Social Venture Partners
In the business world, it’s often said that greed is good. Well, a group of highly successful, motivated executives and professionals have proven that good can be good, too.
The group, Social Venture Partners Arizona, has taken the programs and strategies that made its members successful in business and applied them to nonprofit charities. With the benefit of SVP resources and expertise, nonprofits have a much greater chance of growing into self-sustaining organizations. This venture capital approach to philanthropy has proven extremely effective, but was being eclipsed by big donations and glitzy fundraisers until a thought-provoking campaign by Park&Co changed the perspective.
Innovation Through Dedication
Social Venture Partners comprises of dedicated entrepreneurs who take their successful business approaches and apply them to local nonprofits. The brainchild of Seattle businessman Paul Brainard, SVP is a team of venture capitalists who donate both money and time, working hand in hand with charities to help them meet critical milestones on the road to becoming completely self-sustaining within five years. Already a successful grant maker with over 117 local partners, Social Venture Partners Arizona needed a boost to elevate its status and make it a top-of-mind charity within the community. From a business perspective, they wanted to be known as providing the greatest return on philanthropic investment.
In Plane Sight
The branding effort started with a unifying symbol that represents the two intrinsic qualities of Social Venture Partners: youthful energy and the ability to adapt and change on the fly. A whimsical character standing atop a paper airplane in flight encompasses what SVP Arizona is all about. The bold strokes of the plane’s folds represent SVP’s strong business approach, while the plane’s rider is everyone whose life has been enriched by SVP’s philanthropy. The very nature of a paper airplane, with its ability to be folded many different ways creating many different flightpaths, speaks to SVP’s creative and flexible entrepreneurial spirit in helping nonprofits take flight. The second phase of the communications plan was the print campaign. The ads boldly proclaim the advantages the SVP philosophy has over those of other charitable grant organizations. The tagline “Where Nonprofits Profit” underscores the many benefits charities can reap from partnering with the strong business moxie of SVP members.
Campaign for the Cause
The ads could be considered edgy for the nonprofit marketplace, but it was important to be bold in order to quickly gain recognition and position SVP as an innovator in the grant foundation sphere. Our ad for SVP’s partnership with suicide prevention hotline Teen Lifeline reads “We just invested in a fairly significant phone system.” The striking visual of a troubled youth combined with straightforward copy positions SVP as the organization with the resources and resolve to help teens by helping Teen Lifeline stand on its own. While many charities make a PR event out of a large-scale donation or fundraiser, Social Venture Partners is about returning the greatest benefit to the community. Another ad speaks to SVP’s understated approach to philanthropy. The headline “Not every charity dinner is a gala event” reminds the audience that one dinner on the table of an underprivileged child is infinitely more important than a three-course spread at a hotel ballroom.
The print campaign aimed to quickly elevate and differentiate Social Venture Partners by taking a different approach from similar organizations. Focused primarily on the group’s partnerships with youth charities, the campaign tied SVP’s business model with its real-world contributions, attracting like-minded entrepreneurs to join the cause of one of the nation’s fastest-growing philanthropies.
A Worthwhile Venture
In addition to the groundbreaking print campaign, Park&Co helped Social Venture Partners communicate with its members and charities. We design SVP Arizona’s annual report, which fully details the strides made by SVP-supported charities and is consistent with the other aspects of the campaign in look and feel. Not only is the report a way to keep partners informed of different charitable works, it has proven to be an attractive recruiting tool for new members. The group’s monthly newsletter is another way to communicate how successful business practices have carried over into the nonprofi t world, and its wide online circulation heightens SVP’s profile and that of its causes.
A truly unique campaign for a truly unique organizational concept, Park&Co's work with Social Venture Partners has significantly upped the profile of these previously unheralded benefactors. Now a visible and a more visibly successful group, Social Venture Partners is proof that a for-profit approach can pay off handsomely for causes that are far more important than business. These are investments on which the returns are limitless.
Marketing Moral: Turning a paradigm on its head (a non-profit operating like a for-profit) can become the greatest niche of all.