What’s Happening in Vegas Isn’t Staying in Vegas

If you’re anywhere near Las Vegas Friday morning, and your interested in how to use online social media for water conservation, stop by the Southpoint Hotel and Conference Center for the WaterSmart Innovation Conference. I’m presenting my fishing analogy for deploying social media at 9 am.

The Water - Use It Wisely conservation campaign was one of the first in the water-saving business to have a focused, comprehensive strategy for online social media to share its 100+ ways to save water.

Here’s how we go fishing using social media:

1. We consider the Water - Use It Wisely website as our wharf where we process the fish we catch. In this case, the process is to offer a wealth of conservation information to consumers thirsty for content, including 100+ water-saving tips.
2. To get them to the wharf, we go trolling in the sea of prospects with our blog. We lure in folks with timely information on how they can start saving water and money now.
3. To reach as many people with our blog as possible, we cast the content through a number of social media fishing lines, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And we make our content easy to share by including links to Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, MySpace and more.

You can review my entire fishing analogy social media presentation on SlideShare.

I am also looking forward to tailoring this presentation for the Texas Regional Water Conference in Fort Worth on Tuesday, November 11. For those of you attending that workshop, feel free to review my landing page, Sustainable Social Media 101, and send me any questions you have prior to the event. That way I can focus my presentation to your needs.

And whether you’re in Vegas or Fort Worth, be sure to stop by a say hello.

One of the cool things about running the Water - Use It Wisely conservation campaign are all of the great notes and videos we receive from concerned Earthlings.  In fact, just last week someone sent us a video about the water conservation merits of taking a bath with a friend (A bit creepy to show here).

Today, we received this incredibly thoughtful letter from a fourth grader in Chesterfield, MI, and I just had to share it with you.

Dear Water Use It Wisely,

Water is getting wasted more and more each day. I want to help out and teach people how to conserve water. Please continue reading because your organization is very influential. I had an idea if you could send some workers from your organization to schools all around the world, and they could inform the students about water usage.

Did you know that every minute, 1,000,000,000 (0ne billion) tons of water falls to the earth from rainfall? We are lucky for rainfall water. It helps fill up our lakes. There is about 326,000,000,000,000,000,000 (326 quintillion) gallons of water on Earth. Yes, this is tons, but it is getting wasted. I want to keep this number BIG.

Everyone needs water - so why waste it? I think it is very irresponsible to let the water run when you are not home. The core democratic value, Common Good, supports my issue. This means that we can all work together as a community, country or even continent!

Water conservation is very important. We can use water with respect by making good choices. Take a shower instead of a bath, use an automatic dishwasher instead of hand washing. You can buy Earth-friendly window cleaner spray, so that the bacteria doesn’t get in our drinking water and make it dirty. If your washer isn’t full then don’t start it. With water being wasted every day, by the time we get to the 3000’s we are going to have to survive on milk and juice!!! Won’t that be boring?!?!? That means we have to give our dogs a bowl of juice instead of water with their food. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking real life here!!

Water wasting needs to come to a stop and without delay. Water Use It Wisely, PLEASE inform people about their water usage! It is a big role in my life. It would be really awesome if you take part in spreading the news about this! Thanks tons!!

An impatient fourth grader waiting for a reply,

Mya

We should all be so passionate and eloquent about our good green Earth.

(This post originally appeared yesterday on Park’s “A Brighter Shade of Green Marketing” Blog)

A wise old marketing sage once asked me, “What’s a newspaper in business for?”

“To deliver timely, accurate, and impartial news everyday to their subscribers,” I proudly responded as a young ad man trying to impress his mentor. “Wrong,” he said. “Newspapers are in the business to make money! If they’re not making money, they can’t deliver the news,” he snorted. Great point, and an even better lesson.

The next time you consider asking a for-profit company to sponsor your non-profit cause, first ask yourself the question, “What’s in it for them?” Sure, they want to be a good corporate citizen. That’s a given. What’s really the crux of the question is how can engagement with you and your organization bump up their bottom line while doing good for the community?

You must get inside their heads before you can get inside their pockets.

- Park Howell

Acclaimed marketing professors Philip Kotler and Nancy Lee authored an insightful college textbook called Corporate Social Responsibility: Doing the Most Good for Your Company and Your Cause. This book is filled with best practices on private/public partnerships with companies like The Home Depot, Ben & Jerry’s and Hewlett-Packard. Because it’s written for corporate managers in community relations and corporate giving and marketing, it offers non-profit leaders valuable insight into how companies choose causes and how to best align your mission with their mentality.

Here are ten recommendations from the final chapter, A Marketing Approach to Winning Corporate Funding and Support for Social Initiatives.

1. Start by developing a list of social issues that your organization or agency is currently charged with supporting and that would benefit from additional resources. Be specific.
2. Identify a short list of corporations that these social issues might have a connection with, something that relates to their business mission, products and services, customer base, employee passions, communities where they do business, and/or their corporate giving history.
3. Approach corporations and/or their communication agencies and find out more about their interests and experiences relative to supporting social initiatives.
4. Listen to their business needs.
5. Share with them the social issues your organization supports, the initiatives you are considering or engaged in, and your strengths and resources. Find out which, if any, they find most appealing.
6. Prepare and submit a proposal to those corporations most interested in your social issues. Present several optional initiatives for potential support, ones that are the best match for their stated business and marketing needs.
7. Participate in developing an implementation plan.
8. Offer to handle as much of the administrative legwork as possible.
9. Assist in measuring and reporting outcomes.
10. Provide recognition for the corporation’s contribution in ways preferred by the company.

If you have thoughts on how to approach companies to support your cause, or a terrific case study you’d like to share, please do so in the comment box below.