Beyond the Rainbow Flag: Authentic Marketing for a Meaningful Month

June is Pride Month, a time to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community’s history, resilience, and ongoing fight for equality. Businesses have a unique opportunity to show their support through marketing, but it’s crucial to go beyond mere rainbows and hashtags. Let’s explore how to create authentic campaigns that resonate with the LGBTQ+ community and your broader audience:

Move Beyond the Rainbow

While rainbows are a powerful symbol of Pride, avoid simply slapping them on your logo and calling it a day. This practice, known as “rainbow washing,” can feel performative. Instead, focus on amplifying LGBTQ+ voices. Consider partnering with LGBTQ+ creators, artists, and influencers for your campaigns.

Show, Don’t Tell

Actions speak louder than words. Highlight your commitment to diversity and inclusion within your company. Do you have an LGBTQ+ employee resource group? Offer inclusive benefits packages? Share these efforts authentically. Avoid tokenism by simply showcasing your LGBTQAI+ employees without any call to action.

Make it a Cause, Not a Campaign

Pride Month is an ideal time to raise awareness for LGBTQ+ causes. Consider partnering with an LGBTQ+ non-profit organization. Donate a portion of proceeds from a specific product line or host a fundraising event. Use your platform to lift up organizations that are actively working toward a more equitable today and tomorrow. Collaborate with local entities, community leaders, and other businesses.

Long-Term Commitment

True allyship extends beyond June. Let your Pride Month marketing be the start of an ongoing conversation. Whether it's a fund, a partnership, or an ongoing initiative consider how you can continue to support the LGBTQ+ community throughout the year. Make your efforts a dialogue by inviting thought leadership from a variety of subject matter experts. 

Additional Tips:

Use Inclusive Language: Be mindful of pronouns and avoid heteronormative assumptions in your marketing materials.

Be Authentic: Don’t force your message. Let your genuine support shine through.

Educate Yourself: Learn about the history of Pride and the challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community.

Resources for Educating Your Team:

What LGBTQIA+ Means

LGBTQ+ Training

LGBTQIA+ Health Education

LGBTQ+ Student Resources Toolkit

By following these guidelines, your business can use marketing to authentically celebrate Pride Month, fostering a more inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone. 

Content Strategy for Social Impact: Building Trust and Community by Engaging Donors Through Authentic Content

Content is king and more important than ever as we navigate the changes in social algorithms, Web 3.0, and the uptick in advertising spend and volume. This is especially true for social impact organizations that operate with limited resources. It’s important to be intentional about your marketing, even if it means doing less.

To avoid overspending in the digital ad space, start looking to your owned media.

Your website (and emails) should be more than a place to donate or make a purchase. It should be how you build awareness, community, and support. The next generations of donors are far more intentional about philanthropy and, therefore, want to know more about your cause and why they should be involved. Millennials and Gen Z donors are also far more likely to give unrestricted donations to organizations they trust. While their donations may be smaller now, marketing to them in a way that feels authentic is a worthwhile long-term investment.

Before we jump into content strategy dos and don'ts, let’s chat a bit about the current state of non-profit content marketing. Social impact organizations tend to fall into two traps:

1. Being transactional

2. Writing for the wrong audience

If your emails read like this: “URGENT! We need your support NOW!” then you’re leading with a transactional approach because chances are, this urgent fear-based messaging isn’t a one-off for a truly dire need. Emails like this, with regular cadence, are a common transactional marketing approach, which is the antithesis of brand and community building. While effective in the short term, it can be a hindrance in the long run.

Pro tip – Urgent messages and needs for support do come up, so when sharing the problem, also share the progress. Otherwise, donors are left feeling like their financial support is a drop into a bottomless collection plate.

How Did We Get Here?

Data. Now, before you come for my head, hear me out. Data is a valuable tool when you use it to measure the right things, but with the ability to measure everything, marketers started to make all decisions solely based on data. Large awareness campaigns became micro revenue campaigns. While for-profit companies have started to pivot toward product refinement and community building, social impact organizations are still knee-deep in performance marketing, leaving little time for branding and community building. Between access to data and the constant need for contributed revenue, conversion metrics became the holy grail, so transactional marketing stuck. Tracking ROI has been great for the marketer but not so much for the customer. This leads me to my next point: pitfall number two, writing for the wrong audience.

Distrust among budding philanthropists is growing because of messaging. Audiences feel less connected to the content because it doesn’t feel like it’s written for them. Oftentimes, it feels like it was written for the organization by the organization. Instead of being informative and optimistic while still candid about the problem, everything is about how the donor should help the organization and how it needs to happen now… or else. When organizations do share optimistic content, lengthy and flowery messages ordinarily used for grant awards are just repurposed for donors. While I agree that repurposing content is a smart use of resources, you must make necessary adjustments for the channel and the reader.

Let’s Jump Into Content Strategy

First and foremost, balance is an important tactic to exercise. Social impact organizations obviously need transactional messaging but try to be more in service of your community than you are in need of their money. A three-to-one messaging approach is a good place to start. For every three messages you share, there should be one ask for support. To formulate the other three messages, learn your audience inside out and use data to help.

As I mentioned, data is a wonderful tool, but we don’t need to measure everything. Using data for customer insights and behavior patterns will help you make informed decisions to support your anecdotal evidence.

Once you’ve researched who your audience is, who you’d like your audience to be, and identified your goals, consider the following for a winning content marketing strategy:

1. Have you communicated your needs? Your supporters should be very clear on your issue area and how you are solving the problems that plague it. They should also be well-versed on how their contributions have been utilized and the progress report on what’s been accomplished so far. It’s equally important to avoid bending the truth to exaggerate impact or hide shortcomings altogether.

2. How are you delivering value? Your organization is the expert on your cause, so you should lead the conversation by providing insight and information about the state of the industry you’re serving. This could be trends, education, or providing your unique point of view on how the industry could improve.

3. Are you providing opportunities for advocacy? Beyond donations, sharing compelling stories, talking points, and ways they can take action on their own are ways to engage your community that are not centered around transactions.

Keep in mind that content strategy takes time and flexibility. Content marketing is designed to build community because it’s innately mutually beneficial to the reader and the organization. Like most relationships, you need to provide a benefit to your supporters. Make your website, videos, publications, and so on a go-to destination for your cause. This way, you can maintain the need to gain monetary support without compromising your value to your community.

Pro tip: When writing, use inclusive language like “we,” “us,” and “our.” Phrases like “the community” make the organization sound like a separate entity rather than an embedded resource.

Donors want to help organizations. They want to make a difference, and we, as professional advocates, can build phenomenal communities if we start to be more transparent about our impact. The root of what we do is so special because it’s entrenched with passion and commitment. It’s time we share that internal magic with our external audiences.

Join me for part two next week as we discuss how to use these tips to set up your website to be more community-driven and customer or donor-centric.

Impact Through Influence - How social impact organizations can widen their Millennial & Gen Z donor base by leveraging the creator economy

Why Should Your Social Impact Organization Use Influencers?

Influencers and content creators can help raise awareness and expand market reach. However, as social impact marketers know, the investment to turn one-time engagement into advocacy is a one-to-one or one-to-many game, making email and direct mail go-to tactics. Non-profit marketing is personalized and segmented, coupled with data that isn’t always as robust as for-profit product-based consumer analytics. While there are obvious differences, it’s time to start thinking of our social-impact organizations like a business if we want to see growth and longevity. Investing in digital marketing should be at the top of that to-do list. 

Long before I jumped into the world of social-impact and cause-driven marketing, I cut my teeth in the private sector where driving the bottom line through marketing was key. I focused on allocating resources in a way that helped my team widen our company’s market share and deepen our impact with the customer base, so they chose to spend their dollars with us instead of our competitors (shout out to my days at Pandora Jewelry, Pretzel Crisps, and Freshology where we dug deep into our competitor analysis bag). That skill set would come to be useful while crafting cause-driven marketing campaigns. Understanding that customer centricity, trust, and education are the foundational necessities for brand loyalty helped to craft my marketing campaigns at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a non-profit performing arts organization. 

We did not assume customers knew or understood all our product/concert offerings, so we used our brochure to tell them, and then we used social media to reiterate a sense of belonging. The thought process was to paint a picture to share what they could expect and lift the veil of mystery shrouded around an evening at the symphony. We started with more frequent posts to gauge the level of engagement. We tested videos, carousels, behind-the-scenes, interviews, and user-generated content. After a few months (yes, months. Solid testing takes time and patience), we forged ahead with a few initiatives, one of them being user-generated content. One of the tests even involved me as a mystery arts influencer writing an article (advertorial) about our upcoming concerts in the Baltimore Sun with a prompt to visit our website and social media platforms. That quickly sparked the idea to invite influencers out to concerts as a formal marketing campaign. 

Our Fusion series was the perfect opportunity to test this initiative because the program skewed toward a younger audience who was more likely to be a part of an online community. We curated a list of the city’s relevant influencers and invited them out. They posted ahead of time as “meet & greet” opportunities and created loads of fantastic reels, photos, and stories on Instagram from different perspectives the day of the concert. By reposting these experiences on our own account, potential customers could find a sense of belonging by seeing how the concert experience could be tailored to their liking. Our events team worked to curate post-worthy onsite activations and encouraged tagging us which was a true accelerator for user-generated content. We were then able to leverage the networks of our concertgoers and essentially turned everyone with a smartphone and a social media account into a brand ambassador. 

How Can Your Social Impact Organization Use Influencers?

During intermission, I would walk around to all the influencers I could find to introduce myself and ask about their experience. We’d chat about how their posts performed and any early insights they wanted to share. I requested feedback about the overall messaging and provided them with information about our other initiatives that focused on community engagement and arts education programs. While I know this is vastly different from an organization that is focused on hunger, workplace development, education, or human rights, there is a way to adopt this ideology. 

Offer them a seat at the table. 

Find a handful of influencers and content creators who are in true alignment with your mission. Set up calls or meetings to gauge if the fit is right and if it is, make them a part of your team. They're bona fied content marketers with an impactful skill that shouldn't be discounted. Whether you set up a limited brand partnership, or put them on an advisory council or payroll, you should formally invest in the relationship. Since the work social-impact organizations do isn’t tangible like a product, communication is necessary and should be a two-way street. Ask their feedback to ensure your message is clear to those outside of your organization and work together to make it relatable. If the influencer(s) is well versed in your mission, they can speak to the cause authentically. If you’ll recall in a previous article, I shared how Millennial and Gen-Z donors value transparency because they’re more likely to budget for philanthropy than prior generations. Having a deeply engaged trusted influencer or content creator as part of your team can provide your organization access to a built-in community where support can truly thrive. 

To find real-world examples of how leveraging celebrity as a part of your team can be beneficial, look to the fashion industry. While still for-profit, the high fashion houses are calling in stylish celebs as creative directors to provide true customer insight on what’s popular and well-received to game plan months and sometimes years in advance. Celebrities are looked to for inspiration, so the fashion houses have made those public muses a part of the internal process. Since this shift, we’re seeing things like capsule collections that feel personalized or even brand overhauls that are more resonate with today’s customers. 

In short, a symbiotic relationship is how social-impact organizations can leverage influencers. Beyond a post or two, influencers should have a vested interest in your mission and be armed with substantial knowledge of the inner workings of how you’re solving the problem your organization services. Content creators and influencers are wonderful champions to have in your corner. Just remember that partnership is key, and you’ll be set up for a winning initiative.