#LikeAGirl

Like many women I know, I was told repeatedly by my older brother growing up that I threw a softball "like a girl"— despite turning in an impressive season many years later as shortstop for a co-ed softball team I organized at the University of Hawaii, while there on an international reporting fellowship.

That phrase continues to catch my attention, and I heard it again the other night, after leaving a movie at NYC's Film Forum. There, on the street near the subway, I overheard two men accusing a third of "acting like a girl" during an argument that would soon turn into a fistfight. I stopped myself from shouting, to anyone in particular, "What's so bad about acting like a girl?"

Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield and her new three-minute cause video out this month, called #LikeAGirl, has saved me the trouble. Greenfield, who directed the 2012 documentary, Queen of Versailles, was commissioned by feminine hygiene brand, Always, to make the video as part of the company's CSR initiatives. Watched by more than 40 million people on YouTube since it launched last month, the video has sparked a new national conversation on female empowerment and self-esteem.

"Always was interested in looking into how girls deal with the confidence crisis that happens around puberty," Greenfield told CauseGlobal. "Everyone knows that 'crying like a girl' or 'running like a girl' isn't a compliment, but no one takes the off-the-cuff remark too seriously or considers its damage."  Greenfield said she came up with the idea of asking a handful of adults, for her camera, to imitate running, throwing and fighting "like a girl." The results are predictable, but the surprising part comes when Greenfield later asks young girls the same questions.

Have a look. When was the last time you used or heard the phrase? How did you feel when you said or heard it?



-- Marcia Stepanek

Google Oogled

In May, Google announced that, for more than three years -- in more than 30 countries -- it had been "mistakenly collecting" personal data from open WiFi networks as its vehicles roamed the streets taking photos for its Street View mapping service. That data could include people's email messages, their passwords and even the logs of their Web site visits.

This week, more than 30 state attorneys general announced they will begin examining the lawfulness of Google's actions, though it still isn't clear whether Google committed any legal wrongdoing. "At the very least, Google acknowledges that intercepting and gathering people's data was wrong," Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal told WIRED. "But there may be a need to strengthen and enhance federal and state laws." Meanwhile, the chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission has issued a warning to consumers that Google's "behavior" raises important privacy concerns, adding that the collection of WiFi data, "whether intentional or not ... clearly infringes on consumer privacy."

The Google disclosures have triggered one of the biggest public probes of online privacy so far in the digital era. Google, in response to government inquiries and lawsuits, has claimed that it is lawful to use packet-sniffing tools readily available on the Internet to spy on and download payload data from others using the same open Wi-Fi access points. But two months ago, in May, shortly after the FCC and U.S. Justice Department began looking into the Street Maps issue, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a Google developer conference his company "screwed up" by improperly collecting the WiFi data. "We screwed up, and I'm not making excuses about it," Brin said. "Trust is very important to us and we're going to do everything we can to preserve it." Brin said the company is "putting more internal controls into place and bringing in third parties to work on this issue, as well." Google also has begun destroying some of the Wi-Fi data it collected for Street View -- in some cases, at the request of governments, including Britain's. But privacy advocates now say Google should preserve the data and turn it over to governments.

"The problem here is that there are criminal laws at issue, and there is a real question as to whether Google violated these laws," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a nonprofit privacy rights group in Washington. "If it did, the evidence is in the information Google collected. Google has tried to minimize the data it collected, calling it snippets or fragments. But that's a determination that needs to be made by a third party, possibly a prosecutor."

For one of the most comprehensive overviews of the Street Map issue -- including a timeline of the Street View program from its launch in 2007 to Germany's announcement last month that Street View vehicles have been collecting data from WiFi networks -- see EPIC's Web page on the brouhaha.

Street View isn't the only Google product that has been drawing recent privacy concerns. In February, EPIC filed a complaint against the company with the FTC, seeking constraints on Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service. The complaint describes an attempt by Google "to convert the private, personal information of Gmail subscribers into public information" for the Buzz service. "This change in business practices and service terms violated user privacy expectations, diminished user privacy, contradicted Google's own privacy policy, and may have also violated federal wiretap laws." [Facebook also has come under fire from privacy advocates for ongoing problems with its privacy settings, chiefly the lack of control users have over personal information that others have made public about them, including photographs. Another sore spot: Facebook's decision to push users into using its "instant personalization" feature, the company's link to third-party Web sites such as Yelp and Pandora that share users' opinons on shops and tunes.]

What do you think? As the Web becomes more "social," should consumers have more of a say in how their personal data is distributed across social networks? [See Radical Shock, a Q&A by Cause Global with privacy scholar Helen Nissenbaum about the need for new privacy protections that don't care so much about whether data is shared "but whether it's being shared appropriately."] Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: istock.com)

Raising the Bar

What's the biggest takeaway from today's #Promise conference, the last of several social media gabfests to be held this week in Manhattan under the Internet Week banner? It's this: promises mean increasingly less if tied to CSR campaigns employing social media. The cause-wired want more from companies than active Facebook pages, "do-good" prize competitions and a series of product launches tied to cool charities, speakers said. They want less talk and more social problem-solving -- with results.

[Indeed, the public's growing impatience with corporate gabbing-for-good seemed even more pronounced this morning, amid the continuing gusher of bad news from BP and the Gulf. BP's "beyond petroleum" campaign used to be considered one of the CSR movement's more successful "green" branding exercises. But now? The oil spill has dashed the credibility of that campaign; the spill is making it tougher for all high-profile CSR campaigns to be taken very seriously at the moment, speakers agreed.]

To be sure, while nearly a dozen companies used the #promise venue to tout new-and-improved CSR campaigns -- including Pepsi's "Refresh Everything" project to support social entrepreneurship and Twitter's new HOPE140 outreach to nonprofits -- the social activists in attendance were proving to be a tough crowd to please. [Timberland's announcement that it was planting 5 million trees in China and Haiti over the next five years, for example, took some hits on the conference's Twitter back channel. Some argued the trees are needed closer to home while others criticized the company's choice of Yele Haiti as a nonprofit partner, given a recent story in The New York Times questioning Yele's recent financial reporting practices. The sniping continued throughout the day, at one point questioning why Pepsi was touting its Dream Machine recycling initiative without having recycling containers in greater evidence at the conference venue.]

Keynoter Douglas Rushkoff underscored the bad mood of the crowd at mid-day, when he told attendees [and PR types in the audience] that "corporate communications no longer matter. The only thing that actually matters is corporate activity. If it's doing something real, that will be communicated. You don't decide to be transparent. You are transparent."

Among other social media-in-business takeaways from the day:

* Small isn't big enough anymore. Twitter Social Innovation Manager Claire Williams; IBM's Adam Christensen, and Andrew Katz, who manages the Pepsi Refresh Project, agreed as a panel that corporate efforts to retain, develop and attract corporate talent are getting tougher, requiring ever-bigger efforts by companies to develop do-good initiatives that scale in both meaning and impact. IBM's Corporate Service Corps program, where top talent is sent into communities around the world for six-month stints to work on social problem-solving projects, is now "harder to get into than Harvard right now," said Christensen. "(This program) is a kind of Peace Corps for companies and a great way for us to develop our talent and promote leadership skills." Now, he says, IBM is expanding it to include top-level managers.

* CEO buy-in is critical but it's the bottom-up buy-in that counts the most. "As we've seen with so many movements," said Pepsi's Katz, "the power comes from the ground up. Top-down involvement helps, and if companies have enough people who feel really passionately about making a change and doing business differently -- it can work. But it has got to be a little bit of both. Your CEO can give you a little bit of air cover, but unless you have that body of people who are really interested in this, it's not going to go anywhere -- inside or outside the company."

* Patience is a virtue when trying to change the way a company operates. According to Pepsi Refresh's Katz, "we wanted results immediately but the reality is that with what we're trying to do with the Refresh Project, it's a slower burn. Right now, we've done a really successful job against 10 percent of the population that is really deeply engaged in the project. But how do we make that mainstream and mass? We need to balance the need for immediate results with our objective of trying to change the way we're doing business."

* Stakeholder engagement is a resource in times of crisis. "Imagine if, when (the BP) disaster happened, BP had embraced the social networks," Ogilvy planning director Evan Slater said. "Instead of telling people, 'you can't come research this' ... imagine if they had gone out to the social networks and said, 'We're going to take $30 million and put out a reward for the group of individuals, the organization, the company that can find a solution to this problem.' I think the difference would have been phenomenal.'

Were you at the #Promise conference? We'd love you to share some of your take-aways. Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

Cause-washing: The New Black?

We've all heard about green-washing, what Urban Dictionary defines as "when companies pretend to be environmentally friendly -- when in fact they are not." Now there's a new term -- cause-washing -- that's being used with increasing frequency in the blogosphere to describe inauthentic marketing-for-good.

To talk about this and other new trends and challenges in the worlds of corporate responsibility and social enterprise, I sat down recently with the popular Harvard Business School marketing professor V. Kasturi Rangan, who moderated a panel in February on the subject at Harvard's Social Enterprise Conference 2010. Rangan says he worries a lot about how some causes may be considered a better "sell" than others. He also says he thinks it will soon become critical for companies involved in cause-branding to start proving social impact amid an increasingly cause-crowded marketplace -- but adds that few firms are, as yet, up to the challenge. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation:

What are the new cause-branding trends going forward?
I see pluses and minuses. Cause branding requires you to attach the cause to brand and then commercialize it; there are some causes that are more commercialize-able than others. That does not mean that those other causes are any less important. Some causes pull on your heartstrings. And sure, none of us want to see a hungry child; none of us wants to see children without access to education; we don't want to see children without access to health care. I mean, emotionally, we get pulled in. But there may be other things, for example -- drug addicts; for example, older adults who some in society might think are supposed to take care of themselves. Those kinds of causes may not be saleable, commercialize-able. So my worry is that if we cause-brand some causes and not others based on how sale-able they are to the general public, then we are letting private enterprise choose what is most important for society -- which may not exactly align with what the most important causes are. I really worry about that a lot. There needs to be some sort of clearing mechanism where not just the causes that are commercialize-able dominate all of the money from corporations. There must be some mechanism whereby some of the other causes also have a chance to get some corporate money to play up their causes.

On the plus side, we in America are a mature market. Most consumers in America pretty much know what kinds of products and services they can get and so it's very clear that a differentiation factor is what a company is doing for society. I believe a lot more products and brands will jump into cause-branding. When all is said and done, cause marketing is just a teeny fraction of philanthropy - about $15 billion or $20 billion, alone, versus all of philanthropy, which is about $350 billion. So we might see more corporate money coming into cause branding, and this is good. Once a corporation attaches itself to a cause, it tends to take it seriously, and public companies have oversight and so forth to help guide them in how well they execute. So it's good for the business. It's good for the social fabric.

And the downside? Is cause marketing a tougher sell?
Yes, if everybody claims that everybody is doing a great thing for such and such a cause, and then sooner or later, consumers will become skeptics. It's already starting to happen in some cases. I think the most authentic brands going forward will not only have to be transparent about how they are raising money and how they are spending it, they also now will have to show they are having a social impact. This is something that I do not think that most corporations are ready for. Corporations are willing to show financial impact. They are willing to show transparency. They are willing to show they're authentic about what they are thinking. But are they ready to show that yes, this is the cause that I care for, and look at the impact I've made in society? That, I don't think, the corporations are ready for. But it is something that corporations that really want to differentiate themselves are going to have to step up for. It's a new game for them that many haven't yet started to think about.

Why aren't most ready?
It's a cost item, and it's incredibly more difficult to achieve. Measuring social impact is different than measuring financial impact. (See "Does Corporate Philanthropy Sell?)

Can you cite a company that is?
Timberland, for one, is trying to measure the social impact of what it is trying to do. It's an early symbol of what is happening.

What are the stiffest challenges for cause-marketers?
The only way to succeed here is to support value. Newman's Own and others say that at best, consumers may pay a small premium for a cause-brand, but not a lot more. Cause brands now need to operate at a superb level of efficiency and effectiveness just to generate an extra surplus to support the cause and the movement. Cause brands have to be very lean, very hungry and really tough.

And secondly, of course, cause brands need to be authentic. That's always been the case and this is becoming ever more critical. When you lose trust on 'good' initiatives, your brand suffers irretrievably. A decade ago, maybe you could get by with a little sloppiness on the authenticity front but now - because there are so many companies claiming to be helping a cause - you have to run these cause branding campaigns as both a terrific business and you have to be authentic. There are so many watchdogs on the Web now that will call you out if you're not. With online social networks, successes and failures get amplified. Customers talk to other customers and stumbles can hurt badly. The Web is both a friend and a foe.

In that vein, what do you make of the new consumer activism online - chiefly social enterprises like Carrotmob, Quiet Riots and Good Guide that crowdsource consumer opinion? Are these new online networks friends or foes?
My quick takes on it? This is good for companies; they can get real-time consumer feedback. But companies and movements have to be careful. Ultimately, corporations and brands exist to show a return to shareholders. Some of these movements and the things they ask for may be perfect from the point of view of the small group of consumers that these movements represent. However, what these consumer groups are asking for might not form a valuable business proposition in terms of scale or in terms of sustaining the franchise because a company may not be able to make that kind of product or service available for, say, a mere 10,000 people in a northeast corner somewhere, or to a certain type of demographic. And that's where I think the problems might come, where it becomes like an activist movement, where the activists get up in arms over, say, what mothers really need but there's not a single firm able to take care of it.

If these new online consumer movements can be translated by companies into something viable business-wise, they will present an opportunity for businesses. As long as the consumer feedback is viewed constructively and firms are mindful of the fact that these are great opportunities for them to learn about digital markets and get a very quick sense of how [online complaint] builds up, maybe [online consumer groups] can help companies to decrease the cost of launching a product and taking it to market.

Otherwise, I'm afraid that these [consumer] movements could create more dissonance - cases where these online groups will not have impact and then start to feel used, thinking 'I gave all of these ideas to this company but look at what corporate American has done. It's not stepped up to the plate.' Businesses, beware.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by Matt Hertel for istock.com)

Oops, They Did It Again?

Here we go again. A corporate contest that uses social media to raise money and recognition for good causes is being cited for unfair meddling.

Last month, Chase Community Challenge got into trouble for allegedly disqualifying three nonprofits - Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Marijuana Policy Project, and an anti-abortion group, Justice for All -- over concerns it had about associating the Chase brand with their missions, even though the three organizations were among the favorites of those eligible to vote for them. [Chase also took a drubbing for failing to provide a clear leader board to let "do-good" groups keep tabs of the votes during the contest.]

Now it's Pepsi Refresh's turn to stumble. According to an article by philanthropy reporter Stephanie Strom that ran today in The New York Times, Pepsi Refresh -- which plans to give $20 million to good causes this year -- "accidentally gave a charity currently on top of its rankings a little boost by allowing it to submit some materials after its own submission deadline," Strom wrote. Materials submitted by the Joyful Heart Foundation, a charity founded by Law & Order star Mariska Hargitay to help victims of sexual assault, were updated after the submission deadline -- which is against the contest rules. This, Strom reported, "upset some of the contestants who wondered whether Pepsi was doing favors for a celebrity. 'I can't edit my own submission, so how did she do it?' said one who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his chances" of winning prize money.

Strom also quoted Jill Beraud, chief marketing office for the American beverages unit at Pepsi, as saying it was an honest mistake. "We didn't follow our guidelines to the letter," Beraud told Strom. "The bottom line is that we've learned from this and we're moving on." Beraud says Pepsi, as a result, will give away three $250,000 prizes this month instead of two as originally planned.

What is it about these corporate contests that makes it so hard for administrators to stop meddling over the outcomes? Transparency bites? Let us hear from you.

(Photo: Flickr)

Roundtable: Does Giving Sell?

(Clockwise from top left: Ellen Goldberg Luger, VP of General Mills, Inc. and Executive Director of the General Mills Foundation; Libby Archell, Director of Global Volunteering for Alcoa Inc.; Wendy Ramage Hawkins, Executive Director of the Intel Foundation, and Stacey Cooper, VP of Community Development Banking at Capital One. PHOTOS: Dan Demetriad)

I sat down early yesterday morning -- on Corporate Philanthropy Day -- at the New York Stock Exchange with the top giving executives of Alcoa, General Mills, Intel, and Capital One Bank. We talked a bit about the latest philanthropy trends in the corporate sector and how critical it's getting to try proving impact. It's a challenge that companies now share with nonprofits.

According to the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, a group of business CEOs convened by the late actor Paul Newman to push corporations to give more, less than 1 percent of corporate profits go to charity and philanthropy. Amid public polls showing higher-than-ever public distrust of corporations, the CECP is urging member companies (including those represented by these four women) to start measuring the impact of their giving. It's not enough to say they're making a difference, the CECP says. Better to prove it, so as to be more credible and strategic about their programs.

What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

Jean-Paul Garnier, on the CECP board and the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, told me in a 2008 interview that "public trust has gone down, and in a way, philanthropy gets us on the right side of the ledger." Public trust in corporations is even lower today than it was two years ago and corporate giving is still stuck at under 1 percent of profits. How much can measuring impact help to boost the public's perception of corporate citizenship?

LUGAR: Quite a bit. But just as significantly, measuring impact also helps companies internally. The (CECP's) initiative here is also about helping more corporate giving professionals prove the strategic importance of their work to their corporate boards. ...Many (corporate giving professionals) cite measurement as their primary management challenge and this will help to give those engaged in this work in this sector an exciting new opportunity to identify the most promising steps forward.

ARCHELL: Let me add to that. This is about doing more to align the work of the foundation with the business. We're seeing this evolving. There is now an expectation from the company that its foundation will start applying the metrics and rigor to what it gives, to see that what we're funding is, indeed, having an impact -- and if it's not, then making sure we start shifting our focus to giving areas that will.

That less-than-1-percent spending figure isn't changing, but some companies are pushing harder to develop their corporate volunteer programs -- engaging employees already keen to give to do it on the job, under the corporate brand. This has obvious marketing benefits for companies, as well as benefits for the community. It also tends to be a good retention and recruitment tool for some companies.

ARCHELL: In 2006, we had 12 percent of our employees volunteering. Last year, engagement was up to 37 percent. Anecdotally, Generation Y is much more socially-minded and interested in working at companies that have reputations for innovative giving programs. Volunteerism is something that is also seen as going beyond 'checkbook philanthropy.' Beyond that, we're also becoming more strategic about the philanthropy we do engage in. For the past year, we've been refocusing our efforts within the context of the downward trend in the external environment, developing a series of programs in the manufacturing belt, for example, to help people firm up and update a shakiness in skills.

HAWKINS: We support what our employees are doing, whether matching time or money, and that comes to about $20 million a year. Another $80 million goes into direct philanthropy, and almost all of that is in the form of funding for better education. (Our employee matching program) is a very popular program, here and around the world -- so popular that it nearly blew us away last year (laughter). This is part of a trend, but also the realization that the full extent of what we are as a corporation is not just about philanthropic dollars, but also time, the energy of our employees, the pro bono help we can offer to those who need it, and the targeting of our in-kind giving -- even the production of some products from the start that are made specifically for people tackling solutions to social problems. Corporate philanthropy today is all of those things together.

LUGAR: At General Mills, 82 percent of our employees volunteer. The other place where our board and corporate boards in general now want to know, is, 'What's the sweet spot for General Mills regarding our philanthropy? How does it connect with business strategy?' So we now focus a lot of our work on hunger and empowering women through working with CARE and other nonprofits and programs, investing in agriculture in Africa, and now China, and we're also using many of our R&D employees to help transfer their technical skills to help.

We've heard of "greenwashing" -- the term used to describe efforts by companies to dispel criticism of their environmental policies by touting green initiatives but falling short when it comes time to deliver. Another term is gaining currency -- "cause-washing." As the directors of corporate giving arms, it's a tough sell out there. How do you meet this challenge?

ARCHELL: Any initiative that encourages companies to start measuring their philanthropic impact on a community is really welcome in that regard. I think all the programs we're running are having a significant impact, of course. But it's one thing for me to say it and another to have the metrics to prove it. We have a stronger story to tell if the people we're helping can talk about how we made a difference in terms that everyone can understand.

LUGAR: The field is looking for more accountability, so the CECP's initiative is being very well-received so far by corporations that have been trying to explain more precisely the impact, or even to convince the board that more such activity can "pay." ... Corporate boards want to see ROI and this initiative gives those of us working in (corporate foundations) new impetus to go after the kind of projects that can be measured ... and to be more strategic about focusing our time and money.

HAWKINS: We're a company of engineers and so we love to measure. (laughter) ... Corporate foundations are one of the ways by which the corporation engages with the outside world. We're active in education, so one of the first things we did as a foundation was develop a tool with which to train teachers how to use technology, because they were saying they were afraid of technology and of the students. So now we've trained 7.5 million teachers around the world, and out of that initiative, which began purely as a philanthropic initiative, the company is now looking around and saying there's a market out there, and it's developed an entire branch (of the company) that focuses on education and technology, triggered largely by the experience of philanthropic engagement in this community. I think we're going to be seeing more of this type of thing, where philanthropic engagement leads to new products and new forms of engagement with the communities we serve (commercially).

Pepsi Refresh is one of the first social media experiments in the sector aimed at boosting public-private collaboration around philanthropy. How is the Web changing your company's approaches to giving?

HAWKINS: We live and breathe technology because of who we are. We are using social networking to supplement many of our programs and to engage the public and advocate for the things we care about. We also have a lot of student competition programs in science and technology; we are engaging in a lot of online contests, dialogues, mentoring programs and judging. The Intel-Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge is all about supporting entrepreneurship and innovation. At our science competitions, kids show up with patents or patents pending. It's in the water in which we swim.

ARCHELL: We've been watching this space for a while, and we're launching a new partnership with the EarthWatch Institute, working with them to place environmental experts and teachers into the field in various parts of the world -- Kenya and South America -- and we will be having them report back, live, via the Web into suburban classrooms about environmental sustainability. This is about giving kids exposure to places they could not travel to themselves, and we look forward to developing this further.

LUGAR: We just launched an online community partnership with CARE that's called Join My Village. General Mills is focused on hunger as a cause. This online project with CARE works with 75 African villages; women in this country, families, anyone can go onto the Web site, 'join' the village and hear the stories of the women who live there, and then contribute in a personal way to those villages, to help those women achieve their dreams. Social media used in this way, either alone or partnering with a nonprofit, can empower women and help us work on hunger issues in Africa.

COOPER: We have bank branches run by students as part of our community programs, and clearly, media coverage about our activities can be a powerful incentive, and so we are trying to actively get the story out there, using traditional media and new media, letting kids themselves tell the stories about how their volunteer work is helping people and changing their lives. Are there more such stories that need to be told? I believe there are and technology can help.

All four of you happen to be women; is this a fluke or are the majority of people leading corporate philanthropy arms these days women?

HAWKINS: I do see that women seem to be more present (in corporate foundations) but there is an opportunity for women to come in at the leadership role. Often women have tended to be more present at the staff level of some of these foundations and even today, I'd say that corporations could do more in terms of hiring women as top leaders of their philanthropic operations. There's no question about what's going on at my company -- I'm a woman -- but around the table, I often see men brought in from outside to lead foundations where much of the work has been done by women.

-- Marcia Stepanek

PHOTOS: Dan Demetriad