Is It Time Now for More American Cause-Related Marketing Benefiting Overseas Causes?

Exporting Caring and Dollars

American Express’ Member’s Project, which will fund one member project to the tune of as much as $5 million based on the vote of American Express card holders, is now down to five finalists:

• National Parks Foundation, for the repair and refurbishment of the 391 National Parks.


• American Solar Energy Society to create a small solar-powered generating unit suitable for residential homes.


• US Fund for UNICEF Children’s Safe Drinking Water initiative to deliver clean, pure water to children worldwide.


• DonorsChoose.org, a web-enabled way to match school needs with outsiders willing to help.


• American Forests initiative called Plant a Million Trees, a global reforestation campaign to plant trees in the United States and around the globe.

For those of you keeping score at home, two out of five of those projects have truly global reach. And as of this writing, the UNICEF safe water campaign holds a commanding lead in advance of the August 7 deadline.

UNICEF’s lead may be a signal that it’s time for corporate cause marketers in the States to thoughtfully start considering cause marketing campaigns for charities that fulfill their mission and purpose outside the United States.

This would be a sea change.

Cause marketing stateside for overseas charities already happens to very a small degree. For instance, Proctor and Gamble’s Pur unit, which sells water purification devices and filters, has a cause campaign that supports water treatment efforts in Kenya and elsewhere. And, in the U.K. in particular, cause marketing for non domestic causes is already commonplace. The massive Red Nose campaign earmarks 60 percent of its funds raised for relief in Africa.

I say all this fully aware that the Member’s Project is an imperfect predictor of any kind of change in attitudes:

• American Express card holders may be more inclined to support non-domestic causes.


• Because participating Amex card holders are a self-selecting, it could be that the principle participants are the types that would vote for UNICEF.


• It could be that the domestic projects were not as compellingly presented as UNICEF’s.


• Moreover, there’s a ‘mad money’ aspect to the Member’s Project promotion and participating card holders may be more willing to take a flyer with someone else’s money that they wouldn’t with their own.

But while Member’s Project may not be a predictor, I think it is an indicator that the tenor of the times in American philanthropy and cause-related marketing is changing.

Certainly, there are other indicators. Angelina Jolie is nearly nominated for beatification in the July Esquire magazine article, “Angelina Jolie Dies for Our Sins” mainly on account of her work for AIDS orphans in Africa, Asian tiger habitat restoration in Cambodia, and a host of other Third World causes.

The July Business 2.0 highlighted the work of four organizations… MBA Enterprise Corps, MBAs without Borders, Carana, and DAI… that send out freshly-minted MBAs to apply their training to real-world situations in real-world places like West Africa, the Balkans, Latin America, and Ghana.

Not many years ago public-minded MBAs might have done their service at local United Ways or the Cancer Society. Nowadays they go to Nigeria and conduct focus groups on what it would take to get the locals using mosquito netting again. (Turns out it’s colored netting made cool again by the Nigerian film industry)!

I’ve written before about cause marketing in the First World to serve people in the Third World and frankly worked hard at hedging my bets about whether it could be effective.

But increasing it looks to me like it can.

Cone Cause Evolution Study

You Say You Want an Evolution?

There’s not a card-carrying cause marketer who’s been in the business more than 10 years or so who doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Cone, Inc. the cause-marketing and social responsibility agency now owned by the Omnicom Group.

Back in the day 14 years ago when we were knocking on corporate doors, putting together proposals and making presentations to corporate marketers about the only substantive weapon we had at our disposal that suggested that cause marketing worked was the old Cone-Roper survey of attitudes about cause marketing. It was a revelation and it helped enormously.

The Cone surveys have been often updated over the years.

The latest version of the Cone study, called the Cone Cause Evolution Study, is out and many of my fellow cause-marketing bloggers and analysts have already done an admirable job of addressing the study’s intriguing findings. Check Selfish Giving, or David Hessekiel’s newsletter at the Cause Marketing Forum, for instance.

This latest version finds a sharp increase in people who say that they make their consumer purchases with a strong eye on corporate responsibility. That’s another way of saying that cause marketers will still have their jobs next year!

But valuable as they are, the weakness of the Cone surveys has always been that they measure attitudes, not behavior. While the Cone surveys tell us what people say about cause-related marketing and corporate social responsibility, they don’t tell us what they actually do.

Attitudinal surveys have a built-in bias to them. If a researcher calls you and asks… in effect (‘all things being equal’)…whether you’d buy a can of chicken soup from a corporate angel or a corporate scoundrel, very few people would say, “I prefer the scoundrel.”

But all things aren’t equal.

Suppose you’re a busy mom and you drop into the store to pick up a can of chicken soup and whatever else. The kids… or the boss… is on the phone yapping at you to come home or get back to work. You could go to the soup aisle and choose from among the 1,200 cans of soup, or you could just grab the soup on the endcap, which is on sale, and may be the house brand of soup with no reputation as an angel or a scoundrel!

These days consumer behavior is actually really easy to track. It’s insanely easy to track online purchases and quite easy to track offline purchases, especially when a store employs club cards.

Does Campbell’s longstanding Labels for Education campaign move the sales needle? I submit that the marketers and brand managers at Campbell’s know exactly how much it does. And we can infer from the fact that Campbell’s keeps adding SKUs to the campaign, including food service items, that it works.

Thanks to the demographic information collected when sign up for a club card, they also know just who their consumer is, enabling them to market very specifically to those people.

But this kind of data seldom sees the light of day. Campbell’s and its retailers have zero incentive to release it publicly and many competitive reasons not to. Likewise, why would General Mills release sales data about Yoplait’s lid campaign for Susan G. Komen? They may not even share the data with Komen.

In my view, there’s a role here for academics to step in as a third-party analysts who can both shield the data and analyze and report on it for the good of the rest of us.

The Cone Cause Evolution Study is a welcome addition to the growing body research for cause marketers and a terrific measure of the current American zeitgeist when it comes to corporate social responsibility.

But for me the more evolved cause marketing research would be based on behavioral data not attitudes.

Multi-Cultural Cause Marketing II

Cause-Marketing with a Hispanic Flavor

In Thursday’s posting we raised the question posed by Gabriel Q., who works for a notable California multi-cultural consultancy: what about cause marketing to multi-cultural audiences? Gabriel was specifically interested in cause-related marketing and Hispanic-Latino audiences.

Of course marketing to multi-cultural audiences can be damnably difficult because…just to take up just Hispanics-Latinos…Spanish speakers in the United States may come from dozens of countries. While Spanish itself is a lingua franca, there are hundreds of accents, and thousands of culturally-specific word meanings.

Considering the 1951-mile-long border between Mexico and the United States, Mexican Spanish predominates, especially in the American Southwest. But there are also 3.3 million people born in the Caribbean and 2.1 million people born in South America now living in the United States, according to 2003 survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2000 U.S. Census identified 28.1 million people in the United States who speak Spanish.

If you’re a marketer (cause or otherwise) it’s not enough to simply translate campaigns or even ad copy from English to Spanish. Marketing requires not only language translation, but cultural translation.

Puerto Rican food (liked the stewed beef, fried plantains, and rice and beans platter seen above) is not Mexican food without the chili!

Case in point: I have two nephews, who along with their father, all speak fluent Spanish. One acquired his skills in Peru, the other in Uruguay and their father learned his in central Mexico. After two years in Uruguay, my nephew returned home to Arizona where he’s a construction foreman. This being Arizona, most of his crew is Mexican. Though they spoke the same language, my nephew had a hard time connecting with his crew in no small measure because they found his accent so perplexing.

But back to Gabriel’s question. If you’re a cause marketer, and Hispano-Latinos are your audience, is there some cause that a good chunk of the H-L audience have an affinity for regardless of their accent?

In an email exchange, Gabriel suggests the answer. Several companies that market to Hispanics and Latinos have taken up the cause of education.

McDonalds has a campaign called HACER which offers scholarships and college tours for Hispanics. Coors sponsored the 2004 tour of Mexican pop band Mana, and donated $125,000 towards college scholarships to kids from the U.S., Puerto Rico and Mexico. The Home Depot has partnerships with the ASPIRA Association, HACU, National Council of La Raza, and the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility. Verizon, GM, Kellogg’s, AT&T, Miller Brewing, and others offer college internships, college tours and the like to Latino students.

In June Staples Foundation for Learning granted another $100,000 to the Hispanic heritage Foundation to fund the Hispanic Heritage Teacher Award, which celebrates the contributions of “influential teachers within Latino communities across the country making a positive impact on the lives of Latino youth.”

Of these, the Coors effort is the closest to straightforward cause marketing.

So is education the one appropriate cause that generates affinity across the many Hispano-Latino cultures? Probably not. But the only way to know for sure is to conduct is research and then test your resulting campaign in the H-L marketplace.

If I were to undertake it would probably include some combination of focus groups and surveys.

In Spanish, of course.

Multicultural Cause-Related Marketing Part I

New reader Gabriel Q., who works for a prominent multi-cultural consultancy in California, asks if I’ve ever posted on the topic of multi-cultural cause marketing, specifically cause-related marketing targeted to Hispano/Latino audiences.

It’s an interesting topic to be sure, but I had to confess that I have never written on the subject and I don’t recall ever seeing any studies with regard to multi-cultural in general or Latino/Hispano cause marketing specifically.

In this two-part post I’ll address about the topic of multi-cultural marketing through the case of two ‘Muslim colas.’ On Tuesday I’ll tackle Gabriel’s direct question of Hispano/Latino cause marketing.

Three ‘Muslim colas’ were launched in Europe in 2002-2003, two of which got an astonishing amount of fanfare for their cause marketing efforts and their uncompromising anti-Western marketing positioning. To get a feel for how much publicity they got, just type ‘Muslim cola’ into your browser.

The colas were Mecca Cola, launched in France in 2002 and now headquartered in Dubai, and Qibla Cola, launched in the UK in 2003, but currently in administration (what we in the States call bankruptcy) and presently operating as separate entities in Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both promised to donate 10 percent of net profits to humanitarian causes, notably Palestinian and Muslim charities.

The third ‘Muslim cola’ Evoca, was launched in London in 2003 without any cause tie-ins. All three compete with two more established Muslim colas, Parsi and Zam Zam Colas, both founded in pre-revolutionary Iran and available throughout much of the Muslim world.

It’s hard to draw any conclusions about multi-cultural cause-related marketing from the examples of Qibla and Mecca. Qibla’s founders blame their company’s UK failure on anti-competitive practices from their competitors, presumably Coke and Pepsi.

Without a formal study, who knows which part of Qibla/Meccas’ positioning holds the most appeal for Muslim consumers, the anti-western rhetoric or the cause-related marketing overlay? By contrast Evoca’s positioning is based on the presence of ‘black seed’ flavoring… which draws praise from the Prophet Mohammed himself as a curative… along with the fact that it’s made with natural mineral water.

The failure of the Qibla and Mecca colas in Europe raises a tough question. We know some individuals are more responsive to cause marketing than others. Could it also be that some cultures are less responsive to cause marketing than others?

I think it almost goes without saying that cause-related marketing requires a consumer culture. It’s hard to imagine cause marketing being successfully employed among hunter-gatherer societies, for instance. Likewise, I suspect that if you’re living hand-to-mouth cause marketing holds less appeal than if your situation is more comfortable. So maybe cause marketing wouldn’t do so well in large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance.

Last tough question. Did Mecca and Qibla colas fail in Europe because Muslims there aren’t responsive to cause marketing?

I doubt it. There’s a thousand reasons why consumer businesses fail and cause marketing probably doesn’t even make the list.

Moreover, I did see a study by Mahmood M. Hajjat, PhD, an associate professor of marketing at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. In the experiment Professor Hajjat studied donation amounts in cause marketing and he found that when a company and a cause were a good fit, higher donation amounts lead higher response rates. His test subjects were students who, I presume, were mainly Muslim.

On Tuesday, Latino/Hispano cause marketing.

Check Gallery and Strategic Cause Marketing

The Times they are A-Changing

The bottled water industry generated $15 billion in revenue in America in 2006. It will top $16 billion this year. That’s more than Americans spent on movie tickets or iPods.

And while 50 percent of Fijians don’t have access to clean, reliable water, millions of gallons Fiji Water is shipped most of the way across the Pacific and then trucked from the coast to chi-chi hotels or otherwise sold at a premium across the country.

This even though almost every American could walk to the closest tap and draw out clean, safe and often good-tasting water. These and other choice facts come out in Charles Fishman’s well-wrought 6,000-word piece on water in the July Fast Company.

At a time when the bottle watered business has never been better, I predict that the only direction it can go from here is down. The times they are a-changing.

Fishman concludes:

Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as
we dash out the door, piling up half-finished bottles in the car cup holders--that happens because of a fundamental thoughtlessness. It's only marginally more trouble to have reusable water bottles, cleaned and filled and tucked in the lunch box or the fridge. We just can't be bothered. And in a world in which 1 billion people have no reliable source of drinking water, and 3,000 children a day die from diseases caught from tainted water, that conspicuous consumption of bottled water that we don't need seems wasteful, and perhaps cavalier.

From a June 27, 2007 story in the Deseret Morning News:

Mayors across the country on Monday joined Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson in calling for a study of how bottled water impacts city budgets and waste streams.

Anderson, along with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, sponsored a resolution at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Los Angeles calling for the study, and according to a news release from the nonprofit group Corporate Accountability International, the conference's attendees "overwhelmingly" adopted the resolution…

CAI estimates people in the United States currently spend $11 billion yearly on bottled water, a figure it compared to the estimated $22 billion funding shortfall in the country's municipal water infrastructure budgets.

Other cities have attempted to reduce the use of one-use water bottles in their communities. Most recently, Ann Arbor, Mich., announced it would no longer
offer bottled water at city-sponsored events.

Forgive my immodesty, but I saw this coming back when I posted on Crystal Geyser water in November 2006.

So in times like this what choices do you have if your business is based on consumables? That is, what if your business model is to sell stuff that we discard rather than save after use, like chewing gum, newspapers, or paper checks?

It appears to me that the staff at Check Gallery has asked this very question and came up with some solid answers, based in part on cause-related marketing and social responsibility.

Checks are a consumable and thereby have an environmental impact. But for a check printer, that’s hardly their only worry. Checks are also threatened by electronic banking and debit cards. To get a feel for that threat, next time you go shopping count the number of merchants which have a little sign taped to the cash register, often hand-lettered, that reads “We know longer accept checks. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Above is the front of a flyer delivered to my mailbox on July 10, 2007. The headline reads:

"America’s Leading Earth-Friendly Checks For Less."

The deck below reads;

Great designs get you in touch with your interests at a significant savings. And
whatever design appeals to you—you’ll benefit from Check Gallery’s outstanding
value and environmentally-friendly products. All checks are printed on premium,
recycled paper with non-toxic inks and are available in One-Part and Duplicate
formats in boxes of 150.

Okay, it ain’t exactly Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, but you get the point.

In all, Check Gallery supports six charities: National Wildlife Foundation; Lupus Foundation of America; Defenders of Wildlife; National Breast Cancer Foundation; Humane Society of the United States; and, the Boat U.S. Foundation for Boating Safety and Clean Water.

In effect, Check Gallery has made cause-related marketing, normally a tactic, into a strategy and I applaud them for that and for addressing this issue now, even if their approach is a little ham-handed. Witness their awful logo on the top left, for instance.

Still, if you’re in the consumables business, there's probably something you can learn from Check Gallery.

Walgreens and the American Diabetes Association

Scared Pointless

When it comes to cause marketing the disease charities have potential conflicts of interest that other causes probably don’t. For example, if the American Heart Association does a cause-marketing campaign with Bayer’s 80mg ‘baby aspirin’ then there’s an implied endorsement of both Bayer and the 80mg dose, whether or not the AHA offers an explicit endorsement of either or both.

About 10 years ago, the attorneys general of several States gave the single disease charities a good scare when it comes to cause marketing by drafting a document about the legal and ethical use of the practice for certain kinds of charities. However, the document never received the support of the full membership of the National Association of Attorney’s General, according to their communications director.

Nonetheless, in the wake of that unwanted attention, many of the single-disease charities developed strict policies about what they will and will not do when it comes to cause-related marketing campaigns. The Heart Association, to name one, splits the baby by allowing certain cause marketing campaigns, but by also offering a licensing arrangement whereby if a company’s product meets certain specified criteria they can buy the rights to use the American Heart Association’s seal.

I couldn’t find a cause-related marketing policy for the American Diabetes Association, but I presume they have one. How else to explain the absurdity of this page from the Walgreens sales flyer in June 2007? The headline reads: “Walgreens and the makers of the items on this page salute the American Diabetes Association. We’re proud to make a contribution of $287,500*.”

That asterisk refers us to a sentence in mice-type on the bottom left of the page which reads, “The American Diabetes Association does not endorse any of the products featured.”

Aside from the CYA legalism of the statement, there’s something very prissy about all this. I mean I get Walgreens’ role. It’s their flyer. They want to look like good corporate citizens and sell some product. The vendors want the same. But what is the ADA is doing here? That disclaimer makes it seem like they’re saying, “thanks for your money, but don’t stand too close when you hand us the check.”

The ADA’s participation would make more sense if the ad celebrated “National Diabetes Awareness Week,” or some such. Or if the diabetes magazine mentioned in the ad was prepared in part or whole by the ADA. Or, if the ad featured someone from the ADA’s stable of celebrities. Or if, need I say it?, the ad featured some honest-to-Pete cause marketing!

The standoffishness is silly. As near as I can tell, the ADA has existing relationships with all or most of the companies featured in the ad.

Given that it seems plain that the lawyers are getting too much purview when it comes cause-related marketing at the American Diabetes Association.

Listen, I like lawyers. I admire their training. I’ve worked with one closely at Operation Kids. I put myself through my early college years working for a law firm. You can’t swing a garden hose in my suburban neighborhood without hitting one. But if they’re still practicing law then they’re almost certainly not business people. The occasional exception proves the rule (before he ran for mayor of New York Rudy Giulani was appointed to manage a Kentucky coal company in receivership, for instance). It’s instructive that in the United States we call lawyers ‘counselor.’ You go to them for advice and counsel, not to make your business decisions for you.

This ad is so careful as to be pointless.

Paul Godfrey and Milton Friedman

A New Rigor is Found In Arguments for Corporate Social Responsibility

The most lasting rebuke of corporate social responsibility came from Milton Friedman, the small of stature economist who even in death continues to cast a huge intellectual shadow.

In September 1970 Friedman wrote “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profit,” for the New York Times Magazine. In it, he argued persuasively that corporate social responsibility was just so much twaddle, socialism in a corporate wrapper that undermines a free society. Businesses that practiced corporate responsibility were playing Robin Hood with someone else’s money.

“The discussions of the ‘social responsibilities of business,’” Friedman wrote,
“are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean
to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Only people have responsibilities.”

Instead, companies should maximize their profits and return capital to shareholders so that individuals could then donate to whatever cause they wished to, or not. For companies to do anything besides maximize profits was simply immoral, Friedman wrote.

When Friedman wrote that in 1970, corporate giving to charities was only a few decades old and basically amounted to a pittance. While it was permitted as early as 1917 in the State of Texas (a number that grew to 26 States by the early 1950s), it was a court ruling in New Jersey in 1952 that set the stage for modern corporate philanthropy. In 1950 New Jersey passed a law permitting companies to donate to educational institutions. But it was unclear whether the law permitted companies chartered before 1950 to make donations to nonprofits. In a test case a New Jersey manufacturer of valves and fire hydrants named A.P. Smith Manufacturing Company made a $1,500 donation to Princeton University. A group of shareholders challenged the gift in the New Jersey courts.

The court ruled that the statute was legal, and that it applied retroactively. The court opined that institutions of higher learning were essential to the democracy and the free-enterprise system. Companies increasingly realized this fact and had therefore a part to play to ensure the continued existence of such institutions as a matter not only of continued survival but to enhance the conditions of business in the present.

The case, called A.P. Smith Manufacturing Company vs. Barlow, changed the landscape of corporate giving in America forever.

But a sorry sort of intellectual stalemate was the result. Friedman and other Hayek-followers maintained that corporate social responsibility undermined free institutions. And the counter argument from the A.P. Smith ruling and others was that it improved the conditions necessary for business. In effect the later argument carried the day. Giving USA reports that companies in America gave $12.72 billion to charity in 2006.

But to see how much force Friedman’s article still has, Google the title. In the first page all that will come up are pdfs of the article posted by the nation’s business schools!

Increasingly academics have taken up the question and they’re finding that corporate social responsibility DOES make business sense. I’ve highlighted before the research of Raymond Fisman and Geoffrey Heal of Columbia Graduate School of Business and Vinay Nair of the Wharton School which suggests that for businesses that advertise a lot corporate philanthropy acts as a signal to consumers that a company’s products or services are reliable. They found a positive relationship between corporate philanthropy and profitability in industries with high advertising. But in industries with low advertising the reverse was true.

On Monday I caught a presentation from Professor Paul Godfrey and afterwards we spoke briefly about his 2006 paper in the Academy of Management Review, “The Relationship Between Corporate Philanthropy and Shareholder Wealth: A Risk Management Perspective.” Godfrey teaches at Brigham Young University but like yours truly is a University of Utah alumnus.

The paper presents an ingenious theoretical underpinning which suggests that companies can use philanthropy to bank goodwill and, in effect, draw on it when the mine caves in.
His theory has 14 propositions and math that I couldn’t begin to explain. But his hypothesis goes like this:

Corporate philanthropy can generate positive moral capital among communities
and stakeholders.

Moral capital can provide shareholders with insurance-like protection for a
firm’s relationship-based intangible assets.

This protection contributes to shareholder wealth.

What he told me Monday is that the early data bears out the theory and the hypothesis. Of course Godfrey’s theories require further testing by himself and others. But clearly Friedman’s complaint that there is no rigor among those who argue for corporate social responsibility is no longer the case.

HD Radio

Time to Dust Off Your Plans For Getting Your Charity on Radio

In more than 100 markets in the United States radio station owners are programming dozens of new channels. Maybe one of them could carry programming for and about your nonprofit.

I’m talking about HD Radio or digital radio.

What is HD Radio?

• HD Radio offers a quality of sound similar to what comes out of your MP3 player, meaning less hiss and static than AM or FM.


• HD Radio is a terrestrial signal (as opposed to a satellite signal) broadcast by the same radio stations that are already in your market.


• Unlike satellite radio, HD Radio is subscription free and for about the next year or so it's also commercial free.


• Broadcasters can include data channels that display on your digital radio tuner such things as what song you’re listening to and what’s on related channels.


• HD Radio channels can NOT be heard on standard radios and require a digital radio tuner, which start around $100 in the United States.

Here’s how it works. Existing stations are converting from analog to digital signals. As they do so they are able to compress their signal into a smaller portion of the radio spectrum allotted to them by the FCC. With the leftover spectrum, broadcasters are able to split their bandwidth and add additional ‘channels.’ Assuming they could drop their analog signal entirely and go all-digital, using existing technology broadcasters could put as many as seven channels where one analog channel use to reside. That’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, however, considering the huge inventory of “legacy radios.”

What kind of channels are broadcasters programming right now? Pardon the pun, but it covers the spectrum.

• Weather


• Traffic


• News


• Sports


• Live Music


• Bluegrass


• Zydeco


• Local Jazz


• Old School Album Rock


• Comedy


• All Irish Music in Boston


• Country Music in New York City


• One station even carved out a channel that played the newly-released single from country artist's Gretchen Wilson's latest CD and aired it 24-7!

Here’s where it gets interesting. Clear Channel, which owns about 10 percent of the 12,000 or so radio stations in the United States, is programming a channel in markets like Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Hartford, and elsewhere called “Pride,” targeted to gay and lesbian listeners.

Let’s be clear. This is not a rollback of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine. Clear Channel isn’t doing this because they’re required to do so by rule or by law. They’re doing it because they think they’ve found a market.

So what’s the opportunity for charities?

Right now there are no commercials on HD Radio anywhere. The broadcasters are still trying to figure out what they’ve got and how to commercially exploit it. Audiences are small, and listenership is all but immeasurable. And for broadcasters HD Radio is presently nothing but a cost. So chances are stations would be willing to entertain ideas from outsiders, the Gretchen Wilson stunt proves that.

If you have a cause with a lot of appeal, you could approach stations with some ideas, a radiothon, for instance. I think this is virtual slamdunk for United Ways or other federated entities which could tell the stories of multiple charities. Same with certain advocacy groups.

Let me reiterate, stations are not required to open up their digital spectrum to worthy causes in order to keep their license to broadcast. And, I would expect that almost any charity would have to pay for airtime. But I’d bet there are broadcasters who would hand over airtime on one of their digital channels to the right charity for a song.

Finally, terrestrial digital radio is available in about 20 countries around the globe. If your nonprofit inside or outside the States has an experience capitalizing this burgeoning media channel, please share.

The Ultimate Question

Using Customer Satisfaction to Find Donors

I sat in on a very interesting presentation last week at the Wasatch Online Marketers Association (WOMA) by Ryan Davies of Progrexion, a multi-disciplinary marketing and marketing research firm with offices in San Francisco and Utah.

One of Progrexion’s house specialties is customer satisfaction surveys, one of the more dreary (if necessary) parts of marketing research. You know what I mean if you’ve ever been subjected to a customer satisfaction survey that runs 4 pages single-spaced in about 9-point type. Completing those surveys can be like that scene in the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man when Sir Lawrence Olivier plays the Mengele-like ex-Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell who extracts information along with teeth.

But Progrexion draws from the work of author and Bain consultant Fred Reichheld to come up with a much more streamlined and painless approach. Reichheld wrote the 2006 book “The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth.”

Reichheld maintains that under pressure to meet growth targets modern corporate managers are going after the wrong customers and doing so badly. Hence the implicit statement in the book’s title that profits can be bad and growth wrong.

What’s the ultimate question? Well hold your breath because it’s all of eight words: “would you recommend this business to a friend?”

How people answer that question and a few more carefully selected questions are used to calculate something called the “Net Promoter Score.” The Net Promoter scores are based on a 0-10 scale and the measure the degree to which someone is genuinely pleased with your product, company or service and why.

Here’s the scale:

9-10 Net Promoter
7-8 Neutral
0-6 Detractor

Fine and dandy, you’re saying, but what does this have to do with cause marketing?

Certainly the Ultimate Question and the Net Promoter score could be used gauge the success and lasting power of a cause marketing campaign or program. Want to know if your paper icon campaign is actually costing you money (even while raising money)? Ask the Ultimate Question.
But there’s another possible use.

Progrexion uses the Ultimate Question as a lead generator. They’re currently helping a presidential candidate identify potential donors. (Guess who the candidate is? Bear in mind that Progrexion was founded by an ex-Bain consultant and that Fred Reichheld still works for Bain Consulting. Remember also that among the field of contenders for the presidency there’s exactly one candidate who started and ran Bain Capital before taking the helm at the 2002 Winter Olympics).

In effect, the Ultimate Question and the Net Promoter Score is a way of identifying salesmen and mavens, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terms.

And what cause marketing campaign couldn’t use more of both?