Ass Cream

By Aaron Hurst on September 8, 2008 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My two year old daughter calls ice cream - ass cream. Every time she says it, multiple times a day given her love for ass cream, it still cracks me up.  

It is one of the joys of being around little kids - the unexpected.  They constantly say and do things that catch you by surprise and make your day fun.

The best marketers and entertainers understand our desire to be surprised.  They get that seeing the expected makes very little impression on folks.

Sadly, most marketing and media is far from surprising. It is at comfort food at best.

The earnestness of the nonprofit sector makes nonprofit marketing the least surprising and therefore often the least effective and least memorable.  No one dares to potentially offend and therefore plays it super safe.

Nonprofit marketing rarely takes risks.  It is usually the same formulas over and over again.  Look at our home page.  We have one of the classic formulas going - the photo of the child in need.  Check out the marketing materials for 12 nonprofits and you will see very little variation.

Even our tame tagline, 'do it pro bono,' scared a number of people on our team who predicted that foundations would be offended and would stop funding us.  They weren't and they didn't.

How do we give nonprofits permission to take some marketing risks and make an impression?