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Conversations with Cause Marketers:
Christine Petersen, CMO, TripAdvisor.com
As a consumer and travel junkie, I’ve been into TripAdvisor.com for several years. It’s a terrific place to find frank write ups by fellow travelers about hotels all over the world.
That’s why I took special notice in the fall of 2008 when this division of Expedia announced a cause marketing campaign. More Than Footprints asked site users to vote on how a million dollars should be distributed between five nonprofit groups.
On the day the results were announced, I spoke with CMO Christine Petersen, a veteran of American Express among other companies, about the results of the campaign and lessons learned along the way.
CMF: TripAdvisor has not done cause marketing before – why did you create More Than Footprints?
CP: We were doing well as a company and our CEO asked me “How can we give back? We do well because millions of people build this business every day. How can we support our mission (helping travelers plan the perfect trip) and engage our members?”
Eventually we decided to let our users decide how we should give away money. We went back to our member panel of several thousand destination experts and had them nominate nonprofits and then vote on the charities to be selected.
CMF: What were the business goals of More Than Footprints?
CP: First, to give back and thank the members without whom we wouldn’t have a business. We want to keep them coming back.
Second to broaden who we are talking to. We’ve definitely acquired some new members through this effort.
Third, to support the mission in action.
CMF: How did you publicize the program?
CP: We featured it prominently on the site. We bought some media on YouTube. We engaged (PR firm) Pardes Communications. We talked to our established member base (with emails) and also went to the Facebook community – we have millions of people who have installed applications we built: “Cities I’ve Visited” is a map on which you can put pins indicating where you’ve visited. “Local Picks” is like a really transparent Zagats – you rate restaurants and tell your friends.
The Facebook applications were incredibly successful. We saw open and click through rates 3 to 4 times higher than usual.
(Also very successful) was a video featuring Rosario Dawson that we posted on our brand channel on YouTube. It went viral and was seen over 1.4 million times. (The video is a take-off on a video urging people to register to vote featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and other celebrities.)
CMF: How big a project was this for your company
CP: This was a huge deal. We had over 50 people across many departments working on it.
CMF: What were your metrics for success?
CP: Votes were the number one thing we were looking for, votes and new members. We are thrilled with where we ended up.
CMF: Were there any disappointing results?
CP: Early on we got some feedback from a few users that one of the nonprofits selected was not appropriate. It was only a handful, but when you think you are doing something good that is always a bit disappointing.
Click through rates on emails were not as high as we expected.
CMF: The voting was quite skewed. (Save The Children received 34.7%, Doctors Without Borders 39.2%, The Nature Conservancy 13.7%, Conservation International 7% and National Geographic Society 5.4%) Why do you think that happened?
CP: We worked with all the charities to promote outreach with email to be sent to their base and a widget for their home pages. I think Save The Children and Doctors Without Borders have great brands and do great work. I think that familiarity had a lot to do with their amount of the vote.
CMF: Do you expect to mount more cause marketing programs of this magnitude?
CP: We will definitely do something again. I don’t know if it will be this. I’d like to do something that is even more involved, that has members do more of the outreach for votes.
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