Do You Know About SIFE?

Once again it’s time to play “Figure out the ad.” You do have time for that in your busy day, don’t you?

Whenever I see an ad headline like this one for an organization called SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise), I think of Robert Di Niro in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Are you talkin’ to me?

“Once you get involved, you’ll understand.” Once I get involved in what?

Well, actually, the ad says what. It just takes a little figuring out.

We see a grabber of a photo of Douglas R. Conant, president/CEO of the Campbell Soup Co., with the word SIFE painted on his face.

And down below there’s a logo: “SIFE: Changing the World.”

So once you get involved in changing the world through something called SIFE, you’ll get excited and paint your face like a goofy sports fan, now matter how dignified a business big shot you are.

Actually, what this group’s trying to tell us is that student teams in the SIFE program compete to see who’s developed the best bootstrap business plan for struggling people. Their business sponsors get excited when their team advances toward the SIFE World Cup. Mr. Conant presumably is one of those business sponsors.

Little by little, the message begins to come into focus. Next, we’ve got to figure out what SIFE is and what it does.

Here the ad makes the common error that the Makeover Maven keeps encountering again and again. It assumes that naturally, you know what SIFE is. (Just as Accenture’s costly ad series featuring Tiger Woods assumes you know what Accenture is.)

Well, yes. Some of the readers of Entrepreneur magazine, where I found this ad, indeed will be quite familiar with SIFE. How many? 10%? 20%? 40%? But what about the rest? Don’t they matter? What about the readers of this column? Do you know about SIFE?

And for those readers who don’t know and don’t find out very much from the ad, there’s not much reason to get involved.

The copy tries to tell us what SIFE is all about, but it’s distressingly vague and misleading. Students win awards, we are told, for “their contributions to the community.” But that could mean helping old ladies cross the street and reading to the blind in hospitals. That’s not what SIFE is at all.

Next comes — or fails to come — the most important omission of all.

What am I, the reader, supposed to do…and why, and how am I, supposed to do it?

I went to the Web site hoping to find out, and darned if I could even find it there. Try it yourself at www.sife.org/sifed. (I finally managed to ferret it out.)

In my makeover I start right out with a powerful promise in the headline. At the very top I single out and target the prospect I’m addressing. He/she is a businessperson who’d like to help make this world a better place, but feels overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem and the skimpiness of the available methods.

“Join the Student Revolution” is a startling, paradoxical, arresting headline to appear in a capitalist magazine. But it both gives a quick hint of what SIFE is about and a strong promise of benefit. The photo of Douglas Conant, instead of merely being a puzzler, now reinforces the headline. Yes, he looks like a fan, but also like a revolutionary, raised fist and all.

My copy starts with a brief discussion of what SIFE does — competing teams of college students develop and implement outreach programs to teach entrepreneurship and business ethics to small organizations and potential business leaders in impoverished communities. You quickly learn its scope and importance — “a global nonprofit organization that promotes free-enterprise education on more than 1,800 campuses in over 40 countries.”

Then it spells out ways you can help by joining your local SIFE Business Advisers Board.

And as the icing on the cake, it dangles three possible rewards:

1. The inner satisfaction of being a good person who’s helping to make the world better.

2. The thrill of winning if the SIFE team you work with becomes a champion.

3. A chance to spot students with a talent for business who might make good future employees for your company.

Now doesn’t that give you lots more incentive for logging on and signing up?

Alas, there’s no place on the Web site where you can donate or volunteer — a serious flaw. But the Makeover Maven doesn’t do Web sites.

THOMAS L. COLLINS (thomas.l.collins@verizon.net) has been a direct marketing copywriter, admaker, agency creative director and co-author of four books on marketing. He is currently an independent creative and marketing consultant based in Portland, OR.