Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World, and How to Reach Them: Interview with The She Spot co-author, Lisa Witter

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If you are in charge of communications for your nonprofit or NGO, I recommend you read The She Spot: Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World, and How to Reach Them by Lisa Witter and Lisa Chen.  In the edited transcript of my September 1st interview with co-author Lisa Witter for the Big Vision Podcast, she discusses how nonprofits can use four principles from the book, Care, Connect, Control, and Cultivate to get the word out about their cause.

Lisa is the Chief Operating Officer of Fenton Communications, the largest public interest communications firm in the country. She heads the firm’s practice in women’s issues and global affairs for clients including Women for Women International, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Global Fund for Women, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, David and Lucille Packard Foundation and many others.  She is a co-founder of the award-winning SheSource.org, an online brain trust of women experts designed to close the gender gap among commentators in the news media.

Our conversation began with Lisa talking about why she and co-author Lisa Chen wrote The She Spot: Why Women are the Market for Changing the World, and How to Reach Them.

Lisa Witter: Over the years, Lisa and I, we've been working together for more than nine years, really have had an opportunity to look at how philanthropy is changing and the role that women are playing in society. And we've done that through working with a lot of "women's issues" clients. I'm not really sure what women's issues are, besides breast cancer and ovarian cancer, but you know what I mean when I say it. And we found out that a lot of organizations would come in and they would talk about their target audience as a monolithic gender. We knew that the trends were showing that women give more, women are engaged more, women vote more, women are twice as likely to pass on information, and women make 83 percent of the consumer decisions. So,we just knew that if you wanted to make social change, you had to understand how to connect with women and how to motivate women.

Yet, the NGOs that we were working with didn't understand that at all. They thought, men and women, sort of the same. We would see them do things like put pink marketing campaigns together, but we knew that that wouldn't work for a certain amount of women. So we decided to look at what the private sector had learned, and layer that on top of the social-change sector.

Britt Bravo: In the book you advise nonprofits and political campaigns to use the rule of the four Cs to reach women. I'd love to talk about each of those Cs.  The first C is care.  Can you talk about what you mean by care, and some examples of organizations that have used this concept of care effectively? 

Yes. The four Cs are the critical piece to the book. The first part of what we were trying to talk about in the book is making the case for why women should be your target audience. Like I said, we have more money, we vote more, we are engaged more in volunteerism. In fact, the prototype of what a volunteer is, is a working mother, right? Women are engaged in their community. They're giving, they're voting, they're super-powerful, and they're making consumer decisions. Now that we've made the argument that you should pay attention to women, how do you reach them? How do you move them?

The four Cs are Care, Connect, Control, and Cultivate. Care is pretty easy. Care is the first, easiest one. I think it's the one that organizations get most instinctively.

The first part of care is to put a face on your organization. Just don't have it be some organization online where you see graphics of bar charts and research reports, but not real human beings. MoveOn.org was one of the first organizations that really pioneered this with technology. When you get an email from MoveOn.org, it's from a human being. So, it would be from Joan, Wes, and Eli, or from Adam and Ilyse. Real people were behind the organization. And that's really important. Women want to be engaged in something where real people are at.

The next is to keep it simple, but keep