Learning to Give

There he is at your fancy gala; rich, successful, and bored out of his mind. He’s got an MBA from an Ivy League school, an undergrad in economics and a wife… who studied art history… and who drags him kicking and screaming to your events. He’s worth a mint, but the most you may ever get from him is the price of the gala’s tickets.

Is it even possible to get this Philistine to change his mind about your cause?

The answer has as much to do with how people learn and what kind of ideas they are exposed to as it does how much money they have to give.

(Read more about the learning side of this equation on my blog on informal learning called The Learner's Guild.)

A yet-to-be published study by Professor Raymond Fisman from Columbia Business School… along with Shachar Kariv of UC Berkeley and Daniel Markovitz of the Yale Law School… suggests that even mature students can change their minds when presented with powerful ideas.

In this study Fisman and his co-authors Shachar Kariv and Daniel Markovitz studied first year Yale law students to see to what degree their teachers affected their generosity in giving when they played an experimental economics exercise called a dictator game.

Regular readers will recognize Raymond Fisman’s name. Fisman and other colleagues found a positive relationship between profitability and corporate philanthropy for businesses that advertised a lot.

Here’s how this study worked. All first year law students at Yale University are required to take courses in contracts and torts. Some of the professors who teach the courses hold PhDs in economics, some in the humanities, and some have “no strong disciplinary allegiances at all.” The students are randomly assigned to the professors and the professors are allowed to design the course however they wish.

Fisman, Kariv and Markovitz theorized that students coming out of class taught by a philosophy teacher might be more concerned with social justice and equality, while students taught by an economics professor might place greater emphasis on economic efficiency.

They tested their theory by putting 70 of these Yale law students in a computer lab to play a dictator game with 50 decisions relating to giving.

“In some cases students started with $10,” writes Fisman in Forbes Magazine, “and for each dollar they gave up, their (anonymous) partner in the game would get, say, $5. In this case giving was ‘cheap.’ In others giving was expensive (each dollar given up yielded only 20 cents for the partner.”

By definition if you start with $10, give away $10 and still have $8 left as a giver, you’re concerned about efficiency. Likewise, if you give even when it’s expensive to do so, you are almost certainly concerned about equality. If you never give whether it’s easy or hard, you’re probably selfish.

So what were the results?

“It turns out that exposure to economics makes a big difference in how students
split up the pie,” says Fisman, “in terms of both efficiency and outright selfishness. Students assigned to classes taught by economists were more likely to give a lot when it was cheap to do so. But they were also more likely to take the whole pie for themselves.”

Likewise, students exposed to teachers from the humanities… no matter their previous academic backgrounds… were more “sympathetic to equality.”

So what’s a fundraiser to do? Ask to see donor’s college transcripts? Test donors on Fisman’s dictator game? Stay in bed for the next week or so?

Smart fundraisers know that donors are different, and that the pitch that worked for one would-be donor might not work for the next.

Smart fundraisers… like smart marketers… also know that you need to segment your audience. But even when you’re sure you’re addressing people who are concerned about social equality, only the fool or the incompetent doesn’t also mention something about the rational, hard-headed qualities of the cause; that it’s efficient, well-managed, has a good board, effectively accomplishes its mission, uses its resources smartly, etc.

Every message… including those used in cause-related marketing… should have head and heart.

Is it worth it trying to convert that rationalist Philistine? You bet. His mind can be changed. Fisman et al demonstrate that. And better, Fisman also demonstrates that when that rationalist gives, he's likely to be the most generous type of donor if you structure it right.

You Are What You Learn or Are You?

Early this month Forbes ran a guest column by Columbia Business School Professor Raymond Fisman that is strangely relatable to both cause-related marketing and informal learning, the topics of my two blogs.

The Forbes headline describes it beautifully; “You Are What You Learn.”

I’ve posted on what Fisman’s findings mean to informal learners on my blog on informal learning called The Learner’s Guild.

Tomorrow in this space I’ll post on what Fisman’s study might mean to fundraisers and to those of us who practice cause-related marketing.

So why the brain in the box on the left? Fisman’s study supports two seemingly diametrically-opposed conclusions. The first is that your training determines who you are. The second is that you can change all that.

Stay tuned...

Social Networking/Charity Mashups

Cause-Related Marketing in the Newest Social Media

In the last quarter three charity/social networking mashups have crossed my desk, each with their own distinctive tang. All three are in beta, that is, they’re works in progress. All are for-profit endeavors. All could benefit from a little ‘network effect’ love.

The network effect aka Metcalf’s Law postulates that the value of a network is proportionate to the square of the number of users. That is, a network only starts demonstrating value after reaching the critical mass described by the equation.

In other words, each of these outfits has some selling to do.

uPlej. With an approach that could probably only come from Utah is uPlej, which owes its business model as much to multi-level marketing as it does to Facebook.

Here’s how it works: you sign up as a member of uPlej and designate a charity, create your own profile, alert your personal network to your new uPlej page and UPlej dings your credit card for $4.99 a month. Of that, $4 goes directly to the charity, and the remaining $0.99 goes to uPlej’s operations and fees for processing credit cards and the like.

What’s the appeal? Well if just 4 of your friends also join uPlej, then your designated charity could receive perhaps $85 a month (more or less)! Here’s how: “The charity calculator works on the premise that each of your ‘friends’ tells just 4 people each, who tell just 4 people, and so on through 3 degrees.

“For every person you tell that visits your user page and signs up, you receive $1.00 for the cause YOU have elected to support. For every person they tell that visits their user page and signs up, you also get $1.00 for your cause, and so on through 3 degrees. Everybody that you tell that joins your network is your first degree, everybody that joins the network of anybody on your first degree (anybody that they tell), becomes your second degree, and so on. This gives you the opportunity, for only your $4.99 monthly payment, to raise a significant amount of money for your cause every month—simply by connecting with other charitable individuals.”

As I write this, you can choose from uPlej’s universe of 150 charities, a number they’re working hard to increase. uPlej is not a charity, it’s a fundraising company that uses the power of a networked downline to raise money for charities.

Just Cause. Like uPlej, Just Cause is a for-profit entity as well. But they prefer to think of themselves as a ‘for-benefit’ company, ala Newman’s Own and Peacekeeper Cause-Metics. Just Cause bills itself as “social networking with a purpose.”

Causes, individuals, and companies can all set up accounts and start talking about what their doing to make the world better, mainly through blogs. You can create or join user groups, post events, seek volunteers, donors, supporters, etc.

There’s more than 150 blogs currently being posted on the Just Cause site and about 60 nonprofits. Just Cause also publishes a magazine by the same name, expects to sponsor community events. The magazine is distributed with participating ‘city magazines’ in Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere. Just Cause says that the glue that holds all the pieces together is its approach to telling ‘stories.’

Do Good Channel from good2gether. The Do Good Channel is a kind of localized charity directory that allows you to search charities by type, participation, opportunities. But what really sets it apart is that it can also generates income for participating charities and enables searches that connect current news with charitable missions.

Here’s how. good2gether gives an Internet ‘widget’ to local TV, radio and newspaper media outlets. When a story is posted about, say, the crisis in Darfur, the widget points to local nonprofit resources that are working on the problem. The widget displays information in a frame on the media outlet’s website, which it can sell. If the reader clicks on one of the nonprofit links, it connects to a Do Good page where they find a profile of the pertinent nonprofit(s).

The profile or elements of the profile can be emailed, sent to Facebook, added to your calendar, etc. The profile is free to the nonprofit and relatively easy to generate. Better, the charity can sell the sponsorship of the page which it splits 65:35 with good2gether, which operates Do Good. To participate in this part of the service, the charity has to agree to charge a minimum of $100 per sponsor and limit it to no more six sponsors.

good2gether launched the Do Good Channel in Boston this month and is scheduled to add several top 10 markets per month over the next few months, including San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

There are elements of cause-related marketing in each of these approaches. uPlej enables a kind cause-related marketing for your personal brand, (although there's no reason why a company couldn't be a uPlej member too). Just Cause could certainly host a blog about your cause-related marketing campaign. The Do Good Channel in effect invites charities to connect to sponsors.

Public Policy Cause-Related Marketing

On May 16 Oliver’s Artisan Breads in Los Angeles announced that it will donate 10 percent of net profits from their store line of breads to the Bread for the World Institute, the first case of a CRM campaign benefiting an advocacy and public policy charity I can think of.

Oliver’s Artisan Breads sells a line of organic bread in stores like Whole Foods and Wild Oats (which have merged) in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, southwestern Nevada and Washington state. The term of the agreement is for one year with an option to renew. Oliver’s has guaranteed an undisclosed minimum donation.

The money will go to support the Bread for the World Institute, a 501(c)(3) public charity division of Bread for the World. Bread for the World is an advocacy group, a “nationwide Christian movement that seeks justice for the world’s hungry people by the lobbying our nation’s decision-makers.” The Bread for the World Institute has more of public policy bent, engaging “in research and education on policies related to hunger and development.”

The Institute’s most notable current undertaking is their annual Hunger Report.

It’s the only cause-related marketing campaign I’ve ever come across that supports a public policy charity. By contrast, money from cause marketing campaigns at Susan G. Komen goes to breast cancer research and breast cancer education and awareness. When you clip Box Tops for Education the money goes to local schools.

It probably goes without saying that it takes a very particular kind of sponsor to engage in a cause-related marketing campaign for a public policy charity.

According to Jennifer Coulter Stapleton, the senior manager for marking and branding at Bread for the World and a member of the Cause-Related Marketing Google Group, Carol Head is that kind of sponsor.

“Carol Head, the owner of Oliver’s Artisans Breads, approached us,” says Stapleton. “She personally cares about hunger and heard our president, Rev. David Beckmann, speak several years ago. She made the connection that it would be great cause-marketing for her bread company.”

It helps that Bread for the World sounds like a charity that provides direct services to the hungry. Their website URL, Bread.org, reinforces that impression. It also helps that most customers at Whole Foods are likely to be sufficiently sophisticated to understand the nuances of a public policy charity if they choose to dive into the mission and purpose of Bread for the World Institute.

The campaign is more proof… as if we needed it… that the base of cause-related marketing has grown very wide indeed.

Finally tip of the hat to Jennifer Stapleton, a subscriber to the Cause-Related Marketing GoogleGroup and a reminder. I have a list of blog postings in the hopper. But if they’re newsworthy, cause-related marketing campaigns submitted by subscribers to the blog’s GoogleGroup automatically go to the top of that list.

Let's Get Physical With Our Brains

For most of my life the best analogy that science had to offer about the brain was that by the time you were 35 or so everything your genes could give your brain was cemented into place.

And then that block of cement was basically dropped into a fast flowing river where time (and maybe chemicals) eroded your brain. And then, sometime later, you died.

Cheery, huh?

But for the last two decades especially researchers have grown less deterministic in their view about the human brain.

Increasingly, science is showing that brain cells and the connections between them continue to grow over time. But like muscles those cells and connectors can atrophy. And like muscles, neurons (brain cells), ganglia and synapses can be trained and even expanded.

How do you do that? Check my posting at my blog on informal learning called The Learner’s Guild for some real-world suggestions.

Cell Phone Fundraising

There you are walking down Lake Shore Drive past the rising Chicago Spire building eating a Chicago Red Hot, when you’re struck by a billboard with a message from, say, MercyCorps, asking for help providing relief to the cyclone-battered people in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta. But the sign doesn’t feature a website URL, a toll-free telephone number or even an address to send a check. Instead the sign tells you to text the word ‘Give’ to a number using your cell phone and a $5 donation will be made.

To the Japanese or Europeans that scenario probably sounds not so much futuristic as so 2006.

But it’s new in the United States, made possible by lower fees from the cell phone carriers. If analysts are correct, cell phone fundraising may be a prominent future fundraising channel for charities with a clear mission, strong brand recognition and the ability to effectively get their message to their audience.

What’s the potential upside of this mobile phone fundraising in the United States?

“$100 million was raised via SMS for Tsunami relief across EU and Asia,” says Tony Aiello, SVP of Mobile Accord in Denver, owner of mGive, an early leader in the field which provides the service. “Live 8 raised $2 million pounds in 2 weeks via SMS. There are many examples but due to the fractionalized nature of the international market it is hard to get totals. That said the giving market in the US dwarfs all other countries.”

Here’s how it works: when you text the number, $5 is added to your phone’s bill. The Mobile Giving Foundation in Seattle takes 10 percent as a fee and the rest goes to the designated charity. There’s no taxes or usage fees assessed against the donation although standard messaging rates may apply depending on your carrier and service plan.

mGive only allows registered 501(c)(3) charities to participate. They charge a $100 setup fee and $250 a month.

That $5 donation is the per transaction limit set by the carriers. But Aiello expects they will increase it in time. You could increase it all by yourself. For instance, if you wanted to make a $25 donation just text the number five separate times. Monthly automatic recurring donations are already built into mGive's system and should be available before the end of the year.

What media channels work best? Aiello says live events, and social networks are the early leaders. Radio and TV are also used. But the fact is, if your charity takes the plunge, you may as well put it on everything you produce from your website to your business cards. The technology makes it easy to for sophisticated charities to test different media channels and calls to action.

I see several cause-related marketing possibilities.

1. Charities that do paper icon campaigns could add a sentence or two on the back of their icon asking people to add an extra $5 donation.


2. For charities that host events with plenty of signage, you could dedicate some of it to advertising to the new donation channel.


3. I can even imagine a gala type setting whereby the host would shame people into making a donation. She might say, "Please turn off your cell phones, but if you absolutely must leave them on, we invite you to 'pay' for that privilege by texting the word 'gala' to this number. $5 will be added to your cell phone bill. Thereby if your phone rings during the gala and you rush out, people won't think you're rude. They'll think you just gave $5 to the cause."
4. Charities could loan out their codes to sponsors to put on their materials.

Home Dept and Habitat for Humanity Shack Up

In the last few months The Home Depot, has made a giant right turn in its charitable endeavors and landed in bed with Habitat for Humanity in a five-year, $30 million sponsorship deal, a little more than a year after CEO Frank Blake got his job. It’s a familiar place for Blake, whose wife, Mrs. Liz Blake is a Senior Vice President at Habitat for Humanity.

Mr. and Mrs. Blake told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they recused themselves in the negotiations between the two parties. I’m sure they did. And to be completely accurate, the relationship is actually between The Home Depot Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3), and Habitat for Humanity. Moreover Mr. Blake doesn’t hold a position on the Foundation’s 10-member board which consists entirely of Home Depot employees; I counted one executive vice president, three senior vice presidents, and six lesser lights.

But to be frank, a CEO doesn’t need to have a vote to influence how the vote turns out on a board where everyone, in effect, works for him or her.

What’s the big deal, you say? After all, Habitat for Humanity is a well-respected charity with a mission to build decent shelter for the poor. Since 1976 they've built 250,000 homes that shelter 1 million people. And there’s a certain strategic fit. Strategic enough that Lowe’s, The Home Depot’s principal competitor, has been supporting Habitat for Humanity since 1996, and has donated more than $20 million over the last four years.

But even though there’s no indication of impropriety between Mr. and Mrs. Blake and The Home Depot and Habitat for Humanity, it still sorta rankles.

For one thing, prior to this deal The Home Depot Foundation had previously concentrated on low-income multi-family housing and urban forestry, also strategically appropriate. That support will likely evaporate in whole or in part.

In terms of its corporate philanthropy efforts the company itself has had long-standing relationships with KaBOOM, and the Red Cross and the Hands On Network. With sales declining at The Home Depot, those organizations are all likely to watch as the #20 Home Depot car a contender in the NASCAR racing series, with Tony Stewart at the wheel… and a Habitat for Humanity bumper sticker… blows right by.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were Home Depot employees who were rankled, too. Suppose you were The Home Depot guy or gal that negotiated or managed the KaBOOM relationship, for instance. It would be no picnic going to your contact to say that the relationship was changing and they were getting less money because Habitat was going to get more. And how, exactly, would you answer the all-but-inevitable question about whether or not the fact that Mrs. Blake… ahem… sleeps with Mr. Blake had anything to do with the change?

And I’ll bet Lowe’s was more than a little rankled. Frank Blake told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “I actually called Robert Niblock [Lowe’s CEO] and said: ‘This is something we are considering. If it’s an issue for Lowe’s, let me know.’ He did exactly the right thing, saying it was for charity.”

Wouldn’t it have been fun to be a fly on the wall during that phone call?

I’ve been around CEOs who still do things for a particular charity even though one or more of their competitors does, too. Tom Smith, who was the CEO of the Food Lion grocery chain was a standout in that regard. But sponsorship and cause-related marketing campaigns from multiple competitors are more often the exception than the rule.

Even with all the recusing going on and the personal calls to competitors, The Home Depot’s action still seems cheap and tawdry to this outsider.

Can a Handheld Game Really Give Your Brain a Workout?

There’s a certain extravagance to the claims made the makers of two handheld games from Nintendo and Radica. Use our products regularly, they suggest, and not only will your brain get a workout, but you may even be able to turn back the clock on your gray matter!

Reporters and critics who had initially given a pass to Nintendo’s ‘Brain Age,’ and by extension the less ambitious Radica ‘Brain Games,’ are now looking at these games with a more gimlet-eye.

In my latest post to my blog on informal learning called The Learner’s Guild, I look at the two games and draw my own conclusions.

High-Dollar Cause-Related Marketing

Inspiration Bracelet for the Parkinsons Unity Walk

Thanks to Lance Armstrong and his Lance Armstrong Foundation, we all know how to do a bracelet campaign. You pick a supplier from the hundreds or even thousands out there. You try to find a color and a saying that seem emblematic of your cause, and you sell it for $1 at your charity’s events or online.

[BTW: Today, Tuesday May 13, is LiveSTRONG Day]

If by now plastic/silicone/rubber bracelets seem a little ‘me-to’ then consider this bracelet campaign from New York City artist-sculpture David Stevenson benefiting the Parkinsons Unity Walk. When you buy the sterling silver bracelet at the left called ‘Inspiration’ for $175, 40 percent (or $70) goes to Parkinson’s Disease research.

The Unity Walk, which takes place each April in Central Park, was inspired by Marlene Kahan, executive director of American Society for Magazine Editors, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2004.

The Unity Walk people commissioned the bracelet from Stevenson, and the fulfillment is handled through Stevenson’s website.

This marks another in an increasing number of what I call high-dollar cause-related marketing donations, say amounts from $20 or more. When I started in cause-related marketing a typical CRM donation from a packaged goods campaign might be a nickel ($0.05). But I’m seeing more and more of this high dollar cause-related marketing.

I’m not alone.

As I write this, in the handy little poll from Vizu in the column to the right, 31.6 percent of respondents say they’ve seen cause-related marketing donations of $20 or more for the purchase of a single item.

How can you capitalize on this trend?

1. Start by looking for (and finding) items with a higher perceived value. Don’t forget who your audiences are.
2. Pay close attention to your costs. In a plastic bracelet campaign, it would be no big deal for most charities to keep in inventory $10,000 worth of plastic bracelets, which might cost $2,500-$3,500 and could sit in your supplies closet. But $10,000 worth of sterling silver bracelets at $175 a pop amounts to just 57 bracelets, which you’d probably have to keep in a safe or vault.
3. The lowest cost approach may be the arrangement Unity Walk has with David Stevenson. Stevenson has his own website and ecommerce ability and handles production and fulfillment, too.
4. If you can’t find an arrangement like that… although Stevenson does takes commissions… consider a hybrid approach whereby you add it to your charity’s existing site (or put up a dedicated microsite), and allow the producer to fulfill it.

IBM CEO Survey: Large Increase of Investment in Corporate Social Responsibility Likely Over Next 3 Years

Buttonhole a CEO

CEOs worldwide plan to increase their investments 25 percent over the next three years to better to better understand and reach socially-minded customers, according to a worldwide survey of CEOs released this month by IBM’s Global Business Service Unit.

On February 22, I wrote about IBM’s case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) based on a survey of 250 CEOs. This second, larger survey of CEOs called the “Global CEO Study” tallied results from 1103 CEOs from 40 countries and 32 industries using face-to-face interviews.

That 25 percent increase in investments represents the largest percentage increase of any trend identified in the study.

Among other pertinent findings:

• CEOs believe that customer expectations around corporate social responsibility are increasing, and that CSR will play an important role in differentiating enterprises in the future. More than ever a company’s CSR profile matters to customers. And while ‘green’ initiatives are top of mind, the CEOs say customers are increasingly demanding socially-minded products, services, and supply chains.
• The survey also finds that socially aware customers evaluate an enterprise’s CSR profile before making purchasing decisions.
• CEO concern about environmental issues has doubled over the past four years globally, but is most pronounced in Asia/Pacific and Europe, followed by the Americas.
• CEOs also revealed that CSR reputations are also an important tool to attract and retain employees. They are also recognizing that their organizations are being held mutually accountable, along with the public sector, for the socioeconomic well-being of the regions in which they operate.
• Overall, the CEOs see opportunities in CSR and are using it to their competitive advantage. They indicated that CSR is critical to maintaining current market share.

What does this mean to you, kind reader? It means that if CSR is important to your organization you've got another tool in the box.

It means that if you’re ever in an elevator with a CEO or have the chance to buttonhole one at, say, a charity gala, you’ve got a conversation starter. As in, ‘did you see IBM’s CEO survey?’ They found that worldwide CEOs plan on increasing CSR spending 25 percent over the next years. Does that line up with what your company is doing? Can I come see you sometime about how we might benefit one another?’

I welcome this larger survey of CEOs and am anxious to see the topline report.

While opinion surveys like this one are a coin of the realm, I’ll issue my usual wise-headed caution. Opinion surveys represent a snapshot in time. Or, to mix the metaphor, human opinion is like a river and as Heraclitus (see above) said: “You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing upon you.”

How interesting would it be to come back to those same CEOs (or their successors) three years hence and ask them to bring a spreadsheet of their actual spending on CSR?

Learn Something and Never Forget It

It sounds like a cheap e-mail come-on, or the hyperbole of a late-night informercial, but it is possible to learn something once and never forget it again.

It's based on science first identified 123 years ago by a rigorous German researcher, and improved upon by a brilliant Polish scientist and eccentric who turned the discovery into software.

After you master it, you can sell your library of books on eBay, because you won't need it anymore!

But for the Polish scientist, Piotr Wozniak, there's been a catch. To read more about 'Informal Learning and the Eternal Memory' go to my other blog, The Learner's Guild.

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer

New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Look past the weak ‘proceeds’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years.

Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is quickly headed for its nadir.

And lesser critics would be wrong.

Cause-related marketing has now penetrated every continent (save Antarctica) and visited every clime.

Cause-related marketing is a big tent and getting bigger. And as the stakes of the tent get pulled further back and the acreage under the fabric gets ever larger, cause-related marketing grows ever more diverse.

And now the cause-related marketing tent is big enough and varied enough that it encompasses the sophisticated and the unpretentious, the artful and the artless, the splendid and the dorky.

So I say “bully to Shoshanna and her odd little cause-related marketing campaign.”

Cause-Related Marketing and High-End Interior Design

By now cause-related marketing has penetrated almost every kind of market. Here’s more proof that cause-related marketing finding a home at the high end: when you buy a rug from Dan Golden Inc., a New York City designer and maker of high-end hand-tufted wool rugs, the company will buy a sheep for a family in a developing country from Oxfam.

Golden’s work, which is sometimes in the form of the cheeky ‘rug-cartoon’ like the piece on the left and sometimes more straightforward, sell at retail starting around $3,000 and range north of $13,000 depending on the size.

The Dan Golden website is, naturally, rather artsy and the mention of the campaign is quite subtle. But that befits the audience and the artist. Since Golden’s rugs are made of sheep’s wool, a sheep is the right animal to donate. It can be sheared and the wool sold or bartered. Sheep can also be milked.

The cause, too, is a good fit even though Oxfam is not known primarily for its animal donation efforts. Heifer International has long been the leader in that approach. But Heifer is in Little Rock, Arkansas and is just a little churchy. Oxfam was founded at Oxford, UK, and the U.S. branch is headquartered in Boston. The much larger Oxfam also has strongly progressive bent in its approach to humanitarian aid, which is appropriate for Golden’s customers.

Dan Golden, Inc. could do a little more and still remain understated.

Here’s one idea: Golden could purchase the wool from the families who have received the donated sheep and then produce a specially-designed rug inspired by those families (or their sheep!). Golden could then sell that rug at a premium, with an extra donation built in. Or, Golden could donate one of them to Oxfam for auction at a gala, and sell the rest in the regular fashion.

Heck, if I were at an Oxfam gala I’d bid for a Dan Golden rug that was made of wool from sheep that had been donated.

Of course I’d loose the bid to the guy in the Brioni tux with the trophy wife dripping with Van Kleef & Arpels diamonds, but you get the picture.