I just stumbled upon a fascinating thought piece from Mindshare, a global marketing/media company, part of an occasional series they publish under the rubric CultureVulture.

This report is simply titled Entertainment and discusses the various ways that evolving media use and particularly the way we receive, view and interact with entertainment content will spill over into how brands must be marketed.

The Agitator’s view has always been that fundraising — certainly the communications aspect of fundraising — must be viewed in the broader social and cultural context in which it occurs.

Like it or not, your cause or charity is one more ‘product’ competing for the consumer’s attention, dollars and loyalty. And the messages, channels and creative approaches you use must be competitive with the tools and methods used in the ‘mainstream’ media … or you will be totally lost in the din.

In particular, this report argues, how you use (and come to expect) media to entertain yourself will shape how you will respond to media that is attempting to market to you.

The section of Entertainment that especially caught my attention was titled Snacking and Bingeing. It discussed two opposite phenomena — on the one hand, individuals are consuming information/entertainment in smaller and smaller bites, making it harder and harder for marketers to get their messages across. The report calls this ‘snacking’, an image that strikes me as quite apt.

Further, more and more of this snacking is now done ‘on the run’ via mobile devices … not generally the best environment for educating or influencing considered judgements.

If you picture your donors as merely snacking on the communications you send their way, you might be inspired to re-think at least some of what and how you are communicating! What is the compelling bite-size version of your message?

Yet on the other hand, consumers are also using available media tools and services for bingeing — e.g., watching back-to-back the three episodes of Homeland or The Walking Dead they missed … maybe even the entire previous season!

The notion of bingeing gave me a really scary thought …

What if you donor could download a year’s worth of your communications to them and review all of it end-to-end? What would be their takeaway?!

Do you think your organization would have delivered a persona or offered a relationship that the typical donor would actually feel good about engaging? Or would the impression received be more akin to a con artist?

Maybe we’re better off with snacking!

Tom