If you’re a humane society, you’re running fast from Proctor and Gamble (they’re big on kitten vivisections).

Every donation is a political decision. Every purchase is a political decision. Now more than ever.

What are you going to stand for?