Do the Word

As regular readers of this blog know, I grieve over the amount of time and money nonprofits spend on (re)creating their brochures and tweaking their logos.

Brochures? Not transformational.

Logos? Not transformational.

Coaching your champions? Priceless.

So in an effort to help us all spend less time and money on the former and more on the latter, I share with you (totally unsolicited–this is not a sponsored post; just a clarion call for cheapness) a logo creation site with a bit of a P/E/O twist:

Logotournament.com.

Here’s the way it works:

1. You fill out a logo questionnaire.
2. You set a prize amount of your choosing for the winning design and a time limit for the contest.
3. Designers submit their logo ideas.
4. You provide feedback and rank the logos designers are submitting.
5. Designers incorporate your feedback and send more logos.
6. You choose the one you want and download the file in a usable format with full ownership of the logo.
7. Your champions don’t notice the logo change, despite your repeated efforts to try to casually work it into conversations. Then they say, “Huh… What was wrong with the old logo again?”

We’re not looking to replace our present logo at Mission Increase Foundation, but we decided to test the process out of the wellspring of great love we feel for you (which, loosely translated, means, “Please don’t spend $15,000 on a logo that really is no better than the one you have. Instead, spend $250 on a logo that really is no better than the one you have”).

The results we received were about on par with the results we’ve received with $15,000 logo designers (sans that style sheet usage template thingie logo designers like to supply for only a few thousand dollars more). I’m not sure how long the link to our contest will stay active on the site, but you can try clicking here and seeing if you can still get to the page. If not, there are dozens of other logo contests underway on the site that you can see.

The minimum prize amount you can offer is $250, which is returned to you if the contest fails to generates at least 30 entries. We offered a prize of $300 and got 73 entries, only a few of which looked like they were drawn by me.

I truly don’t know these Logo Tournament folks at all, so please don’t consider this an endorsement. What I do know is that anything I can do to tempt you to spend less time and money on your collateral material and more time and money coaching your champions is well worth a post.

Besides, the participatory framework of the site might make it easier for you to solicit your champions’ thoughts during the logo creation process, thoughts like, “Are you sure this is the best way to spend the time and money I would like to invest in the cause through you?”

As usual, Sean Stannard-Stockton has a fascinating conversation underway at Tactical Philanthropy–this time on words that describe great philanthropy.

So far, words submitted by contributors include:

• passion
• connected
• juicy
• impact
• innovative programs
• measurement of outcomes
• performance management
• accountability and transparency
• capable leadership
• theory of change

My own personal preference has yet to make an appearance, namely:

• good

As in, you know, virtuous. As in, “versus evil”. Light shining in the darkness and the darkness comprehending it not and such.

Just as non-profit nation is marching under the battle cry of good to great (and passionate and juicy and impactful and measurable), for-profit nation has vaulted over us heading in the opposite direction, from great to good.

Morally good, that is.

“Good is better than great,” contends Umair Haque in his Harvard Business Review article, The Great to Good Manifesto . “Many are great. But very, very few are good.”

Indeed.

While the GiveWell blog last week was publishing a great-is-better-than-good post entitled Haiti earthquake relief seems less cost-effective than everyday international aid, Pepsi–through its Refresh initiative–is getting in touch with its Inner Yoda. Writes Haque:

We often equate “doing good” with, a la Google, passively being “not evil.” Yet, they’re not the same. Yoda knew that good is more than just the absence of evil. And he was no mere wise elder — he was also one of the most deadly of the Jedi Masters. So the Yoda Concept says: going from great to good happens when a company goes on the offensive against rivals who are merely great and who are failing to do good. It isn’t enough to simply “do no evil.” Pepsi’s Refresh is interesting in this light because it’s Pepsi going on the offensive against Coke in terms of making each dollar do more good, and less bad.

Still, Haque’s praise for Pepsi’s great to good approach is tempered:

Pepsi’s great failing with Refresh is this: merely investing marketing dollars in worthwhile causes can never make up for something as economically meaningless as merely selling sugar-water. A culture of meaning means that Pepsi needs to refresh the idea of Pepsi — not just how it’s marketed.

The beauty of Sean’s question about words that describe great philanthropy is that it forces us to declare what we view to be the ultimate end of our work–what it looks like, in other words, when we win. For the purveyors of sugar-water, they purport that more is at stake than measurement of outcomes and management of performance. It may all be little more than marketing goofer dust for Pepsi, but it is fascinating to see who is talking the most these days about, as Haque puts us, “making each dollar do more good, and less bad.”

Tom at The Agitator lends space to Lisa Sargent who highlights what she describes as “a trailblazing multilevel donor loyalty program used by M. D. Anderson, a Texas cancer center that has seen direct mail revenues increase five hundred percent since it started the program.”

The trailblazing element?

The program is open to donors who don’t give a lot, so long as they give for five years or more:

‘The Partner’s Circle sprang from the observation that people who gave a little bit of money continuously throughout their lifetime often ended up bequeathing the institution significant donations from their estates,’ says Cindy Lappetito, vice president and general manager at loyalty-marketing company Epsilon, which created M.D. Anderson’s direct marketing campaign and donor loyalty programs.

Effective? Yes. Transformational? Er, not so much. The impetus to include low dollar givers seems to arise more from shrewd traditional transactional marketing than from a James 2:1-7ish egalitarianism.

For sheer transformative value, consider the disloyalty card being distributed by World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies at East London coffee shop Prufrock. To get a free coffee at Davies’ Prufrock shop you have to go grab a cuppa at eight other East London coffee shops.

Comments James Hoffman via his coffee blog:

There is no catch, it isn’t some cunning ruse to sell more coffee.  It might work if one roaster supplied all the places on the card – but there is a complete mix from Burgil to Union, from Square Mile to Nude’s in house espresso.  Gwilym just wants people to go and try coffee in different places.

This man is a great ambassador for coffee.

“A great ambassador for coffee”–not a bad reputation. And if such be true for coffee, then how much moreso for us in the realm of world-shaking causes? Are we known as “great ambassadors for the cause”–or as effective fundraisers (or not) for our organizations?

What might a donor disloyalty program look like?

How about a monthly giving program where once a quarter the gifts accrue to your organization…and each of the other months the gifts accrue to a different nonprofit you highlight that is having a powerful impact on your cause that is different than your own?

The message?

We want to be great ambassadors for coffee.

Or, more precisely, we care about the cause, not just our organization, and we value a wide variety of approaches that we think you should know about–and invest in–too.