In 1990, one of the last great stands of Canada's temperate interior rainforest, outside Nelson, British Columbia, was slated for clear-cut logging. I had no client, no budget, and no institutional backing. I had a cause, a design table, and a question nobody else was asking.
What would move people to act who had never been moved before?
Five years later, after crisscrossing Canada more than a dozen times, visiting universities and stores, building a network of 180 retailers, and collecting tens of thousands of petition signatures, that 65,000-acre forest was protected forever as West Arm Provincial Park.
The methodology that has driven every engagement since was born on that road. When you design for both sides to genuinely benefit, the system sustains itself long after your involvement ends.
Most cause marketing stops at awareness because that is what most organizations know how to ask for. The organizations that came to us arrived wanting attention. The conversation that followed helped them see they could ask for something more. Heroes. Partners. People who would carry the mission forward long after the campaign ended, because they had been given an identity worth inhabiting rather than a message worth ignoring.
Every engagement began the same way. Someone arrived asking for something: a t-shirt, a giveaway, an awareness campaign. The conversation that followed changed what they thought they were asking for.
Most cause marketing stops at awareness because that is what most organizations know how to ask for. The organizations that came to us arrived wanting attention. The conversation that followed helped them see they could ask for something more. Heroes. Partners. People who would carry the mission forward long after the campaign ended, because they had been given an identity worth inhabiting rather than a message worth ignoring.
Every engagement began the same way. Someone arrived asking for something: a t-shirt, a giveaway, an awareness campaign. The conversation that followed changed what they thought they were asking for.
A community needed to protect an endangered forest. I designed a line of t-shirts that gave students an identity worth inhabiting. They became something instead of performing an action and walking away. 180 retail stores carried the shirts and the petition. The stores gained a demographic they had never served before. The students gained a story worth telling. The forest gained tens of thousands of voices.
Nobody had to lose for someone else to win. The forest is now West Arm Provincial Park, protected forever.
A client came asking for a T-shirt to raise awareness of the amphibian extinction crisis.
We asked more questions. Amphibians are dying largely due to pollutants and climate change. So I made the medium the message. The shirt was printed with water-based inks on organic cotton, and the screens were cleaned with a citric-based solution. The object itself answered the question it was asking people to care about.
Then we built a system around it. I created FrogFriendly.ca, which became Canada's first sustainable marketing resource in 2008. We partnered with sustainable suppliers to offer a complete solution. To promote the site, we sent a card printed on 100% recycled paper with a pen made from corn cellulose. The card quantified exactly how much less water, trees, and energy this promotion consumed compared to a conventional one. The promotional piece proved its own argument in the act of being received.
That campaign drove over $100,000 in additional sales in its first year and won the first gold award in Green Marketing from the PPPC. Canada's first.
The City of Edmonton approached us with a budget for giveaways and a goal of reducing single-passenger vehicle use in a pilot neighbourhood.
We composted the giveaway idea and repurposed the budget to seed something different.
We sent every household a litre log printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. The log asked residents to record the kilometres driven in the month before the challenge began. Traffic counters were placed at every exit from the neighbourhood to independently verify the data. Before the challenge started, residents owned their own baseline.
During the challenge month, every household received a refrigerator magnet game. Each square represented a different form of non-carbon travel. Points were earned for each. The game made sustainable transportation a family activity rather than a civic obligation.
Every household also received a seeded paper mirror hanger for their car. If the hanger was visible in the parked car during commute hours for two consecutive days, the household was entered to win a prize. The car itself became the commitment device. The seeded paper could be planted when the challenge ended. The commitment device composted itself into something that grows.
Nobody was asked to report their game scores. Residents turned them in anyway because the game had made them heroes in a common purpose.
The average kilometre reduction was 400km. The target was 100km. Estimated CO2 reductions exceeded four metric tonnes. Canada's second gold in Green Marketing from the PPPC.
Many compelling causes produce awareness and nothing else. These Purpose-Ecosystems™ succeeded because every element was designed around the specific person who needed to be moved, what they needed to feel, and what would make them choose to act on their own terms.
That is the founding principle of the Symbiotic Systems Methodology. Both sides benefit or the system fails. The organization gets the outcome it needs. The person gets something worth saying yes to. When that condition is met the system sustains itself. When it is not the campaign ends when the budget does.
Every Organization Has a Cause Worth Building Toward
A cause is not limited to a charity or non-profit. It does, however, require pure intent toward the people the organization most needs to move. The association that wants its members to genuinely thrive, not just renew, is building a community, not a database. The B2B company that wants to recruit the right people rather than the available people is designing for someone's life, not filling a headcount. The government program that prioritizes measurable behaviour change over awareness is trying to make a genuine difference in how people live, not to produce a report.
Often the why is not yet visible when the conversation begins. The organization arrives knowing what they want. The conversation that follows uncovers why people should care. It is in that alignment, the organization's genuine purpose on one side and the people's genuine need on the other, where the two points of the bridge become visible and the work of building it can begin.
If you are an organization making a genuine difference in the lives of people, communities, or the natural world, the About You page was written for you.
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Do Better Marketing
(a division of Avatar Brand Management Inc.)
Do Better Marketing sees the person behind the role. That act of seeing has protected forests, changed how business leaders see domestic violence, and hired senior engineers. Marketing Triage™. Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design. Dimensional Advertising™. Symbiotic Systems Methodology. GreenMeets™. Edmonton, Alberta.
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