To put the ads in context, we offer the following guest post from Joe Waters, director of cause and event marketing at Boston Medical Center, who writes the blog Selfish Giving and is co-author of the forthcoming book Cause Marketing for Dummies.

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By Joe Waters

Enough people have registered their opinion to confirm this deal-breaker for everyone: Groupon’s Superbowl ads Sunday night were ill-conceived and offensive. Good will earned from this promotion: 0%.

Groupon should have apologized (it hasn’t), pulled the ads (saw one last night), fired its ad agency (standing shoulder to shoulder), and donated a boatload of money to the causes it offended (um … nope).

But while the ads may have been a disaster for Groupon, they highlight four important lessons for nonprofits—and the businesses that work with them.

Holy, Batman! This cause marketing stuff really works! The outrage against Groupon was immediate, loud, and passionate. Now imagine if Groupon had produced a great cause-marketing ad. It would have earned passionate raves from viewers. Cause marketing is a powerful, meaningful strategy that enhances a company’s reputation—when it’s done well. When it’s not, it has an equally potent but negative impact.

Group-buying sites can work for causes. There was a legitimate giving component to Groupon’s Super Bowl spots. But it wasn’t mentioned in the ads (Groupon offered to match donations to the causes it dissed in the ads). Groupon and other group-buying Web sites have already helped causes. Groupon and Living Social have worked with DonorsChoose.org to raise more than $250,000. A recent post in Mashable reviewed seven group-buying sites using daily deals to raise money. And just this week I wrote about GoodTwo.com, a site hat lets charities and individual fund raisers raise cash.

Humor has a place in cause marketing. Tom Watson pointed this out in his wonderful CauseWired post on the Groupon mess, and even the founder of Groupon has assured people that his company was just making fun of itself. But to be effective, the humor needs to be appropriate, non-exploitative, positive, and disruptive. Some causes are trying to use humor well, while others are reminding causes to laugh at themselves every now and then. The message: humor for good is good.

Groupon will survive. Groupon has the potential to join ranks with some of the best brands in the world. A strong brand is your most important asset in cause-related marketing. For cause or company, it’s like a magnet that draws people, money, and influence closer and, in difficult times, repels critics and controversy.

Take a top nonprofit brand like Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which wields one of the strongest magnets in the charity world. It attracts donors, celebrities, and advocates in hoards who contribute marketing muscle and hundreds of millions to its fight. But last year when Komen entered a questionable relationship with Kentucky Fried Chicken, nothing stuck. Despite waves of criticism, Komen weathered the storm. Groupon and Komen demonstrate the power of brand and why we all need a powerful one.

And Groupon certainly has enough brand power to earn a pass on this Super Bowl fumble. The rest of us shouldn’t spend a moment longer dissecting the replay. We need to get busy harnessing the power of cause marketing, the value of group-buying Web sites, and the disruptive nature of humor while building a brand that can play offense and defense.

Her list features:

• Allison Jones, a fund raiser who writes on social justice and nonprofit leadership.
• Akhila Kolisetty works at a civil-rights law firm in Washington and covers legal issues on the blog Justice for All.
• Ian David Moss, research director at Fractured Atlas, a New York group that provides services to artists nationwide, discusses the arts and the economy on Createquity.
• Sam Davidson, an author and co-founder of the company Cool People Care, who writes about nonprofit issues at samdavidson.net.
• Elisa Ortiz, a manager at the nonprofit Smart Growth America, blogs about the issues facing young nonprofit workers at elisamortiz.org.
• Nikita Mitchell serves on the board of the Cultural Academy for Excellence and discusses his experiences as a nonprofit board member and volunteer on the blog Journeyful Life.
• Jessica Journey, who writes about nonprofits, fund raising, volunteering, and leadership at jessicajourney.com.
• Tara Connelly, who graduated from North Carolina State University in 2010 and now works as an independent contractor, explores her experiences working with nonprofits at Quarterlife Tango.
• Devin Mathias, of the Marts & Lundy fund-raising consulting firm, writes about social media, fund raising, and philanthropy on More Donors Blog.
• Tracey Webb, who has volunteered and supported nonprofits, writes about African-American donors at Black Gives Back.

Who are your favorite young nonprofit bloggers? Are any missing from Ms. Thurman’s list? Post a comment to share your thoughts.

Thanks largely to a catchy video (below), the effort has become something of a phenomenon, succeeding in helping to make girls a bigger focus of global antipoverty efforts. But Anna Carella, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Vanderbilt University, writes on the Aid Watch blog that while the effort seems like a “godsend for those who have been working to improve the lives of women, it may actually be damaging to women.”

Her objections:

• It reinforces stereotypes that women are naturally more caring than men and doesn’t do anything to encourage men to do more at home.
• The video claims that putting more women to work will drive economic development—yet women already make up a bigger percentage of the workforce in poor countries than in industrialized ones, but development is stalled. “What poor countries need to stimulate sustainable growth are not women taking out loans to buy cows but better governance and better terms of trade with rich countries,” Ms. Carella says.
• Focusing on economic development prioritizes the well-being of the economy over the well-being of women.
• The video, with its images of flies buzzing around the word “girl,” reinforces the perception that women in poor countries need saving by the Western world.

The post has generated more than 35 comments on Aid Watch, some from people who appreciate Ms. Carella’s critique and others who disagree with her arguments.

What do you think?

Rachel Bellow and Suzanne Muchin, of ROI Ventures—a Chicago company that works with donors, business people, and nonprofits on creating business models and brand campaigns—offer their picks.

Their “worst” list:

• Target’s $150,000 political donation to Minnesota Forward, a group that supports pro-business candidates, including one gubernatorial candidate who ran on an anti-gay marriage platform. The move angered human-rights groups and stirred a boycott movement of the retail chain.

• Goldman Sachs dangling of casual Fridays before employees to convince them to ante up for charity. According to The New York Times, Goldman’s securities division offered its employees the chance to wear jeans to the office every Friday in August if they gave at least $25 to one of four designated nonprofits.

And their “best” list:

• Microsoft’s move to train more out-of-work people in technology skills, in part to compensate for its declining cash contributions amid the recession.

• Wal-Mart’s efforts to make its logistics staff members available to help food banks, as part of a $2-billion pledge to fight hunger.

• A 12-hour marathon effort by Discovery Communications employees to lend  their marketing, communications, social media, and creative skills to nonprofits.

What do you think of Ms. Bellow and Ms. Muchin’s list? What would make your list of the best and worst of corporate giving last year?

A petition circulated last week by a group called the Disaster Accountability Project argues that if aid groups had spent more of the money they raised after the January earthquake to improve water and sanitation conditions in Haiti, the disaster might have been prevented. The petition is titled, “We Donated to Haiti Relief and We’re Angry.”

But others say that’s simply not true. Aid groups say water and sanitation conditions in Haiti were poor before the cholera epidemic—and that it doesn’t make any sense to say they should have prioritized cholera prevention over other types of assistance,  because the disease hadn’t been seen in Haiti for at least half a century.

“Saying that agencies should have been prepared for this outbreak is a little bit like saying the U.S. should currently invest resources and prepare for an outbreak of bubonic plague,” Jeff Wright, operations director of the aid charity World Vision, told The Chronicle.

Others say the threat of cholera was something aid groups and the United Nations did, in fact, recognize as an issue, but they didn’t focus on it because the possibility of an outbreak was remote. In a paper called “The Haitian Cholera Outbreak: A Preventable Tragedy?,” Joseph Crupi, a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, concludes that aid workers “understandably focused on more pressing concerns.”

But even if aid groups ought to have recognized cholera as a bigger threat, could they have prevented the disease? And does it make sense to criticize their rate of spending (many charities had spent about one-third to one-half of their earthquake donations in the first six months after the disaster) as the Disaster Accountability Projects does?

Saundra Schimmelpfennig, a former aid worker and author of the blog Good Intentions Are Not Enough, says that charities probably couldn’t have prevented the cholera outbreak but that if they’d operated with greater efficiency, they might have slowed its spread.

But she told The Chronicle that the rate of charity spending is “a really meaningless way to get at what’s happening.”

“Just because money was spent quickly does not mean it was spent well,” she writes on her blog. “Conversely, just because an organization has not spent all their money does not mean they were not operating at top efficiency given the realities on the ground.”

Ben Smilowitz, who started the Disaster Accountability Project after serving as an American Red Cross volunteer following Hurricane Katrina, says that he would prefer to use additional measures of charities’ performance, but they weren’t available because groups don’t provide them. Encouraging nonprofit groups to share more substantive information is one of his goals, he says. (He based the petition on The Chronicle‘s reporting of how much charities had spent six months after the Haiti earthquake).

Mr. Smilowitz’s turn as a watchdog has stirred frustration and anger among some charity officials. Mr. Wright, of World Vision, says his group sees the value of greater transparency but that Disaster Accountability Project’s reports are ill-informed and get information wrong. He points to other groups—Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance, and Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International—that already serve to evaluate aid groups and also have the expertise and knowledge that Mr. Smilowitz’s group lacks.

Ms. Schimmelpfennig agrees that Disaster Accountability Project’s petition, which seems misinformed, raises questions about how effective the group can be in holding charities accountable. She wonders if the group talked to the informal group of charities and U.N. agencies that work on water and sanitation to learn what they’d done. (Mr. Smilowitz says he receives e-mail messages from the U.N.-organized “cluster” of charities but didn’t contact the group directly).

But Ms. Schimmelpfennig is not so quick to dismiss the importance of an outside watchdog. She points out, as does Mr. Smilowitz, that Active Learning Network and Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International are supported by aid groups, so they aren’t entirely independent from the charities they are evaluating. Nor do they conduct the kind of oversight that Mr. Smilowitz’s group is trying to do, she says.

Mr. Smilowitz, meanwhile, says he isn’t surprised by the criticism he’s getting from some aid groups, but, given the cholera epidemic, “it would have been ridiculous for us to be quiet.”

In a way, Mr. Smilowitz is part of a trend of “do-it-yourself” watchdogs, fueled by new technology like cellphone cameras and a growing interest on the part of donors in ensuring their money is well spent. Charities say they welcome greater scrutiny—but responding to it is posing a challenge.

World Vision’s Mr. Wright says the issue is “who can and should do that scrutinizing and on what basis. We could run ourselves ragged and hurt our beneficiaries trying to respond to the demands of every start-up shop.” He adds: “There have to be norms and standards.”

Mr. Smilowitz says, however, that charities have public-relations employees to respond to queries like his, which he is asking in behalf of donors. His petition calls for more transparency. As an example, Mr. Smilowitz thinks charities should have a weekly update on their Web sites of exactly what they have accomplished and how much they have spent in a place like Haiti. He says that all donors get from nonprofits are happy stories—and they often contradict what is happening in the field.

As of 12:40 p.m. U.S. Eastern time on Tuesday, 369 people had signed Mr. Smilowitz’s petition.

Are aid groups sharing enough information? Is it fair to blame them for the spread of the cholera epidemic? What do you think?

In a recent issue of The Chronicle, Sean Stannard-Stockton, an adviser to donors, listed five questions that people can ask all types of charities to determine if they’re worth supporting.

Now GiveWell, the charity-evaluation group, has come out with a “Do-it-yourself charity evaluation” that gives donors different sets of questions depending on the field in which the nonprofit works.

Questions to ask a charity that works in education, for example, include:

• What do you do to improve K-12 education? What is your relationship with the school? Do you work within it or outside it?
• Who is targeted by your activities? What are the requirements for participation? In the case of over-subscription, how do you determine who gets in?
• Have you done a randomized controlled trial of your program? If not, are you planning to? If not, why not?

Mr. Stannard-Stockton says on his blog that it’s less important for a charity to be able to “prove” its effectiveness from its answers than for it to show it is prepared to answer questions about evaluation and that it has a commitment to obtain that evidence over time.

The question about randomized control trials (which test the efficacy of programs), meanwhile, is generating a discussion.

Isaac Castillo, of the Washington charity Latin American Youth Center, says on Mr. Stannard-Stockton’s blog that it’s the cost of such trials—not a lack of willingness to do them—that prevents his $15-million organization from doing more.

His suggestion to donors who want to give but are concerned about the lack of such testing: “Write a check for $750,000 over 3-4 years to the nonprofit so they can do the [randomized control trials].”

“Put your money where your expectations are,” he says. “Otherwise, lower you expectations to match what you are willing to fund for evaluation.”

Holden Karnofsky, a co-founder of GiveWell, responds by saying that donors who are choosing among charities to which they have no connection may want to support a more established group that has done such testing of its programs.

But for donors who have honed in on Mr. Castillo’s group for another reason, an answer like Mr. Castillo’s ought to be enough to satisfy.

How useful do you think such questions might be for donors?

Now, however, a debate is stirring about how successful the Giving Pledge has really been. The pledge hasn’t “visibly inspired” any new big gifts or attracted additional signatures since August, writes reporter Stephanie Strom in Wednesday’s New York Times. Mr. Buffett, however, says he expects others to sign on soon.

Ellen Remmer, president of the Philanthropic Initiative, writes on her organization’s blog that the Giving Pledge appears to be “stuttering a bit.” That’s largely due to the economic crisis, she says.

“Billionaires may not want the world to know they are billionaires,” she argues. “And the world at large may not like being reminded that these folks still have billions while they are losing their houses.”

Ms. Remmer says the pledge may also be having trouble gaining traction because its impact is so difficult to assess. The real test, she says, is how—and whether—the money helps people and organizations. She nevertheless calls it a “huge step forward in getting people to pay attention to philanthropy.”

The New York Times story says the pledge has inspired mixed emotions. The billionaire fund-raising drive serves as a reminder of the vast wealth of a few Americans and of the influence their money can buy, the article says.

Meanwhile, some of the pledge signatories may choose to donate their money in ways that not everyone considers beneficial to society, the article says.

For more, see the Chronicle‘s coverage of the Giving Pledge here and here.

Do you think the Giving Pledge has been successful?

In a segment that aired Tuesday on Mr. Beck’s talk show, the conservative commentator portrayed Mr. Soros as the man responsible for national currency devaluation and America’s economic collapse and says he has been working in secret to overthrow the U.S. government.

Mr. Beck also ties Mr. Soros to financing and inciting revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and the former Czechoslovakia. “So what is his target now?” asks the narrator in the video segment. “Us. America.”

That portrayal is causing a lot of criticism and fact checking. Several of these revolutions had the effect of ousting communist dictators from power, writes Oliver Willis of  Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that monitors information reported by conservative media organizations. One effort, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, was a nonviolent response to what many considered to be a fraudulent election.

He also takes Mr. Beck to task for ignoring Mr. Soros’s role “funding anti-Communist dissidents like Poland’s Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union.”

The Open Society Institute, which Mr. Soros established,  on Wednesday released a short biographical video of the 80-year-old philanthropist. Justin Elliott, a reporter for the Web site Salon.com, notes that the video’s reach pales in comparison to the more than 2 million viewers who regularly tune in to Mr. Beck’s show.

In introducing the segment on Mr. Soros, Mr. Beck said it was the first in a two-part series and encouraged his viewers to record both programs.

“There’s a lot of meat here that I need you to do your own homework on and learn the truth yourself,” Mr. Beck said.

Here is a segment from Mr. Beck’s Tuesday program, followed by the Open Society Institute video featuring Mr. Soros.

Sean Stannard-Stockton, an adviser to donors and a Chronicle contributor, says on his blog that he’s come across a number of foundations and donors that don’t think about giving in that way. Instead, he says, they are “issue agnostic.”

The Lodestar Foundation, for example, describes itself as not being “focused on any specific field of interest and focus instead on leveraging resources.” Many donors support “social entrepreneurs,” regardless of what issue they seek to tackle. And a client of Mr. Stannard-Stockton’s says he cares less about the particular issue and more about the opportunity to help expand successful nonprofit models.

Mr. Stannard-Stockton says such issue-agnostic donors make him wonder if conventional philanthropy advice—prioritize the areas about which you care most—may be backwards.

What if a better approach, he says, is for donors to consider giving to issues about which they have any interest at all, even if those causes aren’t their passions, and then seek out opportunities for maximizing impact?

Do you know any donors like the ones Mr. Stannard-Stockton describes, who are more focused on achieving impact than influencing a cause? What do you think of this approach?

The stories are inspiring. But Dave Algoso, a graduate student at New York University, writes on the Foreign Policy Web site that they don’t convey a key message: Alleviating poverty is a lot harder than refurbishing a basement, fixing a leaky toilet, or repairing other problems for which this “fix it” attitude is appropriate.

A community’s needs are often too complex and nuanced for outsiders to really understand, Mr. Algoso writes. Moreover, outside money and volunteers can distort local economies, politics, and culture, he says.

For example, local businesses lose out when charities provide donated goods for free, and local governments can face less pressure to provide high-quality services if schools, health clinics, and other services are offered by nonprofits.

Mr. Algoso also writes that it’s often local people who are finding ways to improve their communities, yet those people are absent from Mr. Kristof’s article.

But Mr. Algoso isn’t entirely critical of the Mr. Kristof’s story. “Despite all my complaints, I think Kristof’s article does some good if it convinces more people to pursue international development as a career,” he says. “We all start as amateurs. The difference is whether we seek to learn more or assume that we can just start doing something, muddling through as we go.”

What’s your view?