Keeping It Grounded with Foursquare
Case Study: Connect, Cultivate, Online Marketing, Social Media
Last week I went to an NTEN event about how nonprofits can take advantage of Foursquare, a mobile app that is gaining about 100,000 new users a week.
At the event, Naveen Selvadurai, one of the founders of Foursquare explained how their invention was driven by a series of questions: “How can we get better at living in our cities?” And, “How can we turn life into a game?”
For uninitiated, here’s how Foursquare works: get to a location and “check in.” Once the app registers where you are, businesses and nonprofits nearby can alert you to special offers — like a discount for frozen yogurt. Like Meetup, it’s also a way to connect with friends in real time. Depending on the number of times you check in, you can earn “badges” or be anointed “Mayor” of that place – which can come with special privileges and…
- Posted by Lisa Chen
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I’m a mother one-year old and a three-year old. Snacks are fuel and often live-savers when they get tired, hungry and whiney. The go to snack of preference for many American kids are “Gold Fish.” (We mix baggies of “fish” and fresh apple slices.)
Pepperidge Farms, the makers of the “Fish” have a smart campaign out called “Fishfull Thinking.” It’s a site that gives tips to parents about how to raise a positive child.
Elements include:
1. Skill Quiz
2. Book Club
3. Guides to keeping kids active and optimistic
4. A parent survey
5. Q+A with experts
6. and more…
This is a wise campaign for the company. It allows parents (moms in particular) to see their brand as supportive to their parenting and not just a consumer transaction.
Moms will be loyal if you give her practical tips for doing…
- Posted by Lisa Witter
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CNN recently reporte
d that women make up roughly 70 percent of all volunteer travelers – or people who spend their vacations volunteering in communities far from home. Experts tell CNN that women choose volunteer vacations for reasons including both altruism and guilt. The travelers themselves highlight the “emotional involvement and connection that you will never have when you take a regular holiday.” And the fact that women traveling in volunteer programs feel safer than they would traveling alone.
Volunteer vacations are a way to integrate yourself into a community, give and receive while there, and deepen your understanding of something new while doing so. These themes resonate with the reasons women support given causes and organizations, and also why they are loyal to certain brands. Beyond the altruism and guilt cited by CNN, volunteer vacations are in many ways an ideal…
- Posted by Lisa Witter
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Last night I walked past the windows of the GAP. Each window was marked as a different decade dating back to the1890s and labeled with a tag for a group of women from that decade and their look – think: Flapper, Gibson Girl, etc. Along with these windows and tags, signs indicated this campaign was attached to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Indeed, the GAP joins Conde Nast to sponsor the current exhibit at the Met, “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.” The exhibit draws from the Brooklyn Museum collection of costumes and fashion. “The exhibition reveals how the American woman initiated style revolutions that mirrored her social, political, and sexual emancipation” through an extensive display of costumes and clothes.
Corporations sponsoring art that has something to do with their product? Not so innovative, you say. What about then running an online auction of unique…
- Posted by Lisa Witter
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GreatNonprofits develops “tools that allow people to find, review, and share information about great – and perhaps not yet great – nonprofits.” They have launched a campaign to highlight nonprofits that help women. Instead of generating their own list of winners, though, they are asking you to get involved and review organizations or post your organization to be reviewed.
The Women’s Empowerment Campaign 2010 is a collaborative of many led by GreatNonprofits and GuideStar in partnership with Kiva, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, MADRE, Wider Opportunities for Women, Dress for Success, Women’s Media Center, Women News Network, and Women’s Philanthropy — Women’s Issues.
Voting, reviewing, and other open-source competitions and collaborations online allow organizations like GreatNonprofits to learn about their audience, learn from their audience, and collect awareness on issues with a much wider net than they could alone. It builds upon the…
- Posted by Lisa Witter
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About this blog
Lisa Chen and Lisa Witter
are the authors of The She Spot: Why Women are the Market for Changing the World and How to
Reach Them. They are also both
senior strategists at Fenton Communications, the nation’s largest public
interest communications firm. [