HOW PURPOSE CAN CREATE COMMON GROUNDON HIGHER GROUND

Empowering people in America to perform
extraordinary acts in the face of emergency situations.

You might wonder why a nonprofit, philanthropic organization whose only function is to make a positive difference in the world would need to go through the process of discovering their purpose. Shouldn’t their purpose be obvious? Especially if the organization is one of America’s most trusted, most recognized, and most supported philanthropic organizations? Well, if you work for an organization that has multiple lines of business, all seemingly different and yet equally important to the people impacted by those services, you might be able to empathize with the challenge faced by the American Red Cross.

When your house is seemingly divided, it’s hard to stand on solid ground. A large part of our work with the American Red Cross has been finding the common ground upon which all lines of service can be built. In so doing, we can help create a brand that is greater than the sum of its parts. If you’re working in an organization with numerous business units operating in silos, you might think that coming up with a common, unified purpose is an impossible task. I am happy to tell you that there might be far more common ground than you think.

THE SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND

Currently, the American Red Cross has about five core lines of service:

• Disaster Relief: they respond to more than seventy thousand disasters, including house or apartment fires, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hazardous materials spills, transportation accidents, explosions, and other natural and man-made disasters.

• Preparedness Health and Safety Services: they teach citizens to be prepared for emergencies by assisting people in creating an emergency kit, making a plan, and being informed about appropriate steps to take. They prepare people to save lives through health and safety education and training. They help citizens with everything from first aid and CPR to swimming and lifeguarding.

• International Services: They help vulnerable people around the world prevent, prepare for, and respond to disasters, complex humanitarian emergencies, and life-threatening health conditions.

• Biomedical: they collect nearly half of the nation’s blood supply.

• Services to Armed Forces: They send communication on behalf of family members who are facing emergencies or other important events to members of the U.S. Armed Forces serving all over the world.

With all these services supported by the Red Cross, it was becoming increasingly difficult for people in the organization to answer the seemingly simple question: What is the purpose of the American Red Cross?

If you were to try to answer that question from the “lines of service” perspective, you might hear five very different answers. And if you assembled the leaders from each one of those divisions into a room together to talk about the American Red Cross brand overall, you might find great difficulty arriving at a definition that everyone could embrace. You might end up developing individual marketing campaigns to support each business unit and, in the process, miss out on the opportunity to build a very powerful brand that is more than the sum of the parts. And that’s exactly what was happening.

Our job was to dig deep into each one of these lines of service and uncover the common ground that could transcend the specific line of service and explain the overarching purpose of the American Red Cross.

DISCOVERING THE CORE PURPOSE OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS

To discover your core purpose, you have to understand the difference that you make in the lives of the people whom you serve. The American Red Cross is unique because it makes a difference not only in the life of the person receiving the help, but also in the life of the individual who provides aid to someone in dire need of assistance.

Let’s start with a look at the more obvious beneficiary—the people in the midst of a dire emergency. We learned that no matter what line of service we’re talking about, the American Red Cross makes a difference by transforming a life in some form of crisis to a life with some form of hope. That hope can come in many forms depending on the service—life-sustaining blood, a shoulder to cry on, short-term resources, or critical information—but all offer some form of substantive help that empowers the individuals to carry on. All these lines of service have an almost immediate and obvious transformative effect on the beneficiary.

But more enlightening was the transformative effect that the American Red Cross had in the life of the donor. When we talked to the people who had stepped up to write checks, donate blood, take a course, volunteer, or prepare for an emergency, we discovered another powerful transformation occurring:

• The act of writing a check to help a life in crisis transformed the donor from a passive/apathetic individual to an empowered/ compassionate humanitarian.

• The act of donating blood—literally giving a piece of your life away—transformed someone from an average individual to a potential life-saving hero.

• The act of preparing for a disaster transformed people from average householders to responsible parents and citizens capable of protecting loved ones.

• The act of getting trained in CPR or first aid transformed a person from a passive observer of an emergency situation to an empowered lifesaver.

The idea of transforming individuals from ordinary Joes to extraordinary heroes was and is a very powerful idea. At the end of the day, people have an innate desire to demonstrate their humanity—their worthiness as a human being. They want to step up to the plate when called upon and deliver help to those in need. The revelation in understanding this transformation is that the relevance of the American Red Cross is rooted more in the ability to facilitate humanitarian instincts than it is in providing any particular line of service.

What makes the American Red Cross such a beloved and relevant organization is that it facilitates this humanitarian instinct by empowering individuals to make a difference in the lives of people who are in some form of crisis. It is not so much how they do it but that they do it that matters.

And this bodes well for the organization, especially from the perspective of more efficient and effective communication. We could waste a lot of money trying to make people care about the lines of service that the Red Cross is engaged in. But people don’t wake up thinking about natural disasters or the nation’s blood supply. They do, however, care about being good human beings. They want to go to bed at night knowing that they did their part to use their talents, gifts, and resources to make a difference in the world. With this understanding, the lines of service merely become the ways in which people can make a difference—they are a means to a much nobler end. They can change over time (and have) in response to the emergencies facing the public.

At this point you might be saying, “well, that’s a great insight about human motivation but why can the Red Cross serve that need better than any other philanthropic organization?” There are two unique aspects of the organization that answer the question.

The Nature of High-Impact Emergency Situations Provides a Gratifying Experience

The American Red Cross is inextricably associated with emergency situations, which the public defines as any situation that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• Requires an immediate response

• has an element of immediacy (or else)

• a moment when circumstances exceed preparations

• near impossible for an individual to handle on his or her own

• is life altering (a life is impacted in a dramatic way)

• potentially a life-or-death situation

Compared with ongoing societal issues upon which many organizations can spend a lifetime attempting to make headway, the American Red Cross deals with emergency situations that demand immediate action and, consequently, provide immediate gratification—for all parties involved. People like seeing the difference they made—a life is saved, a family is sheltered, a heart attack victim is saved, a military family is reunited. There is no question of “making progress.” This is a critical appeal of the American Red Cross in a world where people can be easily overwhelmed at the prospects of making progress on issues that may take a lifetime to solve.

The American Red Cross Provides More Opportunities for Fulfilling Humanitarian Instincts in Highly Visible, Highly Personal Ways over the Course of a Lifetime

The vast majority (70 percent to 90 percent) of engagement with charitable organizations involves check writing to aid in a cause where you may never have a sense of the difference that was made by your contribution. When you write a check to the American Red Cross, however, you can turn on CNN and visibly see that money being used to help someone in the midst of a disaster. When I see the Red Cross truck pull up and starting passing out water and blankets, I feel like I’m the one that put that blanket around their shoulder.—American Red Cross financial donor

But beyond check writing, the American Red Cross provides people with a lifetime of options through which they can express their humanitarian instincts. Whether you’re taking a class, giving blood, getting prepared, volunteering, or writing a check, you’re expressing your desire to be ready to make a difference in the event that an emergency strikes.

If you’re a mother of three with no time to volunteer, you can go online at night and learn how to prepare your home for an emergency. If you’re a college kid short of money, you can give blood. If you can spend two days learning CPR, you can be ready to save a life if anyone ever needs you. Whatever life situation you happen to be in, the American Red Cross will have some opportunity for you to express your humanitarian instincts and make a difference in the life of someone in crisis.

Empowering people in America to perform extraordinary acts
in the face of emergency situations.

ACTIVATING THE PURPOSE THROUGH POWERFUL POSITIONING

The next question we had to answer was: How do we activate it in the marketplace? How do we position the organization in the most effective manner to drive people to give their time, money, or blood?

To answer that question effectively, we have to understand what’s keeping people from taking action presently. Unfortunately, when they seek channels for their altruism, they often feel like they can’t make a meaningful difference. Most organizations just want their money, and most donors don’t have a lot of faith that their donations will make much of a difference.

However, the American Red Cross gives people a direct sense of making a difference because of the high-impact, high-visibility, direct nature of the work. Both parties lives are enhanced by the interaction: you give blood/a life is saved; you donate/a life gets back on its feet; you prepare/your family is kept safe; you get trained/an individual gets saved—making the life-changing, transformative nature of an interaction with the American Red Cross the first key to effectively positioning the brand and driving action.

We also found that there was an unintended consequence of complacency when a philanthropic organization takes too much credit for the good deeds done by the organization. It leaves people feeling that “the organization” will take care of it. One of the most remarkable aspects of the American Red Cross is the volunteer army that makes it run. If ordinary people do not rise to the occasion to help those in the midst of a crisis, the work of the American Red Cross will not get done.

With that in mind, we developed the following positioning strategy:

Be part of a life-changing experience. When emergency strikes, lives can suddenly take a different path. When you rise to meet the challenge, everyone’s life begins changing for the better.

BRINGING IT TO LIFE

By recognizing that the American Red Cross is a conduit for the humanitarian instincts of the volunteers and donors, the communication between the organization and its constituents immediately began to change. The Red Cross shifted its narrative from a ‘look what we’re doing” to “look what you’ve done.” The messaging expanded to include not only the difference that was being made in the lives of Red Cross beneficiaries, but also the difference that was made in the life of the donor or volunteer.

Sometimes this kind of not-so-subtle change in tone can make a significant difference in the quality of engagement with your constituents. Consider the following “One Minute Update,” the monthly e-mail newsletter from the American Red Cross:

E-Mail Update

Subject: Have Pride in Your Life-Giving Work • One Minute Update • February 2008

You Make a Living by what you Get, But you make a life . . .
by what you Give!—Sir Winston Churchill

Dear Haley,

Every day at the American Red Cross we are privileged to witness the truth of Churchill’s stirring words. In a society, where so many are focused on what they get, I am proud of the volunteers at the

Red Cross who focus on what they give. And what they give is truly life giving:

• Aid to the Military and their Families

The miracle of giving is that when we give these basic necessities of life to another human being, we receive a gift too . . . the gift of life! What we give comes back to us 100 fold . . . what goes around comes around. We receive the benefits of our own giving in the joy we see in the renewed lives of people in need whose lives were saved by our gift.

These are challenging times at the Red Cross and in our troubled and broken world where natural disaster and violence occur every day. This is a time for all of us to step up and give the gift of life . . . and in so doing, we receive life ourselves! Thank you for your incredible generosity to the Red Cross. As you continue to give time, dollars and the necessities of life to others, may you discover the truth of Churchill’s words: “You make a living by what you get . . . but you make a life by what you give.”

With pride in your life-giving work,

Bonnie McElveen-Hunter

Chairman of the Board, American Red Cross

This letter eloquently captures the desire for a life well lived that drives donor and volunteer involvement across all lines of service. If you lead a membership organization, does the communication you send to your members speak to their needs—or yours? Do you fundamentally understand their attraction to your organization? By recognizing how your organization is uniquely suited to fulfill deep-seated needs of your members, you can begin to develop relationships with them that are much more rewarding for everyone involved.

CHANGE A LIFE, STARTING WITH YOUR OWN

The purpose and the positioning provided a home for all the various lines of service to “live in.” Working together, they tell a much more intriguing and compelling story of the American Red Cross than any one of them could accomplish alone.

Each piece of communication is designed to celebrate the actions taken by ordinary individuals that made a big difference in the lives of others. Each piece of communication closes with an affirmation of the transformative effect on both individuals: Change a life, starting with your own. We invite people to explore “life-changing opportunities” at the American Red Cross—giving them the freedom to find the right opportunity to express their humanitarian nature among any line of business that suits their situation or interest.

The American Red Cross gives people a direct sense of making a difference because of the high-impact, high-visibility, direct nature of the work. This campaign demonstrates how both lives are enhanced by the interaction.

WINNING ON PURPOSE

Finding the common ground upon which all lines of Red Cross service could build was rewarding for us and productive for them. Now we are helping to create a brand that is more vital to its constituents and truly greater than the sum of its parts.

The ultimate measure of success will be to track an increase in the number of people engaging in humanitarian action through the American Red Cross. We want to see a world where we turn “good intentions” into meaningful action. We want to see the American Red Cross become the partner that empowers people with the know-how and the wherewithal to stretch their humanitarian muscles and make a difference.