Grand Strategy: Quit Marketing, Start Communicating

Since I spend a lot of my professional life working with environmental and other non-profits to improve their communications, their campaigns, and their fundraising, I get to see up close the way that many of them are captured by the received wisdeom of the marketing profession - circa 1980. What I'm referring to is the commitment that most of our NGOs have to branding and market differentiation, both factors that lie behind successful fundraising.

But these factors do NOT lie behind successful social change, or at least they do not necessarily contribute to it. Instead, what makes effective campaigns and movements that change the world is a vibrant, rich, and dynamic relationship with the people who are affected by your cause and who support you the most. It's not about whether you are differentiated in the marketplace, but whether you offer a believable response to the oldest question in political discourse, 'what is to be done?', and that you engage those people in doing what you say should be done.

How credible is a movement whose main direct communication with its consituency is fundraising appeals packaged in myriad competing brands rather than a united program to change teh world?

Some individual organizations are doing a better job than others (see, for example, FarmStart, an important innovator in the sustainable food movement), but the lack of what most people in most eras of the modern industrialized world would recognize as a coordinated program with political, legal, and social dimensions hampers our efforts.

But this griping on my part isn't getting me very far with my green friends. Most of them are worrying about revenue shortfalls as a result of the recession, which is making them redouble their efforts in what I consider a secondary direction.

So, as part of my quest to see things in a new light, I offer here a perspective labeled 'radical collaboration' which I found in a post by Adele Peters on worldchanging.org. This approach offers insights from big business on how collaboration between organizations can be made to work even when competition remains an important context in which they must operate.

A recent initiative of Creative Commons is a case n point -- Green Xchange brings together a number of major consumer products corporations (including Nike and BestBuy) to share research and practice in energy efficiency, waste management, and 'greening' their supply chains. This field -- referred to incorrectly as 'sustainability' in the corporate world -- is now seen by some mainstream analysts (see July/09 issue of the Harvard Business Review) as the most important driver of technological and business process innovation in market economies today, so there is evidence that some of the biggest economic entities on the planet are moving past greenwashing to actual behaviour modification.

A certain amount of cross-pollination goes on between the larger environmental groups, obviously, and grassroots groups are always flowing into and out of one another. But a systematic effort to collaborate through matching competencies for a more powerful agenda of social change? I don't see it, I'm afraid.