Profiles in Bad Marketing

Naming your charitable organization has got to be a tough thing to do. You want it to be descriptive, emotive and special. Hell, Bill and Melinda Gates probably spent a billion dollars alone on finding just the right name for theirs.

Other charities, however, don't have deep enough pockets for expensive branding excercises, so they have to scrape by as best they can with their own imaginations. It's sad, really. In fact, I came across one the other day that immediately made me raise my eyebrows in disbelief. "Second Base Youth Shelter" may very well be a good and worthy charity, but there's no denying it could have benefited from some solid focus grouping before starting out.

I have a feeling that concerns were raised by the wider community about the shelter's intentions once they hung out their shingle, though. That may be why the word "(Scarborough)" was hastily added on their actual website, in order to get that "Second Base" idea away from the "youth" as much as possible.

Now, I realize that non-profit organizations are more about helping than branding, and I fully understand the innocent connotation of the name they chose, it's just that you've got to take into consideration widely-used euphemisms when giving your company a name, especially when your business involves a lot of living with abused and/or homeless young people.

And seriously, you can't even claim that the people who named it are of an older generation and couldn't possibly know about the use of baseball as an analogy for different stages of love play. Sure the distinctions of what each base means may have changed over the years, but I'm pretty sure that the idea has been around since… well, the advent of baseball.

Still, one can't help imagining what the list of names that they DIDN'T pick looked like... *squiggly dream sequence lines*

Getting Busy: A Place for Developing Teens
Touched by a Counsellor
Dirty Sanchez's Home Away From Home
Doing It: Helping Kids in Withdrawal
The Neverland Ranch

Okay, that last one would have been okay, but the rest! Ah well, I guess I could always volunteer my marketing services to some worthy cause in the future if I'm so worried about it.

(Also, maybe some cash or clothes to Second Base Youth Shelter. Cuz, you know, they actually help homeless kids in my city have a decent place to live. *cough*)