The Lady Gaga Guide to Emotional Connections
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Now more than ever, brands need to form emotional connections with their audiences. Lady Gaga shows us how to do exactly that with five tips. More on our blog: theblacksheepagency.com/blog
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The Lady Gaga Guide to Emotional Connections
- 17. The Houston Zoo PR/Marketing Team collaborated with GONZO247 to create this series of wildlife murals.
Editor's Notes
- Good morning! WAKE UP I love that you’re all here, this means you want to learn and do better—you’re my kind of people.
- Today, we’re going to talk about using passion and urgency to drive action. Nonprofits talk a lot about service delivery, programs, budgets and development all of which are critical pieces to the puzzle but one thing I’ve seen is that organizations need a little help with emotionally connecting with their audiences.
- There’s probably no room on earth that Lady Gaga could enter without causing a ruckus. She’s great at grabbing attention, whether she’s singing—or literally just being—anywhere. But that isn’t the most interesting part about her. It’s what she does with that attention that’s magical.
- Gaga is unique because she’s more than a pop star—she’s an advocate. She is outspoken about causes near and dear to her heart. Because some of you may not be superfans—or fans at all and because even if you are it’s hard to keep tabs on all she is doing… To put the “why?” of this talk into context, here are a few things Gaga has done as a humanitarian and a philanthropist.
- In 2012, Lady Gaga co-founded the Born this Way Foundation—committed to supporting the wellness of young people and empowering them to create a kinder, braver world. They work with partners to combat bullying, provide better mental health resources, prevent teen suicide and build more positive environments, both online and off. Gaga helps direct the vision of the foundation and gave $1.2 million of her own money to get it started.
- She has been an outspoken advocate for equal rights. In 2009, she spoke at the National March for Equality. In 2011, the Trevor Project awarded her the Trevor Hero Award for raising awareness about LGBTQ issues and inspiring the gay community.
- A continuation of her advocacy work for LGBTQ Americans, Gaga has fought hard for the repeal of DADT. Remember that meat dress? She wore that flanked by four discharged or soon-to-be discharged members of the US military to bring attention to DADT. She has made quite an impact throughout her career and done so by using what matters to her most to connect with and support her audiences. That’s special and unique and it’s worth examining.
- Today, we’re going to walk through 5 examples of how you can use Gaga’s magic to connect with your audience and drive them to action. Before that, I’m going to let you in on a few secrets: you’re doing to have to become friends with your marketing team, you’re going to need to really, deeply connect with the people you’re serving, you’re going to have to rethink what you’ve always done. And the final kicker, you’re going to have to spend money to bring in more money. If you listen to nothing but this, Listen to this. This, in itself, could be an entire presentation. If marketing and development are two different teams in your organization, if you’re in separate wings of the office, if you’re not meeting regularly, you’re doing it wrong. This is one of the most common issues I see among fundraising organizations. Marketing and development don’t get along—and they don’t work together. The most successful, high-fundraising orgs defy this. If you’ve been behind a desk planning fundraising events, sending out campaign emails, courting the top 25 philanthropists, you need to take a minute to get back out to talk to the people If you are doing the things you’ve been doing for years, you’re probably doing the wrong things. The world has changed. Technology, politics, human needs…
- Spectacle is exciting—the unexpected gets remembered—but it’s nothing without substance. You can have a beautiful brand, a shiny new website, all the gorgeous collateral in the world, but if you can’t get across why people should care about your organization, they aren’t going to open their hearts to your mission. And if they don’t open their hearts to your mission, they definitely won’t open their wallets. There are organizations all over the world with less resources than yours that are making just as big of an impact or sometimes even more of an impact than you are. Why? They know exactly how to emotionally connect with their audiences by telling a substantial, inclusive, accessible story with flair. Take, for example, the Ol Pejeta Conservency in Kenya. They did something really unusual recently, something that made people do a double take.
- They created a dating profile for a rhino. The last male of his species, he needs an heir and they’re raising money to make that happen. Hence the call for people to swipe right to donate. Within hours of the profile going live, it had so many hits that the site crashed. People really responded.
- It’s a wild way to create some spectacle—bringing in awareness and donation dollars because they were bold and clear in their mission. And how can you find your story, one you can use to create a bigger impact? Return to your values. Your core. What makes you unique and powerful. This is your passion and your passion is what can excite these big ideas.
- I know, sometimes these big glorious ideas leave you feeling hopeless. How does this relate to me, here, now, so I’m going to rattle off a few places of varying scale to begin.
- Warby Parker is a solid example and there are a few fun years to choose from. Locally, get inspired by the Instagram annual report we did for Neighborhood Centers in 2015.
- Speaking of Instagram… Charity Water is one of the best to inspire you about what is possible. They revolutionized giving through Instagram stories.
- The Pepsi Challenge. Honest Tea Experiment Improv Everywhere Experiments. Pop-up performances!
- The challenge doesn’t have to try to knock off the Ice Bucket Challenge. If I had a nickel for everyone who says to me “we want to do something like…” I can finish their sentences! The key is to create something different that’s fun or funNY that allows you a low barrier to entry and the ability to pass the baton. How do you build community through asking everyone to do something together?
- Right here in Houston you saw this with the Houston Zoo and their partnership with street artists when they created gorilla murals across town to announce the opening of the new gorilla exhibit.
- Finding out what you stand more means more than just reading a mission statement. You have to be unapologetically devoted to your core values. And if your long list of predictable values starts with “honesty…” please, consider throwing them in the trash and starting over. While we do live in a time where dishonesty seems to be running rampant, I hope honesty can be a given. Try to dig deeper. Gaga is, by mission, a pop star. She sings, she dances, she jumps off stadiums. But she has values. Values that are inclusive, and relentlessly dedicated to serving LGBTQ youth and those with mental health challenges. That’s her passion. Your passion is what drives your story and, by virtue of this, drives your audience to connect with you. To start, sit down with your team—not just your executive leadership, but your programmatic staff, your front line folks—and talk about your mission. Take that mission one rung up and make it a North Star: something that orients your team during their every day tasks. Ask your people what drives them, then compare it to your mission and see how aligned they are. If there’s a gap, fill it.
- There is no better example of that than REI. They find ways to appeal to all kinds of people, from those who are just looking for ways to experience nature with their family to hardcore outdoor athletes. One way they recently used their mission and their passion to connect with their audience was through the Force of Nature campaign.
- Focused on women in the outdoors, they told stories of adventurous women across the world with the bold statement: let’s make outside the worlds largest level playing field. This campaign has been a massive success—partly because of the positive message, but one of their biggest updrafts was leveraging user generated content.
- To further inspire. North Star examples. From a construction company From a computer company From a soft drink company From a veterans service org From a deodorant From a car company The people in this room are doing meaningful things. Your North Star should answer the question for everyone… why? Why do I wake up and do this every day?
- You have to put power in the hands of your audience. You have to give them ownership of your ideas so they can connect it to their beliefs. Self expression is one of the most critical components of successful brands today. People care about things they can relate to and participate in—you have to make your story compelling and conversational. No one-way streets. Invite your audience in! Lady Gaga has done this with gusto, inspiring superfans called Little Monsters all across the world. How can you create your own band of Little Monsters? Once you rally around your core mission/North Star, take a hard look at who you are trying to reach. Name these people. Design personas for them. What do they look like? Where do they live? What do they do for fun? Where do they work? Then, take your story and rewrite it for each of them, emphasizing the information they’ll care about the most. Tell them why your mission impacts their community, their industry, their lives That is compelling. When we brush up against things that affect us, we sit up and take notice. Sure, maybe people that share Gaga’s mission don’t love danceable club pop music but maybe they like the camaraderie that her little monsters share. And so they found a way to be a part of her story and connect with it. I’ve personally seen success from this in my work. When we were tasked with creating a campaign for Michelle Obama that inspired young people to go to college.
- The insight we had as a group was, “How do we—a bunch of 30-somethings—get young people to care about school?” The “ah-ha!” moment was: We don’t. They do. We needed to use the core of our mission to build a campaign and then hand them the keys so they could build a movement. By doing this, it spread like wildfire—racking up over a billion impressions on social media. All because we gave our audience the tools and the power to own the story themselves. This campaign, called Better Make Room because Michelle Obama Here you see student commitments—student voices—literally being blasted on the big screens in Times Square.
- Saying things out loud makes them happen is the mantra of the campaign, and it calls for students everywhere to commit to what they want to achieve. Those commitments, in turn, become the content of the campaign. The voices in the spotlight. The celebrities calling them center stage.
- And this leads us nicely to our next piece of advice: activate people by inviting them into your cause by giving them a piece of ownership. When an organization gives you a clear path to participation, you’re more likely to… participate. To take action. What is it that you want people to do? Don’t be so quick to say “Donate!” I know we’re at an event dedicated to fundraising, but there are probably a few steps before that we need to consider. Do you want people to visit your site? To connect on Facebook? Take those personas you created and draw a map of the actions that lead them to you, what you need them to do when they get there and what you hope they’ll do next. This will help you find ways to use your story to drive them to those ends. A great example of a brand doing this is the Alz Research UK who worked with Shazam to pull off a powerful stunt that resulted in almost 6,000 visits to its donation page in a 24 hour period.
- The music identification app “forgot” songs, revealing a call-to-action that provided more information about the disease, telling young people that Alz doesn’t just concern seniors, it can affect people as young as 40 years old. The goal was to gain awareness, measured by impressions (they had over 2 million) and drive donations.
- Another way activation can be seen is through ambassador outreach. Ambassadors build capacity for your organization, so by activating them you’re getting a cavalry of supporters that help your brand grow its influence. In the Instagram campaign, some of which is pictured here, you see the Texas Adventure, a campaign we concepted as part of the Reliant Original Series, where we “powered” ambassadors to showcase what is one-of-a-kind about Texas. Through the lenses of Texas influencers, Texas Adventure took audiences on the road from the Gulf Coast to North Texas. In just two months, the campaign reached more than 1 million Texans, rallying positive sentiment and delivering on the brand’s mission—to empower Texans to do more!
- You have a story, you have conviction, you have people you want to reach and actions you want to drive them toward. Now you need a good dose of urgency. They need a reason to act NOW. Gaga, like Beyonce, is great at hype. “You NEED to see this, to get this ticket, to buy this album now because you’re going to miss out.” An event, an urgent crisis, a big opportunity with a deadline—these can be leveraged to drive real action when coupled with conviction. An obvious example of date-based urgency is Giving Tuesday. It’s a well known day for people to reach into their wallets and donate to worthy causes, but the thing is, it’s saturated. The actual day is so noisy it’s difficult for organizations to break through. I personally think that every day should be Giving Tuesday. There is always an opportunity to create the same kind of urgency.
- You may have seen these murals around town. This was one of our agency passion projects. To create urgency around the idea of giving back to the community, we partnered with local graffiti artists to create a series of temporary murals across the city. Meant to be a daily reminder of the action we all need to take to support our communities, the Give murals served as an opportunity to host meetups with local Instagrammers (event urgency) and—because they were temporary—a way to drive immediate action. See them before they’re gone! Give today. Don’t wait.
- Another example is from REI’s #OptOutside campaign. It’s a Black Friday movement to get people out of the big box stores and back to nature. They were able to tell a new story about it using the urgency that already surrounded Black Friday. Ask yourself: what makes this message urgent? Why do we need people to act right now? Add these events to that map of audience actions so you can plan that path to action with a timeline that converts.
- If, by this point, you don’t have one of Gaga’s songs stuck in your head on repeat, then you’re way stronger than I am. I realize that when we’re talking about your organizations, a lot of time the subject matter is deeply important and very serious. And spending your morning talking about Little Monsters and meat dresses can seem a little goofy. But there are learning opportunities everywhere. In other organizations, in our communities and in our music. What works in another industry can be powerful fuel for what each of us can do to drive our missions forward. I urge you to seek out different teachers in different industries. Like Gaga taught us today, you may find inspiration in the most unlikely of places.