Jo-Ann, Fiskars and the American Heart Association

Woman 18-34, Enjoys Scrapbooking, Seeks Marketers Who Can Make Her Care

Scrapbooking is now the biggest chunk of the craft and hobby industry in North America, according to the Craft and Hobby Association, with estimated annual sales of $2.44 billion in 2006, a growth rate of 2.4 percent over 2005. The total craft and hobby market size is estimated to be $30 billion.

I only just found these figures, but they don’t surprise me. I live with a scrapbooker/ cardmaker. One of my wife’s sisters works for a company that has a substantial (more than 200 SKUs) scrapbook line. My wife and her sister have been to at least a half-dozen scrapbook shows together from Texas on west.

The research I saw from the Craft and Hobby Association, doesn’t break out the female-male gender ratio in scrapbooking, but I think it’s fair to say that more women than men scrapbook. The research does show that the age group most likely to scrapbook is 18-34, an attractive demo to nonprofits and to companies alike.

The research, conducted by IPSOS, found “7 dimensions of crafting:”

Relaxation & Accomplishment
Recommendation
Spend Time With
Others
Children
Economy & Value
Memory Keeping
Health

While my wife makes cards alone, she prefers to scrapbook in the company of friends and family. Drive past any scrapbook store in the country at 10:30 or 11 pm on a weekend and chances are it will be open. Scrapbook stores commonly host crops that go late into the night on weekends. The ‘croppers,’ frequently in groups, get access to large work areas and the store’s tools and inventory, and the stores get to sell to a captive audience long after the closest Wal-Mart is closed. So while IPSOS may have the order right for crafters as a whole, I suspect that the social aspect is one of the most important aspects of the hobby for scapbookers.

Where do they get their ideas? 54 percent said magazines, 49 percent said family/friends, 40 percent said books, 38 percent said catalogs, etc. Only 13 percent of crafters reported getting their ideas from the Internet. Of the finished product, 68 percent give it as gifts and 64 percent keep it for personal use. Just 14 percent are sold. Of those that are sold, 64 percent are sold to family or friends. IPSOS also did a craft participation cross-analysis and found that scrapbookers are most likely to also participate in card making, rubber stamping, woodworking, wreathmaking and floral arranging.

One last number. Crafters spent, on average, $276 per household in 2006 on supplies. I don’t know of any study that cross tabulates scrapbookers against charity supporters, but I’ll bet there’s a strong correlation.

So my question is, why is there so little cause marketing targeted to scrapbookers and crafters? There’s this half-hearted effort (pardon the pun) from Jo-Ann and Fiskars scissors benefiting the American Heart Association. Close To My Heart a multi-level marketing scrapbooking outfit has a cause marketing relationship with Operation Kids. There are a few more.

But I suspect that right now scrapbookers and crafters are a missed opportunity for nonprofit and for-profit marketers alike.

Sports Authority and Unnamed Breast Cancer Charity

With Apologies to Kris Kristofferson

Take the ribbon from this ad,

shake it loose and let it go,

Rubbin’ wrong against my skin.

Use it right or just say no.

Come and sit down by my side,

learn from experience that’s been sad

I’m suggestin’ there’s a way,

for CRM to not be this bad.

You choose to ignore the basic rules,

and you should understand

God is in the details, don’t let the devil play his hand.

This campaign is dead and gone, next time you can get this right

Include the cause and the amount, make it clear in people’s sight

It matters what you do. CRM should be seen through.

It’s not hard to understand.

God is in the details, don’t let the devil play his hand.

This campaign is dead and gone, next time you can get this right

Include the cause and the amount, make it clear in people’s sight.

Scaling Your Cause Marketing

Lessons from Lord Stanley’s Trophy

The Anaheim Ducks of the National Hockey League won the League’s championship on June 6 and with it the right to hold the Stanley Cup for the next year.

The Stanley Cup is the most storied trophy in professional sport in North America, dating to 1893. Unlike other trophies it’s permanent. That is, a new trophy is not made for each championship. It’s also the only trophy that is engraved with the names of the players and management from each championship team.

How do they manage that without making the trophy jinormous?

Well the trophy itself stays the same size; about three-feet tall and 35 pounds. It features a cup at the top with graduated bands or rings below that. Beneath those are five larger bands of the same size. Each of those bands has space for 13 championships. As they fill, the band at the top is removed and displayed at Hockey Hall of Fame and a new blank band is added to the bottom. Using this method, the Stanley Cup trophy could still be around for another 114 years. Even longer.

In short, the Stanley Cup is built to scale up.

But this wasn’t always so. The modern shape of the Cup dates from 1958 or so and the decision to remove the topmost band as the trophy filled with names started only in 1991.

That raises some questions for cause marketers. Is your campaign built to scale up? And if it’s not, what can you do to adjust on the fly, as the NHL has with the Stanley Cup Trophy?

Take some lessons from Lord Stanley’s trophy.

“Begin with the end in mind.” The original part of the Cup filled up quickly with engraved names and so the graduated bands were added beneath. As those filled, the first option considered was to continue to add graduated bands. But that would have eventually proved unwieldy. With the five large bands, they lit upon a system that could scale infinitely.

You can learn on the fly in your cause marketing too. But if you want your campaign to be able to grow you need to put in place systems that will enable that growth. Stephen R. Covey put it best, “begin with the end in mind.”

Give your campaign some personality. Babies have been baptized in the Cup. Dogs have taken their kibble from the Cup. By tradition winners of the Cup drink champagne from the bowl. At the Anaheim Ducks championship party on June 9 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hoisted the Cup high above his head in the classic style (see above). So have countless other non-players. But professional hockey players have a superstition about even touching the trophy if their team didn’t win it.

Maybe you’ll invent the next great cause marketing promotion that will be copied forever after and maybe you won’t. But even if you’re just doing another label or cap or paper icon campaign, you can and should give it some personality.

Pass on the lore. Lore is knowledge or teaching that’s been passed on. As it tours the Stanley Cup is accompanied by minders from the Hockey Hall of Fame. Their job is to protect the Cup, make travel arrangements, handle scheduling and the like. But of course they also are the ambassadors of the cup responsible for passing down the dos and don’ts. Charities and agencies commonly suffer from horrendous turnover. But unless there’s a system for passing on the knowledge of how best to run your campaign, that knowledge could walk out the door forever when the key person leaves your firm.

Make your campaign transparent. Want to know who was on the Montreal Canadiens with Henri Richard in 1970-71? It’s there on the Stanley Cup for all to see. Likewise your cause marketing campaign will scale better if it’s transparent. That is, if people easily and quickly understand the premise, if they know what will happen with the money and if they know the charity will be a good steward of the money, no matter the amount.

Lay's Destination Joy and Make-A-Wish

The 'Ancillary Opportunities' Section of Your Cause-Marketing Proposal

At the end of your cause-marketing proposal to sponsors there should be a section called something like “Ancillary Opportunities.” It’s the place where you add the other stuff that came out of brainstorming sessions that you can pull off and which complements the principal part of the promotion.

Ancillary means ‘subordinate’ or ‘of secondary importance.’ But don’t think that just because ancillary opportunities are subordinate or secondary that you can leave them out of the proposal.

For one thing, you may have spent a lot of time researching the target sponsor and still missed their hot button. Remember Hotmail was the second idea that Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith presented to Silicon Valley venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The ‘Ancillary Opportunity’ section is also a place to showcase your creativity and generate trust.

And like the book title says, “You Don’t Get what You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate.” In other words, you’ll never get the campaign element that you don’t raise in the proposal or otherwise talk about.

Looking at Make-A-Wish’s current promotion with Lay’s, makes me think that Cone, the venerable cause-marketing agency for the promotion, understands the value of the Ancillary Opportunities section.

The main part of the promotion is straightforward; buy a bag of specially-marked Lay’s chips during the May through September promotional period and a $0.25 donation is made up to $345,000. The amount’s a little on the low side, but maybe everybody involved is thinking about this as a starting point. More to the point, Make-A-Wish, Lay’s and Cone didn’t stop there.

In celebration of the 150,000th wish from Make-A-Wish, they’re launching Destination Joy presented by LAY’S – “a national campaign to inspire and empower Americans to share their much-needed time, talents and resources to grant the wishes of the 100,000 children who will be diagnosed with a life-threatening medical condition over the next four years.”

The campaign kicked-off June 5-14, 2007. “Related fundraising and awareness-building activities will continue year-round. … Through Destination Joy, the Foundation hopes to educate people on the many ways they can help grant a wish, such as donating airline miles, hotel loyalty points or professional skills.”

Other elements include:

“Celebrity Wish Ambassadors: will lend their star power to inspire people to
‘come on board’ and share their time, talents and resources to help make wishes
come true

“States on Board: Five major markets (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Nashville, Dallas) have been designated for special Destination Joy launch events that will highlight wish children and their families.

“Chapter Fundraising Events: Fundraising events such as motorcycle rides, walks, bicycle races, truck convoys and sports tournaments will take place nationwide throughout the year.

“Retail Fundraising: Retail partners, including Cold Stone Creamery, will sell
reflective magnetic Wish Stars throughout the country for $2 and paper Wish
Stars for $1 to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation. People who purchase the
magnetic Wish Stars are encouraged to display them on vehicles to show their
support for wish kids

“Online Auction: The Destination Joy online auction, held May 14-June 14, will offer rare and travel-related experiences that are seldom available to the general public at www.wish.org/auction.”

I like it. It’s smart, broad-based on one end and targeted on the other. There’s strong media opportunities, the chapters are tied in and the events give supporters and potential supporters a chance to connect emotionally with the charity. And, Lay’s website is plastered with the promotion.

Liam Neeson for UNICEF

Celebrities Are Just Like You and Me, Only They Get to Stay Free at the Mandarin Oriental

There are two kinds of celebrities in the world; those that are in the Mandarin Oriental ad campaign running right now and those whose agents are trying to get them in.

It’s an image ad campaign for the 17 hotels that are part of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. In it celebrities including I.M. Pei, Zubin Mehta, Helen Mirren, Elle McPherson, and Dame Edna-Barry Humphries are photographed in settings of their choice and they name their favorite Mandarin property. Dame Edna-Barry Humphries get to name two!

Every celebrity appearance carries with it a $10,000 donation to the charity of the celebrity’s choosing. Neeson’s charity is UNICEF and his short profile on the Mandarin website includes a UNICEF logo and link. Most of the other charities are smaller and less prominent than UNICEF.

It goes almost without saying that the donation amount is too small to be meaningful. I don’t know how the deal is structured but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the celebrities wave all or part their cash fee in lieu of the charitable donation and then take the rest in hotel stays.

That’s what makes it so appealing to celebrities… they get to stay in lavish Mandarin hotels for the price of the time it took to do the photo shoot. Better still for the celebrities, the ads feature them, not the hotels. In the process they look like good citizens. If you listen closely you can almost hear agents the world over calling the Mandarin’s ad agency.

By contrast, how interesting would it be if the Mandarin Oriental Group agreed to match what the celebrity donates to his or her preferred charity up to a certain amount? Interesting and unlikely. Most charitable donations from celebrities come in the form of in-kind gifts…read ‘time.’

There’s other things to like in this campaign. The celebrity list is an accomplished and eclectic group, with an especially strong showing of Asians, which makes sense since better that half of the Mandarin’s hotels are in Asia.

However, I think the creative is spare and subtle to the point almost of obfuscation, especially when it comes to the charities. “Liam Neeson for UNICEF” makes sense because UNICEF has plenty of built-in affinity.

But Helen Mirren’s charity is called “Help the Aged.” Sounds worthy enough, but I’ve never heard of it and there’s no website link, which means that most of these charities will get no more than just the $10,000 out of this thing.

That’s a pity.

When to End a Cause-Related Marketing Relationship

Breaking Up the Band

Normally, when it comes to cause-related marketing I would say that longer relationships are better for sponsor and charity. Think Rolling Stones and U2 not Cream or Soft Cell. That’s because cause marketing is a form of co-branding and like any branding endeavor it takes years to for brands to achieve high customer awareness. Frequently changing partners confuses your customers.

For instance, I guarantee you that even after more than 10 plus years of deep association, in a test of unaided recall remarkably few people would be able to identify that Subway Sandwiches and the American Heart Association are co-branded partners.

I’ve written before that lasting corporate-cause relationships are like marriages that require persistent maintenance. Or like bank accounts whereto you must make frequent deposits to cover the inevitable withdrawals.

But there are times when it makes sense to end cause-marketing relationships.

For causes it’s probably more so a dollars and cents issue than it is even for companies.

In the United States and Canada where charities are granted tax exempt status by the IRS and Canada Revenue Agency and in England and Scotland with the status conferred to Registered Charities, it’s all but immoral for charities to remain involved with something that costs more than it generates. And any charity that remains in a relationship that is “unprofitable” will be second-guessed by the board, the press and the public.

But there are other reasons for charities or sponsors to “break up the band.”

Scandal. When news emerged about the nature of the deal between
the American Medical Association and Sunbeam, members of the AMA demanded that the deal be scotched even though doing so eventually cost the AMA
some $16 million. The scandal of a bad deal was greater than the money.

Bankruptcy. If you’ve got a sponsor that has declared bankruptcy it’s potentially an opportunity for a nonprofit partner. After all, in bankruptcy cost-cutting is only one-half of the way out. Companies must also sell their way out and cause-related marketing may have a role to play in such a scenario. But when a sponsor declares bankruptcy the charity must go to the sponsor and offer to let them out of their contract.

Doesn’t work. What if you try every sort of permutation and still the campaign
or relationship doesn’t work? Chances are it’s a bad fit (see below) but even if
it just doesn’t work, you may need to end the deal.

Bad match. Sometimes customers respond in ways you can’t predict and what
seemed like a good fit really isn’t. For instance, it may seem like good deal
linking a BBQ grill company with a safety charity. But if customers don’t get
the connection, or the cause doesn’t, by itself, have enough affinity, you may
have a bad match.

Colliding cultures. The sponsor might be too bleeding edge and the charity too staid. Or vice versa. I’ve seen both. Regardless if the cultures of sponsors and charity don’t share some common ground, then the relationship may be doomed.

If you have other reasons to break up the band, please weigh in.

Black Swan Cause Marketing

For years Europeans and the Romans before them presumed that there was no such a thing as a black swan because all the known swans in the Old World and the New were white. As a result, the aphorism “all swans are white” signified something that was obviously true.

Finally European explorers sighted a black swan in Australia in 1697 and a pair were captured in 1726. Turns out black swans are quite common in Australia and New Zealand.

About that David Hume…the Scottish logician-philosopher who lived 1711 to 1776 …wrote: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”

In the hands of logicians like Hume and mathematicians-investors like Nassim Taleb, the author of the recent book on randomness called “The Black Swan,” the possibility of ‘black swans’ is a problem of logical and probability and for Taleb especially, a monumental challenge in generating reliable investment returns.

But I’m not logician, philosopher, mathematician or investor (per se).

So I ask instead, where’s the black swan of cause marketing? That is, what’s possible and likely but hasn’t been seen yet?

Here’s what raised the question for me.

American Express is currently running a promotion for members called The Members Project. When American Express Card holders register, $1 is put into a pile of money that is capped at $5 million. Card holders are also encouraged to submit ideas that fall into one of eight categories… including an ‘other’ category… that will be funded by the $5 million. As of this writing there are 3542 projects in the hopper. Members vote on the projects through several rounds leading to final elimination on August 7, 2007.

The ‘winner’ doesn’t get the $5 million. Instead the money goes to the nonprofit organization or corporation that American Express determines can best execute the winning idea, making The Members Project a hybrid cause-related marketing campaign.

The black swan question came to me because of the way Amex is promoting this. I saw it in a banner ad at Yahoo or some such portal and followed the link. Once I got there I liked the idea. It’s nicely set up as a social marketing campaign. You can set up a RSS feed to track ideas you like for instance, and ratings and comments fields.

Then I clicked on a link called ‘Outreach Tools,” which takes you to a page where you can place banners or badges into your site. There’s one illustrated above. So far so good. When you click on that banner it goes to the main Members Project site.

But that’s hardly ideal.

If I had submitted a project I would want the banner to take people directly to my project. Then I would use my blogs, e-newsletters, email lists and other contact media to send friends and others to vote for my idea and help advance it through the rounds. As near as I can tell The Members Project doesn’t offer this option short of pasting a link in.

There’s a black swan out there when it comes to social media and cause-related marketing, I just haven’t seen it yet

If you know of cause-marketing black swan, use the comment feature below or email it to me directly at aldenkeeneatgmaildotcom.

Children's Miracle Network Celebration Themed FSI

How I Miss the Old Children’s Miracle Network Telethon

Children’s Miracle Network, the giant charity that raises money for 175 children’s hospitals in the United States and Canada had its annual telethon this last weekend, such as it is.

They don’t call a telethon any more; haven’t called it that for perhaps 15 years. But still I miss it.

Of course this is just personal nostalgia. I wrote the old-school Children’s Miracle Network Telethon for five years, and so I was intimately involved with its production.

My first CMN Telethon featured Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald and they sang a kick-butt version of the Doobie Brothers’ hit “What a Fool Believes,” which they co-wrote and for which they won a Grammy Award. I don’t know how it looked and sounded to the TV audience, but my mind’s eye will never forget watching them live from the outdoor stage at Disneyland’s Videopolis!

That night we kept a skeleton audience who stayed for a long list of comedy performers do sets right on the floor of Videopolis. Buried among them was Jeff Foxworthy.

The next day, a Sunday, we had a visit from Pele, whose soccer career was long over. Still you can bet that I snapped a picture or two. Wish I could track those down.

The show’s hosts included the affable and talented John Schneider, whose career is enjoying a revival, Marie Osmond, Entertainment Tonight’s Mary Hart, Las Vegas impressionist Rich Little, Olympic Gold Medalist Mary Lou Retton, NFL Hall of Famer Merlin Olsen and 2/5ths of the Fifth Dimension, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr.

That year CMN had a themed-FSI that was as thick as your wallet, it had so many packaged goods sponsors. Now the CMN Celebration FSI (see above) is basically a shell.

The CMN Telethon looked and felt different than anyone else’s. Part of that was because it was shot outside under the California sun. Plus, we could never get the number of acts that Jerry Lewis got for the MDA Labor Day Telethon. So we ended up programming hours like the ‘National Parent’s Poll;’ shows within a show that weren’t based on entertainment at all.

I don’t have the numbers in front of me… and CMN has long since quit publishing this kind of information… but the Children’s Miracle Network Telethon was growing at least 20 percent a year back then. They had 220 or so stations in the U.S. and Canada that carried the Telethon, most of them network affiliates. The ratings, on average, were on par with a professional tennis match. Not particularly good, in other words.

CMN’s growth continues, although not at that pace. Nowadays they shoot the progams weeks before its air date and edit it into tight little 30-minute segments that are a little slick. They still get a pretty good mix of entertainers, although fewer A-listers than ever.

But it’s a very different show.

What changed?

The people for one thing.

Both of CMN’s founders… Mick Shannon and Joe Lake… have retired, although you could hire either of them for the right gig.

1. There’s CMN alumni at U. S. Fund for UNICEF, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, and the National Forest Foundation.
2. You can find them at children’s hospitals and in university development offices.
3. One works for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
4. Two are real estate developers.
5. One co-founded another nonprofit.
6. Another started an e-commerce company.
7. One will work with you to book celebrities for your event or promotions.
8. I consult and write this blog.
9. Steve Williams died tragically of lung cancer just last year.
10. And there are a lot of CMN ‘lifers’ who keep the fires burning bright.

Of course there have been broader structural changes, too.

• In the U.S. the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates over-the-air broadcasters, loosened its requirements to air public-interest programming. The result was that fewer station felt like they had to carry a 21-hour telethon.
• Likewise, rule changes at the FCC allowed broadcasters to own more stations, which led to widespread consolidation and, in turn, fewer locally-owned stations. That meant fewer owners who cared deeply about a local resource like a children’s hospital.
• Plus, the cable companies expanded their reach to a larger portion of the U.S., leading to greater competition for the four main broadcast networks.
• And, Americans found new diversions besides TV, including video games, DVDs and the Internet.

Like Chris Anderson wrote in The Long Tail, what we thought was brilliant television programming that united a country and a culture was in fact an inherit weakness in the distribution of television signals.

Now, of course, everyone with a camcorder can be a broadcaster.

But in a world of near infinite choice in television programming no one’s making a telethon like we used to. Including CMN.

Man how I miss the old Children’s Miracle Network Telethon.