Learning as a Cause Marketer

What do you do, as a cause marketer, to keep learning?

How you answer the question of self-education determines things like: how successful your cause-related marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income; your lifespan; researchers have even shown a correlation between happiness and education.

It’s almost axiomatic that more you know the more you want to know (and as Socrates pointed out, the more you realize how little you do know)!

I hope this will be a conversation rather than a monologue or disquisition, so I invite you to comment on what you do to stay on top of your game.

Business/General Interest

• I subscribe to and read a number of business magazines so as to understand current issues, trends, economics and the like, as well as several news magazines. Since I don’t have a business degree I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of business. I also read newspapers, but mainly online. I especially admire the reporting in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
• Inspiration can strike almost anywhere, so whenever I’m in a waiting room I make a special point of reading magazines I don’t subscribe to or normally read. Sometimes that means women’s magazines, trade publications, hobbyist and special interest magazines, etc. It’s almost a lead-pipe cinch that when I read these kinds of publications I learn something I didn’t know or gain some new insight.
• When I find something that I believe has lasting value, I scan or save it onto an external hard drive. The same hard drive holds many hundreds of examples of cause-related marketing campaigns.
• I read Seth Godin’s and Guy Kawasaki’s blogs along with the reliably hilarious Fakesteve.com.

Knowledge of the Wider World

• I’ve all but given up on reading fiction. But in its place I’ve become an inveterate history buff, with a special interest in the ancient world… the Sumerians, Egypt, Greece and Rome, early European history, etc. There’s still a big whole in my education about Asian history which I must soon remedy.
• Most of what I’ve learned on this count I picked up from coursework produced by The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar, both of which I can recommend. Both offer taped courses, meaning I can learn on the go. If I’m driving alone, I’m more likely to be listening to some of these recordings or to an audiobook than to the radio or a CD.
• I haven’t fully availed myself of it yet, but universities in North America and Europe are putting hundreds of thousands of hours of lectures and podcasts online. Check iTunes and individual universities for specific subjects.

Cause-Related Marketing

• There are a handful of professional seminars and conferences that address the issues of cause-related marketing and offer training. In the United States the most prominent is the IEG Sponsorship Conference, but rising with a bullet is David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum. In the UK, the granddaddy is Business in the Community's Annual Conference.
• There are few books at Amazon on cause-related marketing, but the ultimate book on the practice is still to be written. On my bookshelf is Cause-Related Marketing by Sue Adkins, Marketing from the Heart, by Sue Linial, Brand Spirit, by Hamish Pringle, and Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen.
• I actively read a handful of blogs from Katya Andresen, Joe Waters and Cone, Inc., on cause-related marketing, plus others on nonprofit issues.
• While you can get online and offline certificates in various aspects of nonprofit management, still missing is any kind of certificate or other advanced education in cause-related marketing. In my opinion this glaring deficit needs to be addressed.

Brain Exercise

• You could make a pretty good argument that you can implicitly learn from games like Chess, the Asian game Go, Scrabble, as well as some number of video games. Increasingly, I’m seeing handheld games and programs that are explicitly meant to help adults learn or otherwise give their gray-matter a workout.

But you don’t necessarily need anything so external. An elderly aunt of mine kept her mind sharp well into her 90s not just reading the paper, but copy-editing it. She’d literally mark-up the daily paper with a red pen!

Answer a Question, Help Darfur

Eric Cheung, an aspiring social entrepreneur and a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, has a big question: would you like to help the stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan?

Cheung is answering that question with an intriguing cause-related marketing approach.

He may also have the answer to a lot of urgent if less grave questions that university students in particular have at his new website, OneBigU.com.

Here’s the premise: students post questions at OneBigU. For instance, “what is the Albedo Effect?” Other students from across the world, give the answers. “The albedo of an object is the extent to which it diffusely reflects light from the sun.”

The site features Google Ads that generates revenue. A small honorarium, split out from the Google Ads revenue is put into a ledger account in the name of the answerer for each accepted response. The person may take the honorarium or donate it to Help Darfur Now, a nonprofit founded in 2005 by high school students to help address the Darfur crisis.

It’s like Yahoo Answers or the recently-retired Google Answers, only with a cause-related marketing twist.

Of course, this concept could work with almost any charity that had sufficient affinity. Cheung, who studied computer engineering and built the site with the help of a contractor, picked Help Darfur Now after coming across it on Facebook.

Right now, OneBigU needs some help. The site currently consists of not many questions and answers. I like Eric’s approach, so to help get the word out, I’ll send a copy of a 30-page report on cause-related marketing that a colleague and I gave at a nonprofit conference in Italy to whoever can identify the question that I asked at OneBigU.

But generating website traffic isn’t Eric’s only challenge. He also needs to make sure that the answers are more reliable, more helpful, more particular to a questioner’s needs than he/she could get at Wikipedia.

I wish Eric and his venture well and I expect to see much more of this social media based cause-related marketing.

Paul Jones in Western & Engish Today Magazine

At the risk of being immodest, your's truly was quoted several times in a recent article on cause-related marketing in the January issue of Western & English Today, a trade magazine for the Western and English equine industry.

Also quoted were Carol Cone, cause-marketing grandee, and David Hessekiel, the founder of the Cause Marketing Forum and a subscriber to this blog.

Follow this link to the excellent article by Carol Gustafson and read it online. It begins on page 58.

You can also read all the questions Carol Gustafson posed to me last November along with my answers here.

PeaceKeeper Cause-Metics

In my never-ending quest to root out new cause-related marketing buzzwords, I came across this one: “all-benefits companies.” It means companies that are in business to give away all their distributable profits after expenses and profits.

Newman’s Own is a prominent example, but I came across the expression on the website for PeaceKeeper Cause-Metics.

We all know the story of Newman’s Own. Paul Newman and his friend, author A.E. Hotchner whipped up a batch of salad dressing and sold it to neighbors. It was an instant and unlikely success… as a funny little slide show on the company website explains… that led to an extensive food product line. Since 1982 Newman’s Own has given more than $200 million to charity.

According to its website, PeaceKeeper has set a very similar goal for itself.

PeaceKeeper sells a line of mineral makeup including lipstick, lip gloss, lip balm, and nail polish. The products, PeaceKeeper tells us, are made without a long list of harmful (usually artificial) chemicals. They aren’t tested on animals, and the ingredients aren’t sourced from companies that use slave labor, or pay unfair wages.

PeaceKeeper also endeavors to follow the ethical standards ‘Yamas’ and ‘Niyamas’ as practiced by Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. The website defines those standards as “truthfulness, non-violence and non-stealing.”

PeaceKeeper isn’t yet profitable. However, as their website points out, they’re already active givers:

“PeaceKeeper has given one half of one percent of its gross revenues to
urgent human rights issues each year since it has launched and will continue to
do so until profitable. In addition to this, we give a percentage of sales from
the UNIFEM (5% or US$.80), V-Day (5% or US$.80) and Eternal Equity Lip Gloss
(US$1.00) to charity. We also give all proceeds from our Million Kisses Campaign
to charity. To date, we have given over $55,000 in cash donations and $30,000 in
products to women-focused non-profits for their silent auctions or VIP events.”

All of this has led to good publicity in women’s media for PeaceKeeper.

There are other things that I haven’t mentioned, but suffice it to say that PeaceKeeper touches a lot of buttons.

Here’s one for instance, you can get some of PeaceKeepers products without carmine, a natural red die made from insects. Carmine is all-natural, but it isn’t Kosher or Halal, and some vegans won’t use it for ethical reasons.

However, I won’t say PeaceKeeper touches on too many hot-buttons. Nowadays when you make the decision to be non-violent, you’ve almost certainly also decided to pay fair wages and to stand against slave labor. If you’ve decided to sell “non-toxic” products, you’ve also determined to make your products all natural, Halal, Kosher and vegan friendly. Each decision follows from the first.

If I had a suggestion for Peacekeeper it would be that they re-order their selling points, at least for the time being. It’s great that they’re an all benefits company. That’s their unique selling proposition (USP). And PeaceKeeper clearly recognizes this since their trademarked tagline is “Cause-Metics.”

But they’re not yet profitable, so leading with their all benefits approach is kind of a non-starter. Until they are profitable PeaceKeeper should move their cause marketing appeal a little further to the front so that it’s co-billed with their existing USP. Because right now their cause marketing efforts are actively generating charitable donations.

Moreover, I had to read darn near every page of their website in order to write this; their other selling points are spread everywhere. Hey, I’m all for people reading every single page of website. (In fact, I heartily invite everyone to read every page of my blog!) I just wouldn’t count on people doing it.

A simple fix would be to list all their competitive advantages in one place. I’m not necessarily suggesting that they change anything else about their site. Like the direct marketers say, “tell more, sell more.”

But it could only help PeaceKeeper to add one page that explains in bullet points (with links) all of PeaceKeeper’s competitive advantages.

How to Keep from Spreading Your Charity Brand too Thin

The Entertainment Industry Foundation, a federated charity founded in 1942 by Samuel Goldwyn, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and the Warner Brothers, has always held a wonderful fascination for me.

Nowadays you’re likely to know about the EIF because of the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, co-founded by Katie Couric after the death of her husband Jay Monahan to colorectal cancer, and administered under the auspices of the Foundation. But EIF’s other major initiatives include their Women’s Cancer Programs, National Arts and Education Initiative, and Diabetes Aware.

But IEF also has a number of other minor initiatives as well as donor-advised funds supervised by such luminaries as rockers the Blackeyed Peas, former Bondman Pierce Brosnan, the Animal Actors Guild (I can only assume Lassie barks her orders at board meetings), American Idol softy Randy Jackson, and others.

Their mission statement goes like this:

“The Entertainment Industry Foundation, as the leading charitable
organization of the industry, has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars -
and provided countless volunteer hours - to support charitable initiatives that
address some of the most critical issues facing our society.”

All told the EIF gives to hundreds of charities ranging from the Chaka Khan Foundation, to Cedars Sinai, to the American Red Cross, to the Sundance Institute. Federated charities like the United Jewish Communities, the Combined Federal Campaign, and even the United Way raise money and give to a broad spectrum of charities, too.

But even for a federated charity, the EIF seems unfocused. The United Jewish Communities give a lot to Jewish causes and pro-Israel charities, for instance. And individual United Ways concentrate their efforts on the needs of the communities they operate in.

The EIF website is splashed with A-list celebrities like actors Charlize Theron, Felicity Huffman, singers Tony Bennett and Queen Latifah, and celebrity cobbler Jimmy Choo. And the list of celebrities that show up at just one EIF gala would power lesser affairs in big cities like Houston or Atlanta or Seattle for 10 years.

Which leads me to ask; how can a brand possibly stand for anything when it stands for so many things?

And yet the EIF does just fine moneywise. They raised $33 million in 2006, $25 million in 2005, $23 million in 2004, $21 million in 2003, etc.

How have they managed to be involved with so many causes and entities without diluting and irretrievably diminishing their brand?

I really don’t know, although I do have some ideas.

• Plainly the management at the EIF has some skill at putting together cause-related marketing campaigns with corporate America. The Pantene campaign with two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank is adequate proof of that.
• Their vanilla mission statement doesn’t exactly force laser-like focus on them. Meaning they can take on Charlize Theron’s Africa Outreach Project while they also undertake a star driven anti-smoking PSA campaign called Hollywood Unfiltered without being called on the carpet for mission-creep.
• Certainly the star power the EIF can bring to bear helps paper over weaknesses like market positioning.
• I think it’s also clear that there was some kind of vacuum in Southern California for really glamorous star-studded galas that the EIF successfully filled.

But I think those observations raise as many questions as they answer.

So I’m very interested in your comments to questions like:

1. How is it that the EIF continues to grow?
2. Is the EIF's lack of focus good, bad or indifferent?
3. Should the EIF even try to concentrate more closely on its five national initiatives (colorectal cancer, women's cancer, arts and music education, Hollywood Unfiltered, and Diabetes Aware) or should it just go on as is?

Optimizing Your Website for Word of Mouth

Last Thursday, January 10, I heaped praise on the TOMS Shoes use of strategic cause-related marketing to improve the world, launch their business, and generate terrific word of mouth.

Their appeal is specific, easy to understand, and streamlined. For every pair of TOMS Shoes you buy, another pair is donated to a child who needs them.

I also greatly admired their “shoe drops,” whereby they invite customers to join them in places like South Africa and Argentina… at their own expense… to give away TOMS shoes to kids. TOMS, I wrote, was well on its way to creating a “cult brand,” like Harley-Davidson, Jimmy Buffet, or the Star Trek franchise.

I did suggest there was more that TOMS could do to their website to make it more word of mouth friendly and left it at that.

One person anonymously commented on the post, saying, in effect; “alrighty, smart guy, what would you do to optimize a website for word of mouth?”

Glad you asked.

I would do at least the following:

• TOMS should add to their menu bar a section that enables easy word of mouth. Call it FOT (Friends of TOMS) or some such, but it should include product photos, shoe drop photos and video, talking points, as well as some kind of email or tell-a-friend function.
• But remember, the goal here is to help word of mouth spread. So the talking points can’t be in the features/benefits language of marketingspeak. Nobody really talks that way and it won’t get forwarded.
• Make product and other photos easier to download. Right now the pictures files on the TOMS site are sized for the press, but they’re too big for a blogger/emailer who just needs to drop in a photo and doesn’t want to have to open up her photo editing software first.
• Make the site easy to bookmark by putting a select number of the icons from the social bookmarking sites; Stumbledupon, Digg, Deli.cio.us. Or whoever is the least-hated among those kind of outfits these days.
• If TOMS doesn’t already collect email addresses and contact information, it should start. Then TOMS should roll out an email marketing campaign. Each issue should make some reference to the shoe donation and/or shoe drops.
• If that feels too heavy-handed, then TOMS could open up a Facebook/MySpace page and invite friends. From the Facebook/MySpace page they can do a less pushy kind of email marketing.
• Whatever TOMS does to motivate word of mouth, they should NOT use money to incentivize people to talk about them. It muddies the waters. To customers someone who has taken money to speak positively on your behalf is a paid spokesperson, plain and simple.
• When they do shoe drops, TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie should strongly consider doing frequent Twitter updates, including photos and maybe video. Mycoskie already blogs about the drops before and after the fact. But Twitter would bring great immediacy to the members of the TOMS fan base who can’t themselves jet off to Argentina or elsewhere.

Finally, it should go without saying that no matter what TOMS does to its website, it will all be for naught if it screws up its customer service or relationships.

TOMS must work at making its customers happy. It’s a cliché that unhappy customers tell two or four or… 67 people (or whatever the number really is) about their bad experience as happy customers do. A digital audio recording of your customer service rep abusing a customer can circle the world faster than you can issue an apology and correct the mistake.

The good news is that the social media also enables someone to pass around the world a story of just how good an experience they had with your company.

I’d bet TOMS already knows that.

Cause Marketers: Let’s Launch a Virtual Meeting Space

Choreographing a Digital Spark

One of the cardinal principles of adult education theory is that the most meaningful learning frequently takes place between students, and the teacher’s role is to moderate more often than lecture.

It’s true in cause-related marketing. Organizations like Children’s Miracle Network, the Muscular Dystrophy Association and St Jude Children’s Research Hospitals all hold periodic conventions for the people in the field that raise money. The conventions serve to unite disparate groups, provide a forum for unveiling new campaign elements, build camaraderie, spark ideas, etc.

Any of that can happen in meeting rooms, but often as not it takes place in the hallways, over meals or drinks.

David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum serves a similar purpose. Likewise, IEG’s annual Sponsorship Conference and the Business in the Community Annual Conference in the UK.

But what if your need is more immediate? What if you’re from a distant part of the globe? What if you don’t have the resources to travel to a central locale or even to regional venues?

Ashoka, the multifaceted nonprofit with a mission to encourage social entrepreneurship across the globe faces just such issues and they’ve recently launched what could be a useful model for the burgeoning world of cause-related marketing.

The mission of its Citizen Based Initiative, now in its tenth year, is to broaden the base of social entrepreneurs and free their reliance on “traditional foundation grants and government aid.”

How to do that?

Well a big piece of the puzzle for Ashoka is the new CBI website, which contains a treasury of inspiring case studies from social entrepreneurs the world over. The case studies are distilled from Ashoka’s regional CBI competitions. One hundred and fifty of the case studies will make their way into a book Ashoka is publishing. But of course the number that could be included in the website is limited only by their quality and the capacity to meaningfully search the database.
I learned about the CBI website from a young go-getter at Ashoka named David Stoker.

Ashoka has pointedly stayed away from making the case studies “how tos,” says Stoker. Instead, the case studies... stories really... are meant to spark ideas in social entrepreneurs who may be on the other side of the globe.

“We are not trying to promote exact replication of practices,” says Stoker, “but instead trying to paint a mosaic that can inspire practitioners to think creatively about utilizing their own citizen base. If someone wants more information about a specific case study they are also free to contact us.”

In my view, the cause-related marketing world should do something similar.

I imagine a website forum where people can post case studies, comment, ask questions, post and find jobs, and get feedback on ideas from practitioners. But mostly the website would serve as a gathering place for ideas and practices.

To a degree that happens with this blog, the blogs from Cone and Joe Waters and Katya Andresen, at David Hessekiel’s website, and elsewhere.

But I imagine something more than blogs alone. To make it manageable, the content would have to user-generated. And it oughta have content in Mandarin, Hindi, French, Spanish, Arabic, English, as well as the capacity to translate at least some of the content from langauge to langauge.

What would be the value of such a site?

I’ll conclude with an illustrative anecdote from my days at Children’s Miracle Network (CMN).

Each Fall CMN held a meeting for their ‘CMN Directors;’ professional fundraisers who were employees of the affiliated hospitals and who managed the CMN campaign in their market.

One of the key elements was the Million-Dollar Roundtable, a meeting of all the markets that earned more than $1 million through their CMN campaign. The meeting’s format was very straightforward. They would literally go around the room and everyone would describe something they had done successfully in their market.

One in particular stood out. In this market they had held a Macarena Dance fundraiser that grossed, as I recall, something like $15,000. Not bad. This was during the Macarena craze in the United States and I can still envision the people in the room furiously scribbling down notes.

Now I consider myself to be fairly creative. But if I sat in a room brainstorming ideas until the sun set on my life, I’m not sure I would have ever come up with a Macarena Dance fundraiser!

That’s the spark that can come from people meeting in common cause.

Streamlined Cause-Related Marketing is Good for the Sole

TOMS Shoes of Santa Monica, California has taken a page from MAC Cosmetics and created a strikingly straightforward cause-related marketing promotion. When you buy a pair of their shoes, another pair is given to a kid who needs them.

Here’s the language from the TOMS website: “you buy a pair of TOMS and I give a pair to a child on your behalf.”

The shoes are Blake Mycoskie’s more fashionable take on the traditional Argentine slip-on shoe called an alpargatas. Mycoskie, who didn’t have any prior fashion or shoe industry experience before starting TOMS, found alpergatas on a trip to Argentina. He also found a lot of Argentine kids running around shoeless. He loved the shoes and put the two notions together.

“I said, I’m going to start a shoe company, and for every pair I sell, I’m going to give one pair to a kid in need,” Mycoskie told Time Magazine.

The shoes are modestly priced and come in a range of materials and colors. TOMS and Mycoskie get tons of publicity. The shoes are sold in traditional retail outlets in the United States, Canada, Italy, Japan, and Korea, and online.

TOMS released its first line of shoes in June 2007 and Mycoskie says the company is already profitable, which is surprising considering the company has higher costs that come from having to manufacture two pairs of shoes for each pair sold.

The lesson for cause marketers is clear; don't over-complicate your campaigns. If the customer can’t easily and quickly parse out the offer, then you’ve almost certainly shortchanged your campaign. The simplicity of the offer from TOMS and MAC Cosmetics creates word of mouth that is remarkable. That is, worthy to be remarked upon. That’s why the publicity has been so good.

Mycoskie is also taking the next step in creating a cult brand by taking along customers and others with him when he does what he calls “shoe drops.” Hundreds of people have signed on to go with him to South America and elsewhere to give away the shoes. And they’re doing it at their own expense.

All in all, brilliant!

I have only one small suggestion for Mycoskie and his team. Since TOMS is basically built for word of mouth marketing, there are a handful of things they could do to their website to enable better word of mouth.


A big thanks to Lisa Warnock, a member of the Cause-Related Marketing Googlegroup, for bringing TOMS to my attention.

The Secret Sauce of Cause-Related Marketing

I have put off this post for a very long time, mostly because when I’ll tell clients and others the Secret Sauce of breakout cause-related marketing I’m more likely to get a look of doubt than a nod of understanding. Kinda like the look on my face when I read that Disney’s High School Musical brand has passed the $1 billion mark in operating profits.

Here’s what prompts this post. People approach me all the time asking, “how is it that Children’s Miracle Network manages to raise more than $30 million every year with something as simple as a paper icon campaign. Or, “how does Susan G. Komen keep finding new sponsors when we can’t seem to find even one? Or, “explain to me how St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital raised more than $8 million from Chilis and their customers when fundraising campaigns at the casual dining chains have traditionally been death for other charities?

I tell them the Secret Sauce to breakout cause-related marketing and then I get the look.

Most people just don’t believe the Secret Sauce of cause-related marketing is so simple. And it is relatively simple to explain. It’s just really hard to do.

This post is mainly directed to nonprofits, their management, staff, and board members.

For you agencies and sponsors, there’s something for you here, too, but only if the fundraising success of the campaign is important to you.

There are just two ingredients in the Secret Sauce of Cause-Related Marketing. (If you’re reading this in a French-speaking region there’s a third ingredient; beurre. Hah!)

Have I teased this long enough? The two ingredients to the Secret Sauce of cause-related marketing are:

1. A cause’s internal organization.
2. A cause’s appeal.

That’s it? You exclaim! Yup. that’s it.

Let me explain starting at the start. Successful cause-related marketing means that you have be ready to put someone on an airplane at a moment’s notice so they can go pitch a sponsor who had an hour open in his schedule. And you buy the tickets knowing full well that the sponsor might say no to the proposal. It means that you have to organize the cause-related marketing department so that it’s more like an advertising agency and less like a charity. It means that you can’t just task your office assistant “who’s good with words” to work up a proposal for Proctor & Gamble. It means holding people accountable for the results of the campaigns they oversee. It means to some degree you have to have a sales culture. Doing effective cause-related marketing requires a seriousness of purpose. It requires a budget and it demands the support of the board and the rest of the staff. If your charity can’t manage all that then you’re probably stuck with bush-league cause-related marketing until you can.

I’ve written before about the necessity of affinity in cause-related marketing. But the word affinity describes a current condition more than a potential condition. What I’m talking about is the capacity a cause has to win over people and institutions.

That’s important because sometimes a cause-related marketing actually reveals affinity in a cause that was previously unknown.

An illustration might help.

Bobby Shriver cut his cause-related marketing teeth at Special Olympics, the charity his mother founded in 1962. Special Olympics has scads of affinity that has been built up over the last 45 years.

But when Shriver started (Red) … which raises money to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria mainly in Africa… the cause itself had little built-in affinity. That’s not to say that AIDS doesn’t have affinity, only that American’s affinity for AIDS victims hadn’t been proven to extend to those outside the United States. Now Shriver did have Bono added to the many advantages conferred by his own Kennedy bloodlines, but that’s the affinity born of celebrity, which is unreliable by nature.

So while (Red) didn’t have much existing affinity, it did have enormous potential affinity. And Shriver and Bono were able to convince the Gap, American Express, Apple, Motorola and others to come on board based only on that potential affinity.

So ask yourself, if my charity doesn’t have much existing affinity, does it have potential affinity?

• Can you explain your mission in 10 words or less?
• When you explain it to your companion on an airplane, does she get warm, fuzzy feelings? Does she find the story so remarkable that she passes it on to others unbidden?
• Do people blog about your cause?
• Do they buy your branded merchandise? When you send out press releases do you get called back?

These are some of the earmarks of affinity.

Organization and affinity are the ingredients of the Secret Sauce of cause-related marketing. But they still have to be combined in the proper proportions make the Secret Sauce. Maybe the board has given you a good budget for prospecting. But if you have an overly-complicated mission, your cause-related marketing campaigns may never breakout.

That’s the breaks, kid.

And don’t give me that look!

Fearless Predictions About Cause-Related Marketing in 2008

Last September, at the request of San Francisco blogger Gayle Roberts, I posted my predictions on the future of cause-related marketing. With the coming of the New Year it makes sense to re-release this post.

I have a spotty record predicting the future.

I bought a Zip drive about a week before the first USB drive came out.

And then, admiring the portability of said USB drives, I bought 2 of them with 56K of memory for about $50 a pop.

I have two complete sets of the 1987 Topps baseball cards (which includes the rookie cards for Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire) still in the original shrink-wrap. They’re worth almost exactly what I paid for them. Or rather less, considering the ravages of inflation.

(I also have a first edition of Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey in very fine condition that has more than doubled in value. So, I’m not always dead wrong.)

So imagine my surprise to get a short missive from Bay-area fundraising consultant Gayle Roberts asking me to weigh in on the topic of “Predicting the Future of Fundraising” for the September Giving Carnival.

But like all pundits, I’ve got an opinion no matter my history of accuracy!

That said, to paraphrase Abbey’s ‘warning’ at the front of Hayduke “Anyone who takes these predictions seriously will be shot. Anyone who does not take them seriously will be buried by a Mitsubishi bulldozer.”

Here then are my bold predictions on the future of cause-related marketing over 2008.

• I predict that cause-related marketing will continue to grow in North America, if modestly. How’s that for wild-eyed caution? According to IEG cause-related marketing has hovered within a percentage point or two of 10 percent of the total of all sponsorship for the last decade. I don’t see anything in the near term that leads me to believe the practice is going to significantly break out of that range.
  
• I predict eco cause marketing will become commonplace. There’s already plenty going on in North America. But it will only get bigger, especially Canada and the United States where it has more room to grow than in Europe. That said, most of the environmental cause-related marketing I see right now is complicated. Silk Soy recently used an old-school turn in a cap campaign. But instead of generating money, each cap represented wind power offsets. It took their whole website to explain it. Eco cause marketing will need to get simpler in order for it to really grow. Either that or main-street Americans are going to have to acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the ends and outs of carbon credits. I know which eventuality I’m betting on.
  
• I predict North Americans will be increasingly responsive to cause-related marketing campaigns for foreign causes, especially in the Third World. Ten years ago a colleague and I were in the Washington D.C. office of a prominent international relief organization and we got absolutely lambasted by the head program officer over all the money we were raising with cause marketing for ‘fat cat’ children’s hospitals. “Why couldn’t cause marketing fund efforts in third world countries?” she asked us. Back then the answer was that she was too emotionally invested in her cause to see that Americans weren’t ready to redistribute their wealth through cause-related marketing. Now they are.
  
• I predict that cause-related marketing will grow fastest in places like India. That’s because every week someone searches my blog using terms like “cause marketing, India,” or “cause-related marketing programmes in South Africa.”
  
• I predict more local market CRM. It’s easy to look at the mega-campaigns from national brands… both for-profit and non-profit… and conclude that that’s where all the action is. But just as cause-related marketing can scale up, it can also scale down, thank you very much. Local causes that generate affinity and can make a compelling (and brief!) case for the need, can be successful. I see these local efforts all the time and expect to see more.
  
• I predict that for the foreseeable future CRM will continue to trail the giants of sponsorship like the NFL. That’s because too many cause marketers still think it’s all about tears when in fact it’s all about eyeballs. The big guys understand that and NASCAR and the World Cup and their peers are much better at delivering eyeballs than their charity cousins.

Mostly, though I predict that cause-related marketing will continue as a viable tactic and in some cases a strategy for both companies and nonprofits. That’s because for all the naysayers and bad press in the last year, cause-related marketing works.

• It generates unrestricted money, which is highly coveted in nonprofit fundraising.
  
• It deepens relationships with supporters.
  
• It engenders loyalty in a company’s customers.
  
• It builds brands, both for-profit and nonprofit.

More to the point, cause-related marketing works best with women in general, who control 80 percent of all household spending in the United States and Gen Y in particular, who on the balance seem to appreciate the practice.

Bottom Nine Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns of 2007

'Top Eight' 'Bottom Nine' What Do I Have Against the Number 10?


I was contemptuous of a pretty good number of cause-related marketing campaigns and cause marketing ads in 2007. Nine of them make my list for the worst campaigns of 2007. [Read my list of the best eight cause-related marketing campaigns here.]

But only one gave me a visceral reaction. That was an ad in BabyTalk Magazine by American Greetings and featuring the Sesame Street character Elmo. The ad had the look and feel of a cause-related marketing campaign meant to benefit kids in Third World countries

“Instead… as you read the fine print… you learn that Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit which produces Sesame Street and other children’s shows, applies the money it earns from its licensees to underwrite the production of versions of Sesame Street in other countries. Sure, and when I fill up on gas at CITGO stations kids in Venezuela are able to go to college.”

The only reason this ad didn’t lead the list is because it dropped in May 2006, even though I reviewed it last March. I’ll say it again, shame on American Greetings for an ad like that and shame on Sesame Workshop for approving it. I did not expect Sesame Workshop to be this slick.
Here then are the rest of worst.

Worst Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns of 2007

Firedog Across America

• In January I found a lot to like in Circuit City’s interesting and well-designed campaign meant to promote its technology services division called Firedog by raising money for two charities and 10 firehouses in the United States. But I found the total payout potential of $650,000 to be too penny-pinching. When it comes to the donation made by the campaign sponsor, experience and academic research clearly demonstrate that more really is more.

American Heart Association ad for their Start Movement

• The largest charities in the United States have enormous resources to draw on. So when they advertise in support of their sponsors it’s worth paying attention to, even if it’s not cause-related marketing per se. In a small ad featured in Parade Magazine in January, it seemed like the American Heart Association couldn’t trouble itself to be even perfunctory in its recognition of its sponsors: Subway, Healthy Choice and Astro-Zeneca.

March of Dimes WalkAmerica ad and colored ribbons

• Every charity worth its stripes these days has a colored ribbon. The March of Dimes’ ribbon is Pink and blue (get it?). Problem is, every color of ribbon these days has more than one charity or cause. Although I wasn’t critical of the March of Dimes, I did wonder out loud about the use of colored ribbons. “Is it really possible for a purple ribbon to be truly meaningful for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation when it already stands for awareness of pancreatic cancer, as a protest against horse slaughter, as a sign of Pagan solidarity, and in memory of slain Beatle John Lennon?”

Target and National Teacher Appreciation Week

• In May I heaped both praise and scorn on Target, which figured out a way to do cause-related marketing without the hassle of dealing with an actual cause. Their flyer suggested families buy World’s Best Teacher gift cards as teacher’s gifts in recognition of National Teacher Appreciation Week, an observance founded by the National PTA. Yet no money went to the National PTA. Probably because the National PTA never (apparently) bothered to trademark the name.

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and various charities

• I tried to make sense of the campaign featuring certain highbrow celebrities and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. The donation amount… just $10,000… is a prime example of what most critics dislike about cause-related marketing; gifts that are dwarfed by the money spent promoting it. A complaint I share in this case. Worse, the featured charities got virtually no promotional value from the ads or the ancillary website.

Sports Authority and an unnamed breast cancer charity

• I cringed when I saw the familiar breast cancer ribbon used as a graphical “bug” in a flyer for the Sports Authority chain. Nowhere else in the flyer was there an explanation of why the ribbon was there. It prompted me to rework Kris Kristofferson’s song “Help Me Make it Through the Night.” No doubt I inspired a lot of cringing myself with just the opening line: “Take the ribbon from this ad,” I wrote. “Shake it loose and let it go. Rubbin’ wrong against my skin. Use it right or just say no.”

Walgreens flyer heralding the American Diabetes Association

• I was at a loss trying to explain the absurdity of the American Diabetes Association’s presence in a flyer from Walgreens. Walgreens had gathered a list of vendors, all of which were existing sponsors of the American Diabetes Association. The headline read: “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*.” The asterisk referred to a sentence in mice-type which read, “The American Diabetes Association does not endorse any of the products featured.” To me it smelled like the lawyers got involved and rendered the ad quite pointless.

Outside Magazine Green Issue

• I was almost nonplussed by a cause campaign from Outside Magazine. When you bought the April ‘Green Issue,’ Outside promised to give $1 to the Conservation Alliance up to $50,000. “Cause-related marketing is typically a promotion.” I wrote. “And like any promotion it’s meant to give your customer base incentive to do something you want it to do. Given Outside’s green branding it seems odd to me that they want to incentivize people to buy more issues on the newsstands. Think of the paper, the trucks that deliver issues, the issues that don’t sell and are shipped back or just trashed.” I could only conclude that Outside isn’t as ‘green’ as I thought it was.

Fashion Targets Breast Cancer

• In the American idiom we say ‘you can’t argue with success.’ But I did just that when I examined this campaign, which has generated more than $40 million for breast cancer charities in 13 countries. Their approach is to invite a prominent designer to design a piece of clothing featuring the campaign logo, put it on willowy super models, advertise in chi-chi magazines, and sell it at a premium price. I called it “cause-related marketing for the beautiful people” and wondered out loud, where’s the chic products for us fashion outsiders?

Top Eight Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns of 2007

Yeah, You Read it Right. It's a Top 8 List.

More cause-related marketing campaigns are unveiled every day across the world than I review in a year at the cause-related marketing blog. And, frankly, I don’t see very many campaigns from outside North America. So I won’t pretend that my annual list of the top cause-related marketing campaigns is exhaustive.

But, like any other self-respecting blogger, I won’t let my superficial purview stop me from drawing my own tortured conclusions!

So… cue the drumroll (and the dismissive snickers)… without further ado, here is my list of the eight best cause-related marketing campaigns of 2007.

My list of the worst cause-related marketing campaigns of 2007 follows on Thursday.


Chilis and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

• I was delighted by the scope of Chilis’ campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As you walked in you saw the servers adorned in black co-branded shirts. Other elements included message points on the Chilis beverage coasters, a paper icon campaign, a micro-website, a sweepstakes element, and branded merchandise. At the time I wrote that it was a few tweaks short of perfection. And I was right. All told it raised more than $8.2 million in this its third year at a national level. Later this month I’ll post in greater depth about this well-executed campaign.

MAC Aids Fund

• MAC, which makes high-end cosmetics, does a cause-related marketing campaign few companies could/would dare to match. “Every cent of the selling price of MAC Viva Glam Lipstick and Lipglass is donated to the MAC AIDs Fund to support men, women and children living with HIV and AIDs,” their ads point out. Plus their ads… featuring models and actresses… make the sexiest use of any of the celebrity supporters I saw in 2007.

Lay’s Destination Joy and Make-A-Wish

• I liked the many layers of this promotion between the salty snack maker and Make-A-Wish, the charity that grants wishes to ill children. There were a lot of moving parts…a standard buy a bag make a donation element; celebrities; an awareness-raising piece; plenty of media, including PR and on-package promos; special events; an online auction; and, retail fundraising… but they were well integrated. I touted the promotion as reason enough to always include an “ancillary opportunities” in your sponsorship proposal.

Open Source Cause-Related Marketing X2

Twice in 2007 I described cause-related marketing promotions as being reflective of the ‘open source movement,’ a term usually applied to software and meaning that the source code for a piece of software is available to users.

• The first time I used the expression was in praise of General Mills’ Box Tops for Education campaign. Not too long ago only General Mills brands could use the promotion which was developed in house. In 2006 General Mills opened the campaign to non-competing brands including Scott paper towels, Hefty disposable plates, Ziploc, Huggies, Land’s End, J.C. Penney, and others. General Mills still owns the copyright, but Box Tops for Education now belongs all the sponsoring brands, not just those from General Mills. As a result, the campaign has grown explosively.
• I also praised the breast cancer charities for not ‘tying up’ the ownership of the pink breast cancer ribbon. I looked, but could not find any evidence that the emblematic pink ribbon by itself was trademarked in the United States. The result is that any entity… for-profit or not-for-profit… can use it. Any entity can also abuse it, too. Nonetheless, the paradox is that because no one owns the pink ribbon, it’s more valuable!

Cantilena Music

• I wasn’t crazy about the vagueness of the mission of the Cantilena Music Foundation, which is associated with the company called Cantilena Music. But I did like their direct, appropriate, and strategic cause marketing campaign. When you commission music from Cantilena, they direct 15 percent of the total to the foundation, which supports deaf children in North America and abroad. Since the price of a commission from Cantilena ranges from just under $2,000 to more than $5,000, this is a meaningful donation.

Email a Duck, Raise a Buck

• There was a cute Web 2.0 element in this small campaign from the company Munchkin, Inc. In the campaign you could create a virtual Munchkin rubber duck and email it to friends. Every time someone opened it, a nickel went to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, up to $10,000. You could track your duck’s movement on the website. The name, “email a duck, raise a buck” was a problem, since a duck email had to be opened 20 times to raise a buck. Still I liked the Web 2.0 aspect to it.

Get Away Today Vacations and Credit Unions for Kids

• Even though they break one of my cardinal rules for cause-related marketing, namely transparency, I had great admiration for the campaign from Get Away Today Vacations. By trading on the reputation of credit unions and Children’s Miracle Network, Get Away Today Vacations, a travel agency and vacation packager, has been able to very quietly raise a noisy $1 million.