Philanthropic advertising: doing good versus doing well

The missing altruistic side of advertising

Philanthropic organizations like trusts, nonprofits and foundations often don’t have heavy-hitting marketing partners unless they are a big, established group. When they have a new program or initiative, they make a bunch of calls and see who is available to handle their one-off project. There’s no maintained relationship, and therefore no growing understanding between agency and client to create any real brand awareness. And ad agencies rarely actively seek out groups who do social good — the opinion here being that philanthropic projects are either too low budget to make it worth an agency’s time, or they come with too many caveats to create something interesting. In fact, at previous employers, many of us at UpperNinety have been in meetings where we are asked to brainstorm ideas that show how our agency did its part to help enact positive social change — only because that was a requirement for an awards show.

Why only then? Are we so focused on agency financial prosperity that being charitable with our time is always an afterthought? In order to dive into this issue, let’s look at it from a purely profit-driven reasoning. We’re going to take the idea of pro bono out of the equation to see what makes sense from a money standpoint (we are businesses after all, which is why pro bono work should be thought of as an “every now and then” venture).

Agency profits over social progress
Well, yes, agencies are deeply focused on their bottom line. They’re businesses, after all, and in order to keep the doors open, money has to come in. When you look at it through then lens of accounting, devoting a full team to something that doesn’t generate revenue is no different than asking that same team to do nothing at all. That makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint, but it’s also based on a misconception.

The fact is, philanthropic organizations represent good business opportunities for advertising companies. A lot of small organizations in this vein only appear small from the outside. Ten people or less could be running an organization with an endowment in the hundreds of millions. In Winston-Salem, NC, alone, there are at multiple groups that fit that bill. Now, the approval process to get into the funds for marketing purposes may be a little more convoluted, as a board may have to approve the expense of hiring marketing professionals and producing the content they create, but the opportunity to do work for the common good — and get paid for it — certainly exists.

The greater problem: The agency model doesn’t work for philanthropy
We believe agencies want to do more work for social good. Their staffs, especially their creatives, tend to be left-learning politically and caring in general. But the business of philanthropy is at odds with the way agencies work. Agencies generally gravitate to the agency-of-record model for their clients. The client agrees to a yearly scope, and the agency delivers the work.

Philanthropic organizations don’t make sense in this regard, as their marketing needs are few in comparison to a business’s, and what they need marketing for can change monthly, making it impossible to scope out as far as a year. The unpredictability of a philanthropic organization’s needs makes it as hard to put a price tag on a yearly scope as it is to set aside employee time to handle projects.

The UpperNinety Difference
The structure of UpperNinety’s business model changes the game for philanthropy. By purposefully shunning the agency-of-record model, we’re free to take on philanthropic organizations without worry of year scopes or securing employee time. Instead, we will work with you, project to project, as dictated by your marketing needs. We understand that a new program launch will be a solid piece of business, but there may not be much more from you over the next six months. By not being an agency of record, this isn’t an issue for us.

And we don’t have to worry about our employees’ time — with our large roster of experienced, freelance marketing professionals, we adjust the size of our teams to fit the project at hand. So whatever the project size and duration, we have the means to properly staff it without any financial burden on ourself. UpperNinety is poised to do well while doing good.