This is definitely one of the most fun experiences I had in a course. This is the last course of my MBA at Ross School of Business and I’m glad that I got an opportunity to do a social project. After getting some useful feedback from Prof. Nordhielm I have submitted my report officially. If you want to look at my report you can reach me at abhiana|at|umich|dot|edu
I just want to thank my reviewers who had given some excellent comments on my blog and those feedback helped me a lot to refine the report.
Now that I came to an end of this class and finish my MBA here at Ross. I think the below quote from Ursula K. LeGuin is most appropriately describing my feelings.
“It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Updated 5 Box Statement
First of all, I want to thank Megan and Amanjeev for their insight on my STP analysis. I have created an updated 5-box statement based on their feedback. I hope this will make sense with my acquisition -> stimulate demand strategy. My category is "drinking water crisis" so I'm stimulating demand for this category. However, my ideal customer is one who does make donations but not for this cause. Therefore, I’m pursuing acquisition to this category (drinking water crisis). I'm trying to make donors aware of this issue so that they make donations to Charity Water. I'm not trying to earn share from other global causes where I have to do a comparison positioning strategy. I will try to catch up with my reviewers in the class.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Marketing Execution
Before moving to the Marketing Execution part of my project, I just want to reiterate that I’m pursing an “Acquisition -> Stimulate Demand” Big Picture Marketing strategy. The category is “drinking water crisis” especially in the developing world. It is essential to mention these crucial facts of my plan so that you can validate the consistency of the execution plan.
The first thing I have to do is to define some of the search, experience and credence attributes of Charity Water:
Search Attributes: The search attributes in this case are two-pronged. First, it revolves around all the facts surrounding this issue. For example, 1/8th of the world population don’t have access to drinking water and similar other facts which I discussed in my first blog. The next set of search attributes are related to Charity Water’s performance so far. Attributes such as, its financial performance, the list of projects it has funded, the socio economic impact in the project areas, its volunteer strength and so on.
Experience Attributes: I think Charity Water has done a great job by building the technology infrastructure through which donors can evaluate some of the experience attributes. As I mentioned before Charity Water provides features in its website via which donors can track their charities irrespective of the amount. There are numerous testimonials, case study, etc which can definitely help donors to make an informed decision.
Credence attributes: Because of Charity Water’s strong social media presence, extensive PR coverage and above all a dynamic founder has really contributed significantly to an image of savvy, efficient and modern non-profit organization.
Marketing Communication: To be consistent with the Big Picture framework the communication obviously has to focus on raising the basic awareness on this issue. Although, most of Charity Water’s competition in this category communicates similar facts on drinking water crisis I think someone has to do a better job in increasing the importance of this issue in people’s mind. It becomes especially difficult when the crisis is happening at a geographical distant place from the donors. However, I think Charity Water is in the best place to raise awareness on this issue by executing some of the innovative and creative communication strategies. If you visit the website of Charity Water you will find that it tries to promote a message of hope and possibilities. This is consistent with the philosophy of promotion vs. prevention and its impact on donor’s behavior. When most organizations in this category show gloom and doom scenario Charity Water tries to provide a positive spin on this issue.
In addition, Charity Water has to differentiate itself by providing some of the informative message that it is the only organization in this category which is a symbol of transparency and efficiency.
Channel: Lastly, in terms of channel, Charity Water is getting the donations via its website (direct), via volunteer hosted affiliate website, twestivals and some brick and mortar fundraising bash. Except the volunteer organized fund raising Charity Water can control and monitor its channel very well which is essential for acquisition -> stimulate demand campaigns.
Today, I look forward to the discussion on volunteers in social marketing. Like many non-profits, Charity Water has to reach its donor base with very limited resources. However, you lose certain degree of control with volunteers. How would you make sure that your volunteers are executing your strategy effectively?
I will be also looking forward to the pricing discussion. How much should I ask for donations? What is the best way to price discriminate based on my fundraising campaigns? I’m not a great fan of – give us what you can – pricing plan. As a donor I tend to respond better when I was asked a definite amount such as $5 a month will allow a child to attend school.
Monday, April 5, 2010
STP Analysis
I’m fairly comfortable with the organizational objective, marketing objective and source of volume sections of my project. I have discussed my findings and general direction in my last blog. I’m still looking for some objectivity in how to determine the percentages in 4B analysis. May be this will be revisited in today’s class as we were running out of time last week. If you want to look at the draft of my analysis so far I would be happy to share those with you.
The next stage of this project is to define the Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) aspect of this marketing plan and the first step is to define the set of category and dynamic variables. Remember that my customers for this marketing plan are the “donors”. Therefore, from a donor’s standpoint what are the category and dynamic variables when evaluating non-profits who are involved in “developing drinking water infrastructure”?
Category Variables: Desire to help people who struggle to access safe drinking water
Dynamic Variables: Transparency to the investments of donor’s money, Minimum overhead costs, Reputation of the brand, Years of experience, Religious affiliations, Cool factor
So with these let’s look at the current competitors of Charity Water:
Competitors: water.org, globalwater.org, dropinthebucket.org, waterforpeople.org and many more. Having so many players in this area is making the competitive analysis a bit difficult. How would you effectively do a comparison when the market is so fragmented? I’m sure you might have similar findings and therefore I’m looking forward to today’s discussion on competition.
Anyways, if I map the main and dynamic variables of charity water vis-à-vis some primary competitors I will have Charity Water dominate the dynamic variables of: transparency, overhead costs, reputation and cool factor but it will trail competitors in: years of experience and religious affiliation.
With the above analysis it becomes easier to visualize the targeted donors for charity water. I will take an attempt to describe my target donor as below:
Target donor description: John and Elizabeth Kaplan lives in a suburban community with their two children. Their household income is $90,000 and they donate between $300 and $500 in charity every year. They often donate to help immediate crisis situations such as the Haiti Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, Tsunami in SE Asia, etc. In addition, they donate for some of their close to heart issues such as global warming, children education, wild life protection etc. John particularly is aware of world issues and he loves listening to BBC news in NPR or PBS. John loves gadgets and he is always one of the first to buy new electronic items. Lately, he was checking the latest 3D LED TV from Samsung but $3000 price tag is too high for him and he decided to put that wish on hold for now. Elizabeth is a marathon runner and she loves the App in her iPhone which could monitor every aspect of her running. This family loves to travel and stay outdoors and they often volunteer in their community. They live an active lifestyle and believe in having fun in stuffs they do. They have a large circle of friends and are very passionate about their hobbies and beliefs.
With the above TA description let me now define the five-box positioning statement for Charity Water.
• Current Belief
– Believe in making a difference by doing charities
• Current Do
– Donate for Education, Global Warming, Disease and other global issues coz they need attention
• Proposition
– Water crisis is a critical issue of our time having significant socio-economic ramifications
• Desired Belief
– Drinking water crisis is real and people are suffering
• Desired Do
– Donate for this cause to a non-profit which can deliver real impact
The next stage of this project is to define the Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning (STP) aspect of this marketing plan and the first step is to define the set of category and dynamic variables. Remember that my customers for this marketing plan are the “donors”. Therefore, from a donor’s standpoint what are the category and dynamic variables when evaluating non-profits who are involved in “developing drinking water infrastructure”?
Category Variables: Desire to help people who struggle to access safe drinking water
Dynamic Variables: Transparency to the investments of donor’s money, Minimum overhead costs, Reputation of the brand, Years of experience, Religious affiliations, Cool factor
So with these let’s look at the current competitors of Charity Water:
Competitors: water.org, globalwater.org, dropinthebucket.org, waterforpeople.org and many more. Having so many players in this area is making the competitive analysis a bit difficult. How would you effectively do a comparison when the market is so fragmented? I’m sure you might have similar findings and therefore I’m looking forward to today’s discussion on competition.
Anyways, if I map the main and dynamic variables of charity water vis-à-vis some primary competitors I will have Charity Water dominate the dynamic variables of: transparency, overhead costs, reputation and cool factor but it will trail competitors in: years of experience and religious affiliation.
With the above analysis it becomes easier to visualize the targeted donors for charity water. I will take an attempt to describe my target donor as below:
Target donor description: John and Elizabeth Kaplan lives in a suburban community with their two children. Their household income is $90,000 and they donate between $300 and $500 in charity every year. They often donate to help immediate crisis situations such as the Haiti Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, Tsunami in SE Asia, etc. In addition, they donate for some of their close to heart issues such as global warming, children education, wild life protection etc. John particularly is aware of world issues and he loves listening to BBC news in NPR or PBS. John loves gadgets and he is always one of the first to buy new electronic items. Lately, he was checking the latest 3D LED TV from Samsung but $3000 price tag is too high for him and he decided to put that wish on hold for now. Elizabeth is a marathon runner and she loves the App in her iPhone which could monitor every aspect of her running. This family loves to travel and stay outdoors and they often volunteer in their community. They live an active lifestyle and believe in having fun in stuffs they do. They have a large circle of friends and are very passionate about their hobbies and beliefs.
With the above TA description let me now define the five-box positioning statement for Charity Water.
• Current Belief
– Believe in making a difference by doing charities
• Current Do
– Donate for Education, Global Warming, Disease and other global issues coz they need attention
• Proposition
– Water crisis is a critical issue of our time having significant socio-economic ramifications
• Desired Belief
– Drinking water crisis is real and people are suffering
• Desired Do
– Donate for this cause to a non-profit which can deliver real impact
Monday, March 29, 2010
Charity:Water
Charity Water was founded in 2006 by a most unlikely person imaginable to start a non-profit. Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter in Manhattan got disenchanted with his work and decided to dedicate his life for charity. He discovered that poor people in the developing world struggle to access safe and clean drinking water because they lack the money and support to build wells and pumps. With a mission to fund water projects around the world Scott founded Charity Water. The organization currently has 12 full time staffs, 800 volunteers and together they raised $7.5 million last year. Charity Water is primarily involved in fund raising activities and they use humanitarian organizations to build the actual water infrastructures.
Scott Harrison incredible personal story has somewhat made him a media darling and he was able to leverage this for his cause very effectively. Charity Water is featured in most top television channels and print media such as ABC, CNN, Fox and the New York Times. In addition, as I mentioned in my last post just by observation you will see that Charity Water has built a strong brand using Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. Scott is an astute marketer and he leveraged his network very effectively to get celebrity endorsements and promote high profile fund raising campaigns for his cause.
I believe Charity Water is leveraging technology very effectively to bring a new level of transparency in philanthropy. Donors, no matter how small is their donation can now trace GPS coordinates and pictures of projects they are funding via Google Earth technology. Charity Water has developed an extremely user friendly website called mycharitywater.org where volunteers can do fundraising campaigns. The volunteers can customize the website according to their taste and provide information to their donors about the places where their money is being used. Charity Water did a “September Campaign” in 2008 where people born in September were asked to forgo their birthday gifts and instead ask their friends and family to donate for Charity Water. The campaign became viral and almost $1 M was raised in that month. Since then, Charity Water ran similar successful campaigns where volunteers were encouraged to run, bike, sky dive or simply give up birthday or anniversary gifts.
With my research and above observations I can make the following assessment about the core competence of Charity Water:
• Strong brand equity built around the founder Scott Harrison. The brand embodies a sense of hipness, youth, progressiveness and transparency.
• Strong online search engine presence. Both in terms of Search Engine Optimization (natural search) and Search Engine Marketing (paid search) Charity Water comes top in the search engines results for any queries related to water crisis.
• Built a very effective website. The website is very visual making it very effective to promote a crisis which is happening in a place geographically far from the donors.
• Strong organization capability to promote high profile fundraising bash
Since 2006 Charity Water has been growing their funds at 125% CAGR. From $579,463 in 2006 they generated $6,456,932 in CY 2008. Of course, they might not be able to maintain this pace forever. My goal is to make sure that they can at least maintain 50% CAGR for the next three years. That means in CY 2011 they should be able to generate $21 M in donations. Just to put things in perspective Habitat for Humanity, a 30 year old veteran, raised $88.5 M in donations in FY2008. I’m trying to strike a balance between Charity Water’s past performance and realistic future potential. Let me know if I’m correct in my assumptions.
I’m still looking for data in terms of the overall fundraising market for Charity Water. I want to know how much of total donations are generated every year for this cause. This can give me a perspective on Charity Water’s market share. Irrespective of the total market size I believe the primary strategy for Charity Water will be “Acquisition -> Stimulate Demand”.
In order to make the “Category Definition” for Charity water I looked at its primary benefit as – an organization improving the health and well being of impoverished people by providing them access to clean water. However, with such a narrow category definition, am I concluding that the primary competition for Charity Water will be other non-profits providing similar services? Do I really have to care about competition? Here I’m struggling, because I’m not sure how to define the competition for Charity Water and I look forward to your suggestions.
The next is 4-B analysis and here, I was wondering if I can make my calculations backward. I know what my fund raising targets are and therefore I can work my way backwards to determine the number of donors I need and the number of projects I can fund. I look forward to your comments if you think my logic is flawed. I will also try to raise this issue during the class…
Scott Harrison incredible personal story has somewhat made him a media darling and he was able to leverage this for his cause very effectively. Charity Water is featured in most top television channels and print media such as ABC, CNN, Fox and the New York Times. In addition, as I mentioned in my last post just by observation you will see that Charity Water has built a strong brand using Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, etc. Scott is an astute marketer and he leveraged his network very effectively to get celebrity endorsements and promote high profile fund raising campaigns for his cause.
I believe Charity Water is leveraging technology very effectively to bring a new level of transparency in philanthropy. Donors, no matter how small is their donation can now trace GPS coordinates and pictures of projects they are funding via Google Earth technology. Charity Water has developed an extremely user friendly website called mycharitywater.org where volunteers can do fundraising campaigns. The volunteers can customize the website according to their taste and provide information to their donors about the places where their money is being used. Charity Water did a “September Campaign” in 2008 where people born in September were asked to forgo their birthday gifts and instead ask their friends and family to donate for Charity Water. The campaign became viral and almost $1 M was raised in that month. Since then, Charity Water ran similar successful campaigns where volunteers were encouraged to run, bike, sky dive or simply give up birthday or anniversary gifts.
With my research and above observations I can make the following assessment about the core competence of Charity Water:
• Strong brand equity built around the founder Scott Harrison. The brand embodies a sense of hipness, youth, progressiveness and transparency.
• Strong online search engine presence. Both in terms of Search Engine Optimization (natural search) and Search Engine Marketing (paid search) Charity Water comes top in the search engines results for any queries related to water crisis.
• Built a very effective website. The website is very visual making it very effective to promote a crisis which is happening in a place geographically far from the donors.
• Strong organization capability to promote high profile fundraising bash
Since 2006 Charity Water has been growing their funds at 125% CAGR. From $579,463 in 2006 they generated $6,456,932 in CY 2008. Of course, they might not be able to maintain this pace forever. My goal is to make sure that they can at least maintain 50% CAGR for the next three years. That means in CY 2011 they should be able to generate $21 M in donations. Just to put things in perspective Habitat for Humanity, a 30 year old veteran, raised $88.5 M in donations in FY2008. I’m trying to strike a balance between Charity Water’s past performance and realistic future potential. Let me know if I’m correct in my assumptions.
I’m still looking for data in terms of the overall fundraising market for Charity Water. I want to know how much of total donations are generated every year for this cause. This can give me a perspective on Charity Water’s market share. Irrespective of the total market size I believe the primary strategy for Charity Water will be “Acquisition -> Stimulate Demand”.
In order to make the “Category Definition” for Charity water I looked at its primary benefit as – an organization improving the health and well being of impoverished people by providing them access to clean water. However, with such a narrow category definition, am I concluding that the primary competition for Charity Water will be other non-profits providing similar services? Do I really have to care about competition? Here I’m struggling, because I’m not sure how to define the competition for Charity Water and I look forward to your suggestions.
The next is 4-B analysis and here, I was wondering if I can make my calculations backward. I know what my fund raising targets are and therefore I can work my way backwards to determine the number of donors I need and the number of projects I can fund. I look forward to your comments if you think my logic is flawed. I will also try to raise this issue during the class…
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Getting Started...
The first class of Social Marketing definitely lived up to my expectations. I’m truly excited about this course and the Social Marketing Plan which I have to develop. I considered couple of social issues which are very close to my heart - ban cell phone while driving campaign, improve early childhood education in impoverished areas and provide safe drinking water in developing countries. While doing my preliminary research to pick the topic I really got astounded to realize the extent of drinking water shortage in developing countries. Approximately, 3.6 million people out of which 1.6 million are children, die every year because of water related diseases. It might be surprising for many of you to hear that one in eight people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water. There are many more similar statistics which made me realize that this is a worthy cause to invest my time and energy. You can check some facts related to this issue at this link http://bit.ly/RwUki .
Selecting the social issue was easy for me but I was really struggling to choose an organization for my marketing plan. There are so many non-profit organizations out there providing this service that it is difficult to differentiate one from another. This is consistent with Prof. Nordhielm observation that many non-profit organization struggle to build brand recognition. If you visit the websites of these non-profit organizations they all seem to have similar marketing strategy. They are trying to build awareness of this issue by providing statistics of water shortage and I believe this strategy is working. At least, they all were able to convince me about the severity of this issue. What they lack is an effective positioning strategy to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Why a donor should invest in you rather than someone else? This question is never answered effectively.
However, there is one organization which stood out for me and that is “Charity: Water” (http://www.charitywater.org/). They raised $7.5 M last year and funded around 1000 water projects in 13 countries. They appeared in most major press stories and seem to have a very effective online marketing strategy. Just from observation I felt they are doing well in search, blogs and social media marketing.
In terms of defining the Organizational Objective for this project I have to first define the fundamental entity. My fundamental entity for this project will be “Charity Water”, that part was easy. The goal is to raise funds and I’m still working on to quantify this objective. In terms of Charity Water’s core competence I feel they are good at PR campaigns and they are also leveraging digital marketing very effectively. I need to dig little bit more on the “core competencies” aspect.
I came from India and I saw how poor people struggle to find safe drinking water and access proper sanitation. Because of my background I was able to recognize the severity of this issue but I wonder how much people from developed world can relate to this issue. Here, we never have to worry about finding drinking water or accessing clean toilet; whatever may be our socio economic condition. One of my goals for this project would be to analyze the issue of geographical spread between the donor and the beneficiary and find ways to mitigate it. Prof. Nordhielm said that she will cover this issue in future classes and I look forward to that discussion. For now, I’m really excited about my project and I hope I can develop something very useful for Charity Water…
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