Millennials are the most active generation on social media, with 88% of Americans ages 18 to 29 using Facebook and 75% of them having created at least one social media account. Fewer adults over age 30 use social media, but their adoption is still high. More than 60% of adults older than 65 use Facebook. These numbers show a significant increase from six years ago, when only 6% of people 65 and older used social media.

Projections signal continued growth, with recent data suggesting that worldwide use of social media will increase 18% by 2020. Some data report more than 5 billion people, or about two-thirds of the world’s population, will be using social media by 2020.

With such growth comes increasing risk. Communication and media researcher Pekka Aula writes in his article, “Social media, reputation risk and ambient publicity management” that “reputation risk, the possibility or danger of losing one’s reputation, presents a threat to organizations in many ways (including) competitiveness, local positioning, the trust and loyalty of stakeholders, media relations, the legitimacy of operations, and even the license to exist.”

According to research carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, leading European managers consider reputation risk to be the primary threat to business operations and the market value of their organizations. The growth in social media use magnifies the possibilities of these risks, expanding the spectrum of reputation risks and boosting risk dynamics. It is useful for new and experienced social media users to understand the risks of the technology and how to mitigate them.

Twitter is one social platform where brands can experience swift fallout from losing control of their message. To avoid and mitigate risk in social media, marketers must be cognizant of best practices, how to anticipate and prepare for activations in social media, how to leverage supportive voices during times of crisis and how to limit brand crises.

Background on the Activation

Research and communication firm Westat partnered with The Motherhood, a blogger network and social media marketing agency, to produce an hour-long Twitter chat on behalf of a well-known national organization working to educate the public about the importance of vaccines. The chat was intended to share reputable information and resources about vaccines and engage parents and caregivers on the topic of vaccination for their families.

Westat suspected that this topic would be particularly divisive because data suggest that the online anti-vaccination conversation is strong. For instance, Jennifer Keelan, Vera Pavri-Garcia, George Tomlinson and Kumanan Wilson analyzed videos on YouTube about immunization and published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association (J���������). They found that 32% of the sampled videos opposed vaccination and that these videos had higher ratings and more views than pro-vaccine videos.

Another YouTube analysis carried out by Keelan, Pavri-Garcia, Wilson and Ravin Balakrishnan found that 25.3% of YouTube videos about HPV immunization portrayed vaccination negatively. The researchers also analyzed MySpace blogs on HPV immunization and found that 43% were negative.

Another study published in Healthcare Quarterly by Neil Seeman, Alton Ing and Carlos Rizo analyzed the sentiment on vaccines during an influenza outbreak by studying top search results for information on vaccines during the study period. They found that 60% of the results contained anti-vaccination sentiments.

Given this context, the Westat team wanted to be prepared for anything that could go wrong during the activation. As such, it prepared for a variety of outcomes. This preparation led to great success, despite participation by anti-vaccine advocates.

Results

The Twitter chat generated a great deal of attention around the importance of vaccines. Tracking the conversation using a dedicated hashtag and comparing the level of conversation using the hashtag before and during the chat, Westat saw a 1,176% increase in the number of people participating in the conversation during the hour. The number of tweets increased nearly 4,300%, and the impressions increased nearly 1,500%.

Although anti-vaccination participants did appear during the chat, of the 1,772 tweets published during the hour, only 262 shared anti-vaccination sentiments. Their message was diluted by the 1,510 tweets that came from pro-vaccine advocates — nearly six times the number of anti-vaccination tweets.

The top 10 highest-reaching anti-vaccine participants had a total of 44,307 followers (an average of around 4,400 followers per person). In contrast, the top 10 pro-vaccine advocates had a combined following of 175,678 (or an average of around 17,500 followers per person), demonstrating that the caliber and influence of the pro-vaccine contributors was greater than those in the anti-vaccination camp.

In fact, 17.2% of tweets during the chat shared negative sentiments about vaccination, but those tweets generated fewer than 3% of the overall impressions. This demonstrates that while the anti-vaccine sentiment may have felt overwhelming to the team, when Westat reviewed the data, the anti-vaccine content represented only a small slice of the conversation.

Anticipate and Prepare

Westat anticipated that a chat devoted to the topic of vaccines could attract anti-vaccination trolls, or those who would join only to tweet inflammatory, misguided or off-topic messages. Therefore, Westat and The Motherhood took steps to prepare, counter the misinformation shared by such participants and defuse what could be an emotionally charged situation.

One of those steps was to create a detailed script in advance of the chat to act as the framework for the real-time online conversation. The script included links and citations to reputable, impartial and nonpartisan sources to support the points made on behalf of the health care brand. Ultimately, this kept the conversation on-topic as new participants joined the chat and pulled it in different directions.

The planning paid off. Post-chat analysis of the activation data revealed that despite chat impressions being slightly above average and the number of tweets being on par with other Twitter chats executed by The Motherhood during the same time frame, the number of participants was 4.5 times higher than average, indicating how many people were engaged — for better or for worse.

Bring in Supportive Expert Voices to Create a Safe Space

Ahead of the chat, Westat notified vaccination experts and scientists about the event, and The Motherhood identified and engaged supportive parenting influencers to join the conversation and share positive messages of vaccines.

Having a team that included scientists and curated parenting influencers who supported the message and were educated ahead of time helped keep pro-vaccination tweets at the forefront of the conversation and ensured that those tweets got the most visibility.

Stay Out of the Fray

During the Twitter chat, the sponsoring organization was mentioned by participants more than 553 times, 70 of which were made by anti-vaccination advocates. The sponsor only responded to one anti-vaccine mention. The account to whom the sponsor responded, in contrast, was mentioned just 95 times throughout the chat, comprising only 3% of total tweets and 1% of impressions during the chat. The sponsor organization’s decision not to engage with the majority of the anti-vaccine content limited the visibility of that messaging, ultimately achieving the aim of the chat: to communicate the benefits of family vaccination.

The message here to brands, initiatives or campaigns conducting an activation in social media on a topic that may be controversial is that you should not get involved in emotional arguments you can’t win. In short, do not “feed the trolls.” This only provides antagonists with a larger platform to amplify their message. By not engaging, you can minimize the visibility your vehicle gives to these counter messages. An alternative strategy to manage this content is to ask individual experts to engage or intervene on your behalf.

These results demonstrate that preparing and deploying a risk communication strategy in support of a potentially controversial situation or conversation can result in a successful activation. Brands, organizations and individuals that carefully consider their message before sharing can successfully enter the online space, even if some risk is involved.

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The power of story is applied to strategic messaging to inform, energize, persuade and inspire. The use of signature stories is particularly relevant to B-to-B firms because their customers are often buying a relationship with an organization and their employees. Communicating organizational values and a brand vision with authenticity is critical.

However, the nature of signature stories and the process of developing and using them is different for B-to-B firms than B-to-C firms, which raises the question: What are the challenges of using signature stories that are unique to B-to-B firms, and how can they be addressed?

In B-to-B contexts customer success stories are often the best vehicles for signature stories. Given that reality, there are three challenges facing B-to-B firms:

• Finding effective B-to-B signature stories that are intriguing, authentic and relevant.
• Having so many stories that their management is overwhelming.
• Creating an organizational structure and process to find and use signature stories.

Finding Effective B-to-B Signature Stories

Effective B-to-B signature stories that can break through to disinterested, skeptical audiences need to be intriguing. In a B-to-C context it is easier to find stories with emotion, tension and connection with relatable characters. In contrast, B-to-B customer success stories tend to show functional benefits and processes. To avoid bland, shallow customer stories, look for ways to dramatize the problem, solution or outcome.

The problem context might be so dire that it intrigues. Lou Gerstner’s turnaround story in the early 1990s started with a failing IBM paralyzed by silos focused on their own interests. Customers were annoyed at the resulting confusion, inefficiency and absence of system capability. The firm was in serious financial trouble with a proposal on the table to split IBM into seven firms. 

A solution that is dramatically creative grabs your attention. Marc Benioff started Salesforce in 1999 with the idea of using cloud technology to change software usage and make social programs a part of his business. The story involves a retreat to India, experience with an Oracle program to aid education and some research around what other firms were doing. The solution was the 1-1-1 program, whereby the firm would devote 1% of equity, 1% of people and 1% of product to addressing social problems. The solution was so unique and compelling that more than 70 other firms decided to adopt it.

An eye-opening, impressive outcome can intrigue. One of Prophet’s signature customer stories was about T-Mobile. The “Uncarrier” program took the business from a loss of 4.5 million subscribers to a gain of 22.5 million subscribers in 18 months when it scrapped contracts and roaming fees. The amazing turnaround transformed the industry.

The story should not seem exaggerated or contrived. Nor should it feel like a veiled sales pitch, providing no information that would help or interest the audience. Authenticity and intrigue are greater challenges when the brand resists dramatization or the telling of the complete story. A company might be embarrassed about the problem or feel there are trade secrets at risk. The result can be a shallow story with no punch.

People’s ears perk up when they hear a story that is relevant to their problem, their industry or their type of firm. Having many stories will increase the chances that one or several are relevant.

Dealing with Story Overload

Introducing new signature stories can provide freshness, energy and visibility to a brand. Multiple stories can also give the brand message depth, breadth and texture. Organizational values, for example, are likely to need many stories to capture all the dimensions and facets. But there is a tipping point after which there are too many signature stories for employees to manage or for customers to grasp.

Some ways to manage story overload include:

• Screen: Some stories won’t break through the clutter. Screen out stories that are not intriguing, authentic or relevant. If they do qualify but their impact declines over time, they should be candidates for removal.
• Prioritize: High-priority, lead stories intrigue and are dramatic examples of an important strategic message. Give them more resources and visibility.
• Draft a Composite Story: Sometimes a story that incorporates some of the experiences of several customer case stories can work.
• Link: A lead or meta-story may be elaborated by signature stories that involve different applications or perspectives. Link them to add freshness and relevance.
• Bank: Create a story bank and code stories so they can be easily found.

Creating Organizational Support

Success with signature stories is more likely in an organization that can supply employees with motivation and a story support unit.

Employees should realize that stories are valued and necessary to adequately communicate organizational values and other strategic messaging. Role models that demonstrate story power can help. Visibility of the task can be stimulated by contests. Before its merger with Exxon, Mobil had a contest to find the best stories around three values: leadership, partnership and trust. The winners got to be on the infield in the Indy 500. There were more than 300 entrants and a host of great signature stories.

Appoint an organizational team or person to support the stories. This person can also take on a reporter’s role, seeking out signature stories, refining stories, executing presentation options and finding outlets such as podcasts, trade press and as internal communication opportunities.

B-to-B firms have their own characteristics to create and implement an organization in which signature stories can thrive.

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Twitter is a minefield of insults, gallows humor and political arguments, but it’s also a gold mine for marketers looking to connect with some of the world’s brightest minds. As easy as it may seem for marketers to say the wrong thing and offend thousands of people simultaneously, it’s as easy—if not easier—to say the right thing and gain access to the best of Twitter’s 330 million monthly active users.

Marketing News spoke with three social media professionals who weighed in on what career marketers should do and what they should avoid on the quick-fire social media platform. 

3 Things to Avoid

Posting Without Thinking

Think before you hit send, says , owner of social media and digital marketing agency Kruse Control. Many people—even those who list their job in their Twitter bio—simply don’t think before, during or after they tweet. Many users post gross images, inappropriate videos and offensive thoughts on Twitter, she says, all of which can be gravely damaging to a marketing career.

“I’m not saying people shouldn’t have their personal opinions about things politically or otherwise, but what you say and do online speaks for you,” she says. “A lot of people don’t realize that because it’s just the click of a button. But the reality is, you can see [the Twitter post] for the rest of your life.”

Twitter posts can bubble up at the worst possible moment—many are archived by the Library of Congress—and take a marketer from candidate for a new job to the rejection pile. “Tread lightly,” Kruse says.

Only Talking ���������t Yourself​

Twitter is like a cocktail party—most people hate listening to people who only talk about themselves. 

, a social media strategist and CEO of Tatu Digital Media, says using Twitter solely for self-aggrandizement is one of the biggest mistakes professionals can make. Instead, marketers should join other conversations and share other people’s posts, especially those who are valuable for their marketing network. 

“Respecting the intelligence of other people and sharing their information aligns marketers with the people they respect,” Fouts says. “When they do that, they can really raise their status by associating with people who are super smart.”

Speaking as an Authority If You Aren’t an Authority

Don’t be a know-it-all, says , social media coach and co-founder of Rocks Digital. If a marketing professional, perhaps feeling intimidated by the experience of other marketers, speaks like an authority on Twitter when he’s more of a dilettante, other marketers will see through his pretentiousness, Duty says. Wanting to be an influencer is a great goal, but influence can’t be forced, she says. Be open to learning new information before bestowing it. 

3 Things to DO

Focus on Your Passion

It may be cliché, but marketing professionals should post about their passions to establish themselves as  thought leaders in areas they truly care about, Kruse says.

“Let that guide you for how you want to be seen, and establish yourself as an expert or a thought leader,” she says. “Volunteer to write content around it, certainly, but also volunteer to speak at [events] or contribute to blogs of companies that you admire.”

A lot of smart companies will try to poach these Twitter thought leaders, Kruse says, because their presence makes the company look like a marketing thought leader, too. 

Strive to Learn

Amid the insults, arguments and cat posts are a lot of posts by brilliant people. The smartest marketing professionals on Twitter learn from them, Fouts says.

Marketing professionals should think of Twitter as a place of professional development, a place they can learn from leaders in their field. Marketing professionals can also help others learn by reading and sharing these insights, which will likely help their own brand.

Reach Out Within Your Range

Marketers should focus on connecting with influencers who are within reach, Duty says. For example, Twitter users with 500,000 followers may not respond, as their notifications are likely crowded. However, someone with 50,000 followers may respond, which can have immense value.

“[They can be] someone to look up to, ask questions of and follow,” Duty says. “Someday, they can develop the relationship, and they too will be an influencer. That’s how [marketers can] grow their reach on Twitter.”

Duty used this method to increase her Twitter following. Her @LissaDuty account has 30,700 followers, but those followers didn’t appear overnight. Duty identified three influencers who had a big reach on Twitter and developed a rapport with them on the platform. When their influencer status grew, Duty’s did, too. 

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“Don’t just clean; deep clean and invigorate your skin,” actress Hayden Panettiere exclaims in a 2007 Neutrogena ad, a light blue cream with tiny dark-blue dots splattering across the screen as she splashes water over her face. These dots are “icy blue microbeads,” , solid plastic particles that were used in soap, toothpaste and facial scrubs starting in the late 1990s. Nearly every large distributor of cosmetic goods—including L’Oreal, Unilever, Procter & Gamble and Neutrogena parent company Johnson & Johnson—laced consumer products with microbeads.

As consumers slathered their faces and teeth with microbead-filled creams and pastes, experts estimated 8 trillion of the microbeads—ranging in size from 10 micrometers to 1 millimeter in diameter—separated from the goop and traveled down the drain with the water each day, according to a 2015 opinion published in Environmental Science and Technology. Eight trillion microbeads is a “conservative” estimate, researchers from Oregon State University and University of California, Davis wrote, .

Circling down the drain of a consumer’s home, these trillions of microbeads are sucked into sewer systems before flowing into wastewater treatment plants. Wastewater plants are efficient at filtering out most debris, but , along the surface of the water, above the sludge and detritus and into nearby bodies of water—bays, rivers, oceans and, according to what Dr. Sherri Mason found in 2012, the Great Lakes. 

Mason, a professor of chemistry at the State University of New York at Fredonia, was the first scientist to research how many microbeads had floated into the Great Lakes. In 2012 and 2013, she sailed the Great Lakes—Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and Lake Michigan—r. Mason captured samples to measure plastic in the lakes. Plastic content ranged from 7,000 to 230,000 particles per sqaure kilometer, increasing as the chain of lakes extends to the Atlantic Ocean. Millions of tiny beads and other pieces of plastic successfully floated from the bottle to the drain to the Great Lakes. According to her research, 75% of the plastic found was smaller than 1 millimeter in diameter—“like a period at the end of a sentence,” Mason said during a 2016 TED Talk. 

“We are the problem,” she says. “But that also means that we are the solution.”

​​In 2013, as Mason’s microbead research became public, the , a Chicago-based nonprofit with the mission of protecting the Great Lakes, hired Jennifer Caddick. Caddick, whose career has been dedicated to water advocacy nonprofits, was hired by the Alliance to establish a marketing and communications team to break down internal silos and improve communication to supporters. Caddick wanted to use human stories to inform and appeal to Alliance supporters, but she also wanted each message to be a springboard for action, whether it be donating, volunteering or sharing news on social networks. The Alliance’s key issues would stay the same—Lake Erie’s toxic algae bloom, clean drinking water and invasive species, such as Asian carp—but Caddick wanted to focus the Alliance’s marketing to efficiently galvanize its base. She revamped the Alliance’s website, adopted new communications tools and ensured campaigns were measurable. 

The Alliance seemed a perfect fit for Caddick, a lifelong lover of the Great Lakes. Caddick grew up in upstate New York, near the Saint Lawrence River, an inlet that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. One of Caddick’s fondest childhood memories is walking with her grandfather atop peat and plants to the edge of the river. She was 10 years old and the day was foggy. She fidgeted, trying to locate the foghorns blowing in the distance. As the fog peeled away, she watched the water with wonder, peppering her grandfather with candid curiosities. What does a foghorn mean? Where are the ships going? The thinning fog uncovered rippling water and roaming ships as he patiently explained the world revealing itself in front of them.  

“I started to get a sense of the vastness of the river,” Caddick says. “He helped me understand our place in a bigger system.”

Decades later, in 2013, Caddick had just started her job at the Alliance when her sense of place turned into a sense of disbelief. She saw Mason’s microbead research and wondered:  Why are so many companies using plastic microbeads? Other companies, such as Burt’s Bees and Palmer’s, use apricot and cocoa shells as natural alternatives for exfoliation products—items that biodegrade quickly, unlike plastic, which may take 1,000 years. Caddick and the Alliance went on the offensive, using marketing, traditional media outlets and social media to lobby for a nationwide ban of microbeads in consumer products. “This is a commonsense problem that we can prevent,” Caddick says.

As the Alliance’s policy team lobbied Illinois and other state governments for a consumer microbead ban, Caddick communicated directly with the Alliance’s supporters. Each message conveyed the seriousness of the situation and listed steps they could take toward a microbead ban. “The first step [is] to keep an eye out for products that you’re purchasing,” Caddick says. “The second [is] encouraging our supporters to write their elected officials. We organized letter-writing campaigns, action alerts and saw a huge outcry from our supporters.”​​

Social media became an explosive medium for the Alliance, particularly Facebook. The nonprofit’s most successful post—shared 855 times—was an infographic showing how microbeads are sucked into the Great Lakes and eaten by wildlife. Caddick and her team realized the great potential of social media to hold the rapt interest of supporters. Microbeads have what Caddick calls an “ick factor;” for example, . 

Microbeads were already a visceral issue for supporters, but Caddick and her team wanted to show what the beads looked like outside globs of gel and cream. “We did an experiment in the office,” Caddick says with a smile. Her team ran a microbead-laden facial scrub through a coffee filter in the Alliance’s kitchen. After the beads dried, Caddick dipped her finger into the beads—some blue, some clear, some white, all varying sizes—and took a picture. Newspapers and users across social media picked up the photo, Caddick says. Mason’s research became well-known in public conversation as large news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, wrote about microbeads in the Great Lakes. In 2014, the campaign’s virality paid off: Companies began setting timetables to end the sales and production of consumer products with microbeads. Then, the state of Illinois became the first in a wave of state governments to ban microbead-laden cosmetic products. “Lake Michigan and the many rivers and lakes across our state are among our most important natural resources,” then-Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn said in a statement. “We must do everything necessary to safeguard them.” In 2015 New York, Ohio and California had their own microbead-banning legislation. 

Caddick and the Alliance celebrated each victory with a message to supporters, compounding the earned media campaign with its own awareness and letter-writing campaigns to keep supporters active. , linking to a form letter that supporters could send to their legislators in support of a microbead ban.

Anxious Great Lakes supporters didn’t have to wait long for a nationwide microbead ban. , was signed into federal law in December of that year. The bill banned the manufacture of consumer products containing microbeads in July 2017 and will ban sales of those products in July 2018.  

Caddick scored her , taking advantage of what she called “a perfect storm.” The virality, research and marketing came together to galvanize the anger of Great Lakes supporters into political action rather than stopping its momentum at the “like” button. 

“We can’t do everything, but when we discover an issue that we are concerned about, we want to educate our supporters,” Caddick says. “We always want to give people an action.”

Now that it has scored a big victory against microbeads, the Alliance’s next action must be equally evocative.

Sometimes, Caddick says, it’s hard to keep supporters aware of and fighting for issues that will take decades to solve. Most Great Lakes issues, like plastic pollution, are difficult to see, hidden by 6 quadrillion gallons of water. 

In a Loyola University lab in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, works to uncover the hidden plastic. In Hoellein’s lab, foil-covered jars, glasses and petri dishes line the shelves, most filled with water and sediment from across the U.S., many stacked perilously above computers and microscopes. Other jars contain fish set to be dissected, pulverized and examined for plastic in their guts. Hoellein picks up a beaker of water and turns it in his hands, sediment slushing across the bottom; there are likely plastic fibers—even smaller than microbeads—in the sediment, he says. These fibers compose most of the plastic that Hoellein and his students find in bodies of water. Rachel McNeish, a post-doctoral research fellow in the biology department at Loyola, leans over a microscope, looking at fibers they’ve found in samples of fish and water. She can tell the first sample isn’t plastic because it’s frayed; it looks like a hair with a split end. “See how the end comes apart?” says McNeish, smiling as she motions for others to look in the microscope. The next two samples she examines look to be synthetic, she says; one curves like an S, the other like a C, neither are frayed. Both look like a loose piece of plastic curling under the heat of a flame.

Plastic fiber comes from garments made with artificial material—such as polyester or acrylic. The fibers come off in the wash, on the ground or even in the air, floating away and landing in the water before being gulped down by wildlife. Hoellein says they’ve found plastic pieces, mostly fibers, in approximately 96% of fish studied in his Loyola lab. When asked if these fibers end up in the fish humans eat, Hoellein says he isn’t sure, as no U.S. studies have been conducted yet. However, he says European researchers have found plastic pieces of varying sizes inside of fish at seafood markets. 

Although banning plastic microbeads in consumer goods was an easy decision for most—especially for Great Lakes supporters who knew there were biodegradable alternatives—Hoellein says that plastic is ubiquitous and the pollution it creates is not easily solvable by a ban. Plastic is in our cars, our clothes, our smartphones and even the construction of our buildings. In 1950, the world produced almost no plastic, per PlasticsEurope; by 2014, there were nearly 300 million tons of plastic produced each year—most pieces completely disposable and entirely unable to biodegrade. 

“We’re all participants in the pipeline of plastic products in ways that affect everything that we do,” Hoellein says. “It’s more about trying to understand our relationship with the material and where it enters our bodies, our behavior and asking what the responsible use of it is.” 

Back in the Alliance’s office, Caddick sits in a room overlooking Chicago’s Millennium Park, just west of Lake Michigan. It’s bitter cold—5 degrees—and Lake Michigan, sitting just beyond the park, has crystalized. Somewhere under the ice, plastic pollution churns and bubbles with the fish and water. Plastic pollution is a big issue, bigger than the 95,160 square miles of the Great Lakes, and supporters always want to know how they can help. However, the Alliance’s supporters are human and have finite attention spans. Caddick knows that bombarding them with unfocused e-mails and social media posts is more likely to overwhelm than galvanize. Microbeads were an emotional issue and had a spark with supporters, but other issues, such as the unseen plastic fibers that come off our clothes, are more esoteric.

That’s the frustrating part about understanding and protecting the Great Lakes system as part of a small nonprofit, Caddick says. The staff of 25 at the Alliance for the Great Lakes can’t protect everything, nor can it spur its 13,000 Facebook fans, its list of e-mail newsletter recipients or its 150 ambassadors into action on each issue. There isn’t enough attention, let alone people. Therein lies the importance of a focused, well-planned marketing campaign. If a campaign isn’t grounded in research and doesn’t spark the interest of supporters, Caddick doesn’t believe it will be effective. 

When asked what issue the Alliance will attack next, drinking water is Caddick’s immediate answer, but plastic is still an issue. Then there’s the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie, which can now be seen from outer space, and Asian carp, an invasive species of fish swimming ever-closer to the Great Lakes. As Caddick and the Alliance staff members debate the next big push, the crux of the Alliance’s marketing—fundraising, volunteering, storytelling and disseminated information—continues, undaunted. 

from across the country to remove litter from beaches, a program with data Hoellein has studied. Nearly 87% of the litter found by volunteers is plastic—namely cups, straws and food wrappers.

Caddick doesn’t have the next big push ready and doesn’t believe the process can be rushed. To attack drinking water, the Alliance needs help from researchers and scientists like Mason and Hoellein, members of affected communities and Alliance supporters across the U.S. The Alliance needs the spark that made the microbead campaign successful, but it also needs support, planning and expertise from outside its walls.  

“The marketing comes second,” Caddick says. “Everything is grounded in our strategic goals and the needs for the lakes and the people who rely on the lakes. Then we ask how we can use our communication tools to help our policy, planning, volunteer and education staff meet their goals. These stories have to work to further those campaigns.”

Just as Caddick thinks of her time with her grandfather by the Saint Lawrence River, the best stories make people think of their own fond memories by the water and wonder: Am I leaving a better world for my kids? “These issues impact real lives every day,” Caddick says. “It’s essential to find those stories, tell them and use social media to get those stories out there.”

​

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Caroline Webb loves her work. Case in point: she was called “the happiest person at McKinsey” by a co-worker when she worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Despite her job satisfaction, the long hours and late nights took a toll on Webb.

Three years into her job as a consultant, Webb got sick. An infection of her central nervous system put her out of work for six months. She fought back to health over the next eight months, gradually increasing her workload until she was well enough to work full-time. However, she found herself at a career crossroads: Long hours didn’t always mean better work, she thought, and they certainly didn’t mean good health or a sustainable personal life. “I had to acknowledge that I did not have infinite stamina,” Webb says. “I became very interested in how to do more with less. That was one of the turning points in my career.”

Trained as an economist, Webb became interested in how she could work smarter—“do more with less,” as she puts it. She pored over hundreds of psychology and behavioral economics books and studies and applied the techniques to her life. Webb compiled her research into a book, How to Have a Good Day, and founded Sevenshift, an advisory firm that helps people use science to excel at work.

found that 51% of American employees aren’t engaged at work while another 16% are “actively disengaged,” showing their discontent in their words or actions. Employees are also working longer hours, despite the long-promised shortened work week—including a famous 1930 prediction from economist John Maynard Keynes, who said . However, it’s 2018, and the work week remains long: The average American works anywhere between (per data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and . Gallup reports that 18% of people work longer than 60 hours each week.

Webb and others offer insights on how marketers can improve productivity, do more with less and have a better day.  

The Myth of Multitasking

Many people spend their days clicking from browser tab to browser tab while answering texts, having a conversation and thinking about what’s for dinner—periodically wondering where time went. This is multitasking and it doesn’t work for most. .

Though many people brag about their multitasking skills in job interviews, most multitaskers create more work for themselves—or someone else. A study from the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University finds that people who do two tasks at the same time take 30% longer and make twice as many mistakes as those who do the same tasks in sequence—which Webb calls “single-tasking.” 

Multitaskers, Webb says, make between two and four times as many mistakes as single-taskers.

“The conscious part of your brain can only do one thing at a time,” Webb says. To avoid multitasking, she suggests batching similar tasks to avoid constant switching, designating “zones” throughout the day to tackle batches of tasks and setting rewards for good behavior such as setting a timer, taking a break or simply crossing completed tasks off a list. 

​​Give Me a Break, Please

Knowing when to step away for a break is an art, Webb says, and most American workers are barely painting by numbers. A survey by Right Management finds that fewer than . 

This paucity of breaks may lead to what Webb calls “decision fatigue,” putting the mind on autopilot. On autopilot, the mind sees the easiest choices as the most attractive, and it is sapped of insight, self-control, concentration and effective thinking. 

To fight autopilot and decision fatigue, Webb suggests planning deliberate downtime throughout the day. This may mean scheduling breaks between batches of tasks (approximately every 90 minutes), grouping intensive tasks to do together when the brain will have the most energy and scheduling meetings at intervals of 25 or 45 minutes instead of 30 or 60, creating natural breaks throughout the day. 

And yes, fighting decision fatigue means stepping away from the desk for lunch.

Block Out Online Distractions

Attention was at a premium for Warren Benedetto in 2010. He’d wake up early to work as a freelance web designer and web developer, but he would instead find himself wading into the internet’s ocean of information. Benedetto says he’d lose track of eight hours, then work until 4 a.m. “It was an endless cycle,” he says.

Benedetto—now the director of software engineering for PlayStation Now—created a simple code for Google Chrome to solve his problem. The code set timers on a self-curated list of websites, blocking them until the next day when time expired. He decided to share the idea, titling the extension “StayFocusd” and uploading it to the Chrome web store. Within 24 hours, his creation had 15,000 users. Eight years later, it has more than 700,000 users, all setting their timers to avoid wasting time on websites like Reddit, YouTube and, for more than 80% of users, Facebook. 

People may shudder at the thought of limiting time on their favorite—and most distracting—websites at work, but studies show that employees waste a lot of time online, killing their productivity. A 2016 CareerBuilder study, for instance, found that with the biggest focus killers being cellphones and texting (55%), the internet (41%), gossip (39%) and social media (37%).

Webb vouches for StayFocusd’s efficacy, saying it helped her focus when writing How to Have a Good Day. “I didn’t make it so that I couldn’t look at Facebook at all, but I set it for 10 minutes a day,” Webb says. “It really was a treat if I clicked.”

Use the ‘Positive No’ to Avoid Pointless Meetings

The average employee . Their meetings are spent daydreaming (91%), feeling overwhelmed (45%) or doing other work (73%)—which is sloppy and unproductive, as studies have shown. 

Though not every unproductive meeting is skippable, Webb says employees should dare to say no to meetings if they need time to work on more important tasks. Employees can use the “positive no,” Webb says, a counterintuitive technique that leads with a yes instead of no or “Sorry, but …”

Here’s how the “positive no” works: First, Webb says you should show appreciation to the person requesting your time, enthusiastically letting them know what your current priority is (leading with what you’re saying yes to). Then, explain that your current priority means that you can’t give up your time to the invitation. End the interaction with warmth, making a helpful offer or suggestion that you can do without distracting from your priorities. 

“If you lead with the yes, then it puts the other person slightly less on the defensive by leaving with something positive, especially if you can make it speak to them and the things that they care about,” Webb says. 

​​Some Peace and Quiet

As more companies choose open office layouts, more employees lose privacy at work. The open office can be a productivity killer—especially for introverted employees, as Susan Cain points out in her book Quiet. A Steelcase study of 10,000 office workers finds that workers in open offices report . Another study from Exeter University finds open offices cause a 32% decrease in worker well-being and a 15% drop in production.

But with the money open offices save for budget-conscious corporations, these layouts are likely here to stay.  

To find peace and privacy, Webb says employees in open offices will have to be clever. Webb suggests a technique she used in the past: putting on headphones and posting a visible note that says, “thinking time.” People can interrupt if they really need to, but the headphones and note are clear signals that an employee is busy. If that doesn’t provide enough space for concentration, she suggests searching for an open meeting room.  

“I used to be quite proactive in asking myself how I was going to find the mental space to get done what I want to get done,” Webb says. “Once you know your brain needs rest as much as it needs activity, then it seems obvious,” Webb says. “The trick is to know how to get people who haven’t had a health crash to reach the same insight.”

Less-than-mindful work environments are why Webb wrote How to Have a Good Day: Employees who work in difficult situations under challenging bosses can take control of their lives and seize opportunities for more meaningful work. 

“We can be at our best more often,” Webb says. “It’s much easier to do that if you’re on a team where these conversations [about productivity and balance] are happening, but I’m really keen to encourage people to look for what’s possible within the constraints that they’re operating under.”

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Pop-ups featuring promo codes have become ubiquitous to the online shopping experience. Most inboxes are clogged with similar offers: Use MYDAY15 for 15% off on your birthday! Use MEMORIAL10 at checkout for $10 off your order over Memorial Day weekend!

Promo codes are so prevalent that many online shoppers expect them and will search sites such as RetailMeNot or SlickDeals if they aren’t offered one by a retailer before purchase. Chris Johnson, client services director at Vouchercloud, says the discounting trend accelerated during the recession. Now consumers know they can shop around to get the best deal.

“Promo codes are a valuable part of most retailers’ marketing mix and, if used with the right strategy, can deliver results that either exceed expectations or play a significant role in budget management,” Johnson says.

, 65% of consumers say online voucher codes often sway their purchase decisions if they are undecided. They can also be a successful retention tactic, as 91% of coupon redeemers say they will purchase from a retailer again if they are offered a coupon.

To meet customer expections, marketers should learn how to use coupon codes, when to offer them and how to track them.

When to Use Promo Codes

There are three key reasons  CMO Erika Brookes says marketers use promo codes: to hit sales targets, to acquire new customers without losing money and to move surplus inventory.

Brookes suggests sellers can use promo codes as part of their cart abandonment strategy by sending coupon codes to customers who leave items in their virtual shopping carts to entice them to complete their purchase. Promo codes may be used to reward loyal customers or encourage first-time customers to make a purchase. The latter typically involves a trade-off wherein the customer gets a code in exchange for their e-mail address.

Sheena Brady, Shopify’s merchant success manager and CEO of , says her tea brand has an ambassador program, which includes a call on its tea packages for customers to post a photo of themselves on social media enjoying the product. In response, the company sends the customer a promo code for future purchases.

The in-kind exchange is simple and worth the cost, Brady says. “People respond well to natural, organic social media posts like that.”

Tease Tea also has a loyalty program through which members earn points that can be redeemed with promo codes. One of Brady’s favorite strategies for offering codes is through Wheelio, a Shopify app that tracks a gamified pop-up on vendor websites. Visitors who submit their e-mail address can “spin” a wheel for a prize. “We’ve only had it for two months and it’s been ‘spun’ about 2,400 times,” Brady says. The pop-up has a 2% rejection rate and a conversion rate around 21%. “Basically, 21% of people who have answered their e-mail have converted to a sale using the promo code that’s generated [from Wheelio],” Brady says.

Tracking and Measuring

Promotional codes are a great opportunity for measurement and tracking. They allow companies to attribute a sale not just to a specific campaign, but down to the medium on which the code was offered and the unique ad copy. For example, Brady says Tease may use the codes FB15 on Facebook and IG15 on Instagram and track which one customers use to match them to a preferred social platform.

Companies like Shopify, WordPress and Squarespace have apps and plug-ins that can help with the creation and tracking of promo codes. Even beyond tracking which platform or campaign worked best, companies can use promo codes to see which type of discount or benefit is the biggest driver: a percentage off, dollar discount or free shipping.

Promo codes have the added benefit of easy sharing. Vouchercloud’s figures find 40% of consumers share e-mail offers with friends, and 28% share deals via social media platforms. Tracking specific promo codes used by social media influencers can also evidence whether much-lauded influencer marketing actually works for brands.

To track these codes, it’s helpful to understand the difference between public, private and restricted codes, and when to use each.

“Anyone can see a public promo code, which is good for enticing new customers but could get costly if too many people redeem it,” Brookes says. “Private codes are great for treating a specific group, usually as a reward for your most loyal customers or an enticement for first-time buyers. Restricted codes are targeted to a single buyer and can only be used once. They’re often used as an apology for something like a delayed delivery or as a thank you for making their 50th purchase. We recommend stores use all three types of codes and follow a strategy for when they use them.”

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John Pfeiffer and Andrea Ziel are describing the still-fresh merger of their respective nonprofits. Ziel, director of Skills for Good, starts to explain her organization’s name change. She pauses for a moment, apologizing for being a bit tired.

“I have chocolate!” Pfeiffer exclaims, fishing through his desk drawer. “I have the chocolate you gave me for Christmas.”

He proffers a few bars for Ziel to choose from, along with a couple of napkins. The generous give and take between the two is symbolic. On Jan. 1, Ziel’s organization, previously known as , merged with , where Pfeiffer serves as chief operating offIcer. From their telling and their effortless interaction—passing questions back and forth or reinforcing the other’s point—the tie-up has been fairly seamless. Their professional and interpersonal ease comes from months of careful planning.

The branding challenges that arise in mergers—often emotionally charged—can cripple their success.  found the naming of a merged organization or its branding were cited as difficult issues in 44% of the cases studied. Excluding federal cases, 50% of the mergers involved difficult naming or rebranding issues. A study published in Stanford Social Innovation Review,  examined nonprofit merger activity between 2007 and 2012 in Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts and North Carolina. The report identified three emotionally charged issues that are frequent stumbling blocks, one of which was “blending the brands.”

Name changes and other image-related tweaks can have a resounding effect for nonprofits.  nonprofit brands can be leveraged for fundraising; driving long-term social goals; and strengthening internal identity, cohesion and capacity. For a nonprofit merger to succeed, stakeholders are often challenged with emotionally detaching the brand from its mission.

The Argument for Merging

The Chicago research report analyzed 25 nonprofit mergers that occurred in and near Chicago between 2004 and 2014. Perhaps the most compelling finding was that 88% of the nonprofits reported that after the merger their organization was better off in terms of goals achieved and increased collective impact. Despite this positive finding, report author Donald Haider wrote that mergers can seem alien to those in the nonprofit field.

“In some ways, it’s little wonder that mergers have so few champions within the nonprofit community,” , an emeritus professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “They are often associated with leadership failure, financial distress and good intentions run amok.”

Instead, the Chicago report found nonprofit mergers can be used as a strategic tool to advance mission goals, improve services and expand impact. The merger of three suburban chapters of Big Brothers Big Sisters with the Metro Chicago organization “turned a largely insolvent operation serving 100 or so at-risk children in 2005, into a $4 million sustainable enterprise promoting high-quality services for 1,800 at-risk children in 2015,” Haider wrote.

In another example from the report, the Eleanor Foundation merged with the Chicago Foundation for Women in 2012 under their mutual mission to help female-headed households. After four years, the combined CFW organization doubled its asset size, increased its donor base and grew its projects.

Katie Smith Milway, a partner in nonprofit management consultancy the Bridgespan Group’s Boston office and co-author of “Why Nonprofit Mergers Continue to Lag,” says merger opportunities can identify themselves as inorganic growth options.

“Boards constantly talk about organic growth: How are they going to find the next funder? How are they going to get the current funders to give more?” Milway says. “Too rarely do they talk about inorganic growth, where you actually acquire growth. That conversation alone is a strengthening one to focus on what you should build, what you should borrow, what you should buy.”

She says nonprofits should consider a strategic partnership or merger when, for example, there’s a leadership transition or the organization wants to innovate. There may be another nonprofit already doing the work.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 may convince nonprofits to consider mergers. With an increase in the standard deduction, fewer people are expected to itemize their taxes, meaning fewer taxpayers will be able to claim the charitable tax deduction. With fewer people able to benefit from the deduction, experts are anticipating a drop in charitable donations. According to, these changes would reduce charitable giving by $12.3 billion in 2018, a 6.5% decline.

State and federal budget constraints may also nudge some organizations to pool resources. The number of registered public charities in the U.S. grew 28.4% between 2005 and 2015, according to IRS data. Crain’s Chicago Business  that Illinois has “too many nonprofits,” citing a 2015 study by the Nonprofit Finance Fund that found 73% of Illinois nonprofits reported an increased demand for their services, but only 53% said they had the​ funding to meet demand.

Roll Up and Reset

Illinois started 2018 with one less nonprofit, due to the merger of WomenOnCall and Chicago Cares. Each sought a partner to fill gaps in outreach and programming. WomenOnCall had shifted its focus from a national level to home in on the Chicago community. At the same time, Chicago Cares was bringing on additional program staff and considering its investment strategy.

“Both of us were at inflection points at the same time, without even knowing it,” Ziel says.

The conversations began as an opportunity for strategic partnership before morphing into merger discussions. WomenOnCall is an online network that connects professionals with skills-based volunteer opportunities. Chicago Cares’ approximately 20,000 volunteers typically engage in activities like painting schools or helping to combat isolationism at senior care centers.

“This (merger) allows us to offer a richer array of opportunities,” Pfeiffer says of Chicago Cares, which is 75% corporate-funded. “It speaks to companies’ interest in doing more of that skills-based work. And frankly, we just want to offer as many options to people as we can. Some people gravitate toward lending their knowledge or expertise to a nonprofit. Other folks want more of a social experience. They want to engage with people and do some roll-up-the-sleeves work. We want to offer the full menu.”

The Chicago Cares and WomenOnCall coupling was technically an asset transfer, although they prefer to use the term merger in the spirit of collaboration. When a larger organization absorbs a smaller one, the branding strategy is usually clear. With Chicago Cares’ $3.3 million budget and WomenOnCall’s $450,000 budget, the latter is now considered a program and sub-brand of the former.

The branding and naming decisions are less clear in other acquisition scenarios. For comparison, hospice nonprofit JourneyCare merged with Horizon Hospice & Palliative Care and Midwest Palliative & Hospice CareCenter in 2014. In 2013, JourneyCare and Midwest had similar revenues ($34.8 million and $33.2 million, respectively) and market share (each with 6%) while Horizon was a good deal smaller ($12.9 million in revenue and 2% market share). Because two of the three organizations were of similar size, there wasn’t a clear case for keeping the largest group’s name.

More than 300 names were vetted, including hyphenated mixes, but these options resulted in confusion or failed to register as hospice-type names. Other names were eliminated because they were already trademarked. The new board finally opted to use the JourneyCare name because members said it conveyed “excellence and innovation in care, expertise and leadership, and a responsiveness that the organization delivers to patients and facilities every day.” Rather than choose a new name that would be unfamiliar with the public, they opted for a known, trusted identity.

Mergers can also be an opportunity to rebrand if the new joint mission represents a shift from the legacy missions, as was the case for WomenOnCall. As it merges with the Chicago Cares brand, WomenOnCall is being renamed Skills for Good.

“We decided early on that Skills for Good would accept individuals of all gender identities,” Ziel says. “WomenOnCall has always enjoyed creating a community of female volunteers, but we knew that moving forward we would need to change the name so it would be open to all.” As WomenOnCall became a program under Chicago Cares, the team wanted its updated mission to be reflected in the name. The name Skills for Good, Pfeiffer says, makes the program’s goals clear.

The Chicago Cares brand also evolved during the merger in 2017. Pfeiffer says that although Chicago Cares is a well-known brand, its name is a little vague. A new tagline adds clarification: “Do more good: Volunteer.”

News of the Skills for Good rebrand and merger with Chicago Cares spread to the community mostly through digital platforms and local press. The merger was official on Jan. 1 but was marked with a kick-off at the Feb. 7 Meet and Match event, a signature program run by WomenOnCall for the last 11 years. It was an opportunity for the two communities to meet in person and move forward with their combined mission.

Combining, Waiting, Then Rebranding

Legacy nonprofit brands have to tread carefully when they merge. Milway’s research explored . The former was founded in 1824 and served women and families, and the latter formed in 1877 as an advocacy organization, conducting programs and research on social and economic issues faced by low-income women and their kin. Crittenton and The Women’s Union had more than 300 years of history between them, and donors would certainly notice if those brand names disappeared overnight.

“When they merged, they had a lot of equity in both of their brands,” Milway says. As such, they rebranded as Crittenton Women’s Union in 2006. The new name identified their deep roots and histories but didn’t speak as much to the future. Before the organization could rebrand with an identity that better reflected their vision, Crittenton Women’s Union proceeded slowly and cautiously. It hired a new executive director to combine the two organizations. As time wore on, the board naturally rolled over and members previously loyal to either Crittenton or The Women’s Union moved on. ���������t one year ago, with fresh board members and about a decade of equity as a unified system, the organization changed its name to EMPath.

“They took the power of the research on the Crittenton side and the access to women and helping them with livelihoods on The Women’s Union side and pulled them together into an amazing resilience-focused effort moving women from economic dependence to independence,” Milway says. “They call it a path to economic mobility: EMPath.”

Separating Name and Mission

One of the greatest barriers to a successful nonprofit merger may be the emotional connections people have to the brands—especially those on the inside. The Chicago study found internal stakeholders care more about the naming than the external community. Chicago Cares’ Pfeiffer has punched the clock at other nonprofits and has seen this attachment firsthand.

“It’s human nature,” he says. “We’re all protective of our organizations, of our brands. We’re proud of them. It’s hard to truly be mission-first in orientation. It requires a little bit of detachment. You have to make decisions based on how you can advance the mission most effectively. That’s hard for people because it does mean they have to give up some personal attachment.”

Ziel credits WomenOnCall founder Margot Pritzker for imparting the need to sever emotional ties to the brand name.

“She continues to emphasize that if this is going to help us get to that end goal, we shouldn’t have pride of ownership,” Ziel says. “Our work is to continue to serve nonprofits and to help professionals find relevant volunteer opportunities. A colleague of ours said that ‘me’ is usually one of the biggest barriers in a merger.”

Milway found that nonprofit boards can confuse their stewardship of the mission with stewarding the organization, becoming married to the organization’s identity versus its impact. There’re also external attachment to brands, and nonprofits don’t want to lose the equity built up with donors and volunteers.

One of the simplest ways to maintain brand equity is to keep original names in some capacity—at least temporarily. Arizona’s Children Association (AzCA), for example, acquired seven organizations over a decade. Milway says AzCA kept each of the brands as programs or sub-brands—similar to Skills for Good under the Chicago Cares umbrella—so donors could identify the nonprofit to which they were loyal. Eventually, the sub-brand names were phased out as donors became familiar with AzCA. AzCA placed one board member from each of the acquired organizations onto its board of directors, thus shifting the members’ loyalty as well.

The keys to a nonprofit merger are humility and a focus on the mission over all else. Unless they are regrouping under an entirely new name, organizations should examine which brand has the best name recognition and best represents the future of the organizations and how they want to grow.

Chicago Cares and Skills for Good hired a consultant, who Ziel says helped guide and support the process, acting as a sounding board and brand expert. But what has helped seal the two organizations together was the mutual interest in their combined mission.

It’s still very early in their partnership, but Ziel and Pfeiffer are looking forward to upcoming roll-out plans and how each organization can support the other’s growth. Chicago Cares is an affiliate of the nationwide Points of Light network, and there’s an opportunity for the Skills for Good volunteer program to be replicated in other U.S. markets.

“We’re building more potential for Chicago, but also for the whole network,” Pfeiffer says. “In five years there could be versions of Skills for Good all across the country.”

Ziel chimes in: “We can easily see the amplification of our work and the ways that we can, together, be much stronger than we could be on our own.”

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Goal

Summertime for kids is celebratory. Vacation from school means more time for popsicles, hot dogs and other summer treats—but not for all. Twenty-two million children receive free or reduced-price meals through the National School Lunch Program during the school year, but in the summer that number drops to fewer than 4 million.

Feeding America went on a mission to highlight this 18 million-child gap.

“Very few people have any real awareness of how many kids go hungry every summer,” says Catherine Davis, chief marketing and communications officer at Feeding America. The nonprofit partnered with the Ad Council, with help from Facebook Creative Shop, to create a mobile awareness campaign in the summer of 2017.

Action

The “Hungry to Help” campaign was anchored by an ice cream truck, one of the most symbolic signs of summer for American children. The outside of the truck was painted with statistics about child hunger. Instead of serving ice cream, it distributed family action plans to raise awareness of hunger in the summer. The truck visited seven cities and traveled more than 3,800 miles.

The truck started in New York City, then passed through Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Its Facebook page chronicled the journey with updates from the road and an inside peek at local food banks in each city.

“Being able to livestream is one of the key features of Facebook that is particularly appealing to us,” Davis says. “It gave us the opportunity to focus on this from a national perspective but also from a local perspective. The livestreams reflected the personalities of the food banks.”

The videos showed volunteers and leaders giving tours of their respective facilities. Las Vegas’ Three Square Food Bank featured a young volunteer playing bagpipes for the camera, and a few celebrities—Leighton Meester, Adam Brody and Tiffani Thiessen—appeared at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

Feeding America engaged with the audience during each of the videos, answering questions about how to connect with local food banks and providing national and local hunger statistics.

Davis says the goal of the engagement is to spark an emotional connection with viewers. “Not only with the idea of hunger, but the individuals facing hunger,” she says. “An objective of every campaign is to create empathy for the people who are hungry.”

Visitors to the campaign website can download the family action plan that includes conversation starters on the topic of hunger, community action ideas, a children’s activity sheet and a summer checklist to help end hunger. The landing page also provides additional statistics, links to local food banks and instructions for creating fundraisers.

Results

Just as real ice cream trucks draw people out of their homes, the “Hungry to Help” campaign drew a robust and curious audience. Heidi Arthur, the Ad Council’s head of campaign development, says the campaign videos garnered more than 15 million views and drove more than 200,000 clicks to the campaign landing page. She says there was a 9% increase in Facebook ad recall lift, and polls of Facebook users who viewed the ads showed a 10% increase in intent to help end summertime child hunger.

Feeding America’s brand got attention as well. Arthur says when respondents were asked if they had seen information about Feeding America, their aided communication awareness was at an all-time high during the campaign in June (30%). The organization averaged less than half of that (10%-14%) from 2013 to 2016. “People’s passion for hunger has increased in the last 18 months to 2 years,” Davis says. “We’re at this really interesting moment where people are more receptive to our messaging.”

The nonprofit doesn’t plan to do another ice cream truck road trip this year, but it does plan to continue efforts to end child hunger with another large push this summer.

“This year, millions more kids and their families will struggle to fill the summer meal gap,” Arthur says. “As we look ahead to summer 2018, we will again develop a social and digital effort that aims to raise awareness and drive empathy for hungry children across the country.”

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Growth looks small these days. Most large, multinational brands are finding it difficult to grow not because growth is unavailable, but because when growth looks small, big brands struggle to see it. This shift is here to stay.

An analysis by the Financial Times Stock Exchange reported that profits for its more than 700 global firms located in developed markets declined by a jaw-dropping 25% in the five years prior to 2017. Yet at the same time, profits of smaller, national firms rose by 2%. Admittedly, profits aren’t the same as revenue, but this pattern of profitability is illustrative of the shift in the marketplace.

More to the point, an analysis by the competitive intelligence firm Craft found that the combined sales of Fortune 500 firms dropped from 2014 to 2016, largely due to poorly performing large companies, which have a disproportionate influence on aggregate results. When individual firms were broken out and assessed, nearly twice as many grew as shrank. Growth was occurring, just among the smaller firms, not the large ones.

From 2013 to 2015, Kantar Worldpanel tracking of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) categories worldwide showed a shift of nearly two points of aggregate share from global brands to local and regional brands. Boston Consulting Group has estimated that from 2011 to 2016, the shift of share from large to small or midsize FMCG firms in North America totaled $22 billion in topline sales, and Europe experienced a similar shift.

The mounting clout of local brands is visible in the WPP/Kantar Millward Brown BrandZä Power Index as well. For example, the power of local Chinese brands has been growing. In 2016, for the first time, the average power of local Chinese brands exceeded that of multinational brands; 15 domestic brands are now in the Chinese Top 100 ranking, up from seven in 2010 and just one in 2006. Similarly, in India from 2014 to 2017, there was an increase in the number of local brands in the Indian Top 50.

Across the board, the big propositions that dominated the marketplace in years past are now behind the curve when it comes to the future. Certainly, big firms still earn most of the revenue, but they no longer dominate growth opportunities or command much, if any, of the growth. Smaller brands are producing most of the dynamism that is churning the marketplace. Globally, this is compounded by the fact that in emerging markets—which will account for the bulk of growth in future demand—the consumer preference for smaller brands over big brands jumped from 46% in 2016 to 54% in 2017, according to Kantar Consulting Global MONITOR.

Shifts in demand are not new; companies have dealt with them successfully before. But this time, shifts in demand are part of an historic pivot in the marketplace. Big, established companies have built their position by mastering a particular confluence of macro forces, consumer lifestyles and competitive situations, but those forces have shifted, and lifestyles and market demand have changed as consumers have adapted to new conditions. Big companies entrenched themselves in the old environment, embedding their outlook and operations to monetize it at scale, but competitors have moved into this evolving configuration and found growth outside the boundaries of the previous environment.

When change is contained and uncomplicated, big companies can migrate in measured ways that sustain their dominance through the barriers to entry they have erected. But change doesn’t look like that anymore. Incumbents now find themselves a step behind new, smaller competitors that move with greater agility and speed. The advantages of size have been lost to outsourced production, expanded retail options and digital marketing channels.

Going forward, mass markets will not be available. Every brand knows this, but the imperative of scale keeps big firms from following the ongoing shifts in demand. The first requirement of growth is to identify an available market large enough to scale. Conventional metrics favor a big, cohesive opportunity, so the comfort zone in which most companies have operated is to scale mass markets into big brands. Even strategies like segmentation that divide mass markets into smaller pieces are just tools to give companies manageable entry points into mass markets.

Nowadays, growth opportunities are coming more from the edges than the center. In accordance with the insights surfaced by Kantar Worldpanel and others such as Byron Sharp (author of How Brands Grow), companies are adopting penetration strategies on the notion that brands are built by growing the number of buyers, not by deepening the loyalty of buyers. Inherently, this means achieving scale by adding up small, disparate niches.

The standard operating procedure of scaling one product for everybody is not transferable to a marketplace that requires customization for niches, particularly personalization for niches of one. Scale is still needed, but the available market will be an ensemble of individualized, granular pieces, not a single, unified base. Success will come from scaling small niches into big brands.

Some experts have characterized the scaling of niches as a “conglomerated niche” strategy in which production, delivery and marketing have to be done for an aggregation of small batches. Companies that have begun to make this transition are finding that it requires relocating production facilities closer to buyers, digitizing supply chains, utilizing predictive technologies, adopting faster learning systems that guide production and employing greater flexibility in procurement and hiring. In effect, a whole new way of working.

Brands will have to master “reverse segmentation,” which is to say, putting lots of small things together rather than breaking one big thing apart. In the past, mass markets were segmented from the top down into smaller pieces. Going forward, niches will have to be aggregated from the bottom up into bigger pieces that give companies a sizeable enough platform on which to scale niches into big brands. Many of these new segmentations will be problem-specific, and all of them will require rich, integrated data sources.

Companies that are growing nowadays are not encumbered by the weight of expensive assets or large investments; they can innovate and adapt at speed. They thrive by trying new angles. This is the only way to win at a small scale.

Big brands are lumbering giants that have always relied on a large footprint to keep erosion and irrelevance at bay. In today’s environment, big brands must make a conscious effort to fight off the risk aversion inherent in large organizations. Innovation scholar Clay Christensen once said that mustering the resources it takes to compete outside a company’s comfort zone is like flapping one’s arms in an effort to fly because it runs contrary to the ingrained ways in which big companies work. But big brands have to do better. Otherwise, they will not measure up to the challenges or enjoy the opportunities of a marketplace in which growth looks small.

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Nonprofit organizations differentiate themselves from traditional businesses by their profit focus. Of course, businesses are customer-focused—they exist to make money from their customers. Nonprofits believe they exist to fulfill a mission and vision and to meet every stakeholder’s needs. All too often fulfilling the mission becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that distracts nonprofits from meeting the needs of their customers. Confusing myriad stakeholders, such as employees and suppliers, with customers, nonprofits can become internally focused, dedicating themselves to costly initiatives that consume organizational resources but do not improve customer satisfaction.

Nowhere is this more evident than in one of the largest nonprofit enterprises worldwide, the U.S. K-12 public school system. The superintendent of an underperforming school district told me the district’s strategy was based on key initiatives, such as “data-driven decision-making” and “aligning cultural values.” The former initiative led millions of dollars to be dedicated to data management systems, and the latter led to extensive training and countless culture-building exercises. Proud of its investments, the district leadership remained puzzled as to why its customers—students and parents—were leaving the district for private, charter and home-schooling options.

We conducted a district-wide study to measure the state of parent satisfaction in the district. It revealed low parent satisfaction driven by low academic standards, perceptions of unsafe schools and perceived lack of parent engagement. When asked about the disconnect, the superintendent responded, “Of course we care about parents. That is why we are completely focused on data-driven decision-making and cultural alignment. These initiatives reinforce our mission to become the best school district possible.” 

What’s causing the disconnect? The school district started with its mission, not with the needs of its customers. This systematically subordinated the customers’ needs to the mission, values and vision of internal stakeholders—teachers, staff and administrators. Though all the stakeholders claimed to care about customers, they were really driven by an inward-looking approach. As a result, the district invested more in internal initiatives that did little to satisfy customer needs. Dissatisfied, the customers migrated to other providers. This migration only dampened the morale among front-line employees, with the district declaring an intensifying need for cultural alignment. The downward spiral of lowered customer satisfaction, followed by the launch of internally focused initiatives, continued unabated, even as a growing number of students and parents sought to explore other options.

The way out of this spiral involves embracing lessons learned from successful businesses.

Define Your Customer, Unambiguously

Strong organizations are customer-focused. They do not confuse their customers with other stakeholders—even as they recognize the importance of other stakeholders in satisfying customer needs. While it is fashionable to lump all stakeholders in the same bucket and treat them as customers, it is strategically dysfunctional to equate customers with other stakeholders.

Consider a nonprofit such as a hospital. Nurses, physicians, pharmacists, administrators and suppliers are a hospital’s stakeholders. Its customers include patients and their families. Most stakeholders are a component of the value chain that should satisfy customer needs. Every nonprofit should ask itself: “Mission aside, whose needs does the nonprofit organization exist to serve?” Hospitals exist to serve patients, not physicians or nurses. Schools exist to serve students and their parents, not staff and administration.

Start by Satisfying Customer Needs

Satisfying customers’ needs should be the starting point for conceptualizing any nonprofit organization, not a distant byproduct of activities, processes and initiatives.

Profit-oriented businesses are much better at starting with their customers’ needs. Walmart understands the importance of satisfying its customers through low prices, convenience and variety. Amazon starts with the premise that it is critical to satisfy its customers through convenience and competitive pricing. Apple satisfies its customers through innovative products, online engagement and unparalleled service. For these businesses, the linkage of customer satisfaction with sales, profits and shareholder value is clear.

Nonprofits have a harder time understanding the benefits of satisfying their customers, but they should not. A strong body of evidence shows that  is associated with increased compliance, better clinical outcomes and improved patient health. In education, our research shows higher parent satisfaction is associated with improved academic performance, lower dropout rate and higher student retention. These nonfinancial outcomes are critical to the survival of nonprofits, and they are driven by customer satisfaction.

Identify Satisfaction Drivers

Smart businesses have a clear understanding of their . Walmart, for example, understands that overall customer satisfaction is based on low prices, convenience and variety. Many nonprofits have very little, if any, insight into the drivers of their customers’ overall satisfaction. Hospitals may not understand the relative weight of the check-in process, physician interaction, nursing support or the cleanliness of facilities as drivers of overall patient satisfaction. Public schools may not know the relative importance of family engagement, safety, academics, extracurricular activities, school leadership, teachers and academic standards.

Nonprofits should identify the drivers of overall customer satisfaction and ascertain their relative importance to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction. The process of identifying satisfaction drivers cannot be accomplished by ad hoc engagement initiatives, focus groups or one-off surveys. Rather, it entails a structured and systematic survey process to listen to the customer’s voice and measure overall satisfaction, satisfaction drivers and customer loyalty.

To illustrate this process, my colleagues at Rice University and Texas A&M University conducted a nationally representative study of more than 7,000 parents of schoolchildren to measure overall satisfaction and its drivers. Overall satisfaction was found to be unambiguously associated with student retention, academic performance and attendance. Overall satisfaction with schools was found to be driven by family and community engagement, school safety and academics. Interestingly, extracurricular activities did not drive overall satisfaction.

These results suggest public schools need to focus on family and community engagement, followed by safety and academics to improve satisfaction. The study identified several levers for improving family and community engagement, including creating opportunities for parents to be involved in school activities and give input on important school policies, as well as communicating with parents.

What Now?

Nonprofits that start with the fundamental premise of satisfying their customers’ needs will also prioritize initiatives that support a customer focus. Their planning process will provide concrete guidance for a  that clearly measures customer satisfaction, identifies satisfaction drivers and provides a roadmap for achieving meaningful outcomes on the customer’s behalf. For such an enlightened nonprofit, customer satisfaction serves as the focal metric that singularly advances the cause of customers while also aligning other stakeholders.

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