According to The Bridgespan Group, nearly 90 percent of audacious efforts took more than 20 years to make an impact on the general public. Audacious, or large-scale, cause marketing was a main point of discussion at last week’s Massachusetts Coalition for Serious Illness Care summit, where the topic at the forefront of discussion was how to get more people to have end-of-life care discussions with their loved ones to ensure that everyone receives health care that honors their goals, values and preferences. Campaigns such as the anti-smoking movement, prevention of drunk driving and legalizing marriage equality, were all highlighted at the summit as sharing similar successes in changing cultural norms. The consistent: changing the public’s opinion of what is acceptable regarding hot button issues, such as smoking.
At Teak, we promote the good news of our nonprofit and socially responsible clients through public relations and are constantly looking at examples of how the most successful campaigns came to create lasting social impact. We’ve compiled the most consistent attributes of audacious philanthropy efforts, which were discussed at last week’s summit:
When setting out to change a person’s mindset, create an emotionally stimulating message.
With an issue such as smoking, there were so many mixed messages out there debating whether smoking was cool or if it were deadly. For anti-tobacco campaigners, it took communicating a message that dug deep into someone’s emotions. We all remember the commercials featuring the “truth singing cowboy”; an extreme display of the negative effects of smoking featuring an ex-Marlboro man with a noticeable hole in his throat singing to a shocked audience about what happens to you when you smoke (i.e. lose a lung, big hole in your neck, etc.) . Advertisements like these trumped those flaunting the “cool factor” of smoking and the public perception on smoking has made a drastic transformation since.
No major change takes place without a shift in public opinion.
Some people are willing to change, some are on the fence, and many are stuck in their usual ways. The ones you want to target when marketing a cause requiring audacious change are those on the fence – “the contemplators” – as they, when their perceptions are changed, will be the most likely to change the minds of their connections who are otherwise opposed to changing. A commonality between all major change campaigns we’ve seen is that at the end of the day, no real change takes place without the shift to majority support of the public audience. NBC did this when they created the iconic, lovable characters living in their hit show, Will & Grace, which built a great deal of gay acceptance amongst Americans who may not have otherwise had a positive example of same sex relationships.
Think global, but act local.
As Ellen Goodman, a Pulitzer Prize winner, former journalist and Co-Founder of The Conversation Project said at last week’s summit, “think global and act local.” For example, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has taken action in local communities to stir a public shift in perception around drunk driving, educating the public on ways to prevent it. No matter how many advertisements a brand puts out to make an immediate splash, what really ignites change is the actions that a group takes on the ground. Large-scale change takes a lot of work and time, so always approach your goals with a global mindset, acting over time on more of a local level to drive maximum impact.
