An essay in the latest issue of Fast Company magazine got me thinking about foundations and hipster status. A number of Fortune 500 companies are hiring marketing agencies run by twenty-somethings to keep their brands cool:

Companies are outsourcing cool. They’re paying other companies – smaller, more-limber, closer-to-the-ground – to help them keep up with customers’ rapidly changing tastes and demands. Talk about a core competency! It’s like farming out your soul – or at least, asking someone what you should wear in the morning. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that foundations have souls, I wonder if they ever think about how building a more progressive [and, dare I say, hip] image of themselves among their audiences could contribute to their effectiveness as grantmakers. When’s the last time you read something about a foundation and thought, “Wow, that’s cool”? Something that would perk up the eyes and ears of your average 16-year-old?

Foundations are lousy brand managers. I think that’s because they think their images are derived from the identities of their grantees. How unfortunate. This plays itself out in two ways: 1] Foundations don’t recognize all of the other ways in which their images get shaped [example: speeches and presentations given by foundation employees to outside audiences]; 2] Only very traditional tools are used to for communications and marketing activities and adoption of new tools, particularly in the communications technology arena, is excruciatingly slow. By the time they get into a new marketing space corporations have long moved on to something more current and effective.

Back to the Fast Company essay:

To get closer to customers and speed the feedback loop, Samsung’s U.S. marketers established relationships with some 1,500 Web sites that serve its target markets, from fly-fishing sites to the home pages of rock bands. When designers in Korea give the word that a new product is on the way – often with only a few months warning – marketing puts out the word through its network. Presto! Instant product launch. 

I’m not saying foundations should look to organize groups of 14-year-old girls via text messaging to sell tickets to the local nonprofit community theater production. The nature of the business of foundationland has its marketing limitations. But it would be nice to see some foundations thinking outside the box a little bit when it comes to sharing their agendas with the outside world. Maybe take off the suit and put on a pair of hip jeans every now and then.