Kiss Off Cause Marketing

Right now DNA II, a custom art company believe it or not, would like you to kiss off.

When you do they’ll make a donation to the MAC Aids Fund; enough to purchase 1000 condoms for distribution in India or 14 HIV test kits in Haiti.

Here’s how it works. You purchase one of DNA II’s KISS Portraits online, which start at $290 USD for a 51cm X 51cm (20”x20”) canvas print. They send you a tube of MAC Viva Glam lipstick and a bunch of KISS image sheets. You return the sheet you prefer and a few weeks later you get a portrait of your lips on a canvas suitable for hanging in the colors you specified.

DNA II, which operates out of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and sells worldwide, started by selling portraits of your DNA. They send you a cheek swab they turn into a colorized version of the lines biologists use to designate your DNA. They also sell a fingerprint…um… print that they blow-up from your... er... fingerprints.

Baked into the DNA of the company's corporate culture is corporate giving. Corporately they give to AIDS, Alzheimer’s and cancer research and to a handful of other causes. They were even a sponsor of the Google X Prize Gala.

I like the way they’ve identified the donation amount with the products that will be purchased with the donation, ie condoms and HIV test kits. It makes the donation more concrete.

But there are good reasons to also identify the actual dollar amount being donated: in the aggregate it’s easier to describe and understand a $50,000 total donation than a 600,000 total condom donation (or whatever the actual amount is).

I also admire the way they partnered with MAC twice; as providers of the Viva Glam lipstick and with the MAC Aids Fund. It’s a well-crafted cause promotion from a polished operator. (Do visit their website to see an outfit that really gets e-commerce.)

7 Tips to TurboCharge Your Small Business Marketing With Cause Marketing

In today’s rocky economy it may be small businesses that have may have the most to gain from integrating cause marketing into their marketing efforts. For purposes of definition, cause marketing is a relationship that bridges commerce and cause in a way that benefits both parties.  

Cause marketing has been shown to improve sales, brand and increase customer loyalty. It can help a company stand out from competitors and improve employee recruiting and retention. And it does several and sometimes all these things while helping a cause.

Cause marketing is like red wine. It feels good and it’s good for you.

Here then are ‘7 Tips to Turbocharge Your Small Business Marketing With Cause Marketing.’

1. Pick an appropriate cause. Consider not only a cause’s appeal, but its capacity to support your effort. It may be that the best cause marketing fit for your small business may be a small charity.
   
2. Weigh the option of weaving cause marketing into your overall business strategy. General Mills’ Boxtops for Education campaign, which benefits tens of thousands of local schools nationwide, has gone on year-round for a dozen years. It’s a key part of their business model. Galactic Pizza in Minneapolis donates a portion of the proceeds from one of its pizzas to the local food bank. The promotion is printed right there on their menu.
   
3. Don’t ‘causewash.’ We all know what greenwashing is. That’s when you make false or overstated claims about the greenness of your product, service or company. Well, you can causewash, too. But don’t do it. Your customers are savvy. And if they begin to not trust your intentions or the authenticity of your cause marketing campaign, it will backfire on you.
   
4. Consider doing cause marketing for a small business peer in the developing world using Kiva.org or another microenterprise lender. You know what it’s like to finance the startup and ongoing operations of your small business. So too do millions of existing or budding entrepreneurs in the developing world. With an outfit like Kiva, your business and your customers could pick a fellow entrepreneur in the developing world to support, and then follow their results.
   
5. Make your cause marketing offer really compelling. When you buy a pair of TOMS Shoes, the company gives away another pair to a child in the developing world. TOMS Shoes does precious little advertising. They don’t have to. Their word of mouth has been so good they’ve gotten exposure they couldn’t have purchased.  
   
6. Give your cause marketing campaign a fitting amount of support. You don’t necessarily have to spend a lot of money promoting your campaign. But you do need to support it. And as every small businessperson knows, time and money are almost interchangeable. You just have to decide which you value most. Let’s say you own a small fly fishing shop and you’re offering $5 to Trout Unlimited when they buy $100 or more worth of gear. You could post that on your blog, website or FaceBook page, put up a sign in front of the register, send out a press release, Twitter it, include it in your newsletter, etc. Remember, one of the benefits of cause marketing is that it gives your business a new story to tell to customers, prospects and the press. Take advantage of that.
   
7. Proceed cautiously if your business doesn’t face the consumer. The research is clear. Companies that advertise benefit the most from cause marketing. Now there is such a thing as B2B cause marketing that can really benefit your business. But to pull that off you probably need some help.
   

Tweet it Forward Cause Marketers

There’s a handful of stories out there about the successful use of Twitter in nonprofit fundraising. Social media expert Beth Kanter has been especially watchful of this trend.

The most common technique is to simply spell out the need in a Tweet to the people who follow you on Twitter.

Just last night in my little market organizers of the 'SunTweet for Charity' tried something I haven’t seen elsewhere. They held a Tweetup for charity in conjunction with the Sundance Film Festival. A Tweetup is a meetup for Twitterers.

SunTweet for Charity featured panelists on the topic of ‘creating value for your social audience,’ free pizza and soda drinks, a cash bar and face-to-face social interaction. The price of admission was $5, which went to an unnamed charity. Event costs were covered by sponsors.

I love events  for charities. Like very few other tactical media choices events can help move prospects from interest to action. And Tweetups happen because even the most distant Twitterer wants the chance to press the flesh of other Twitters. We’re human after all and we crave physical contact with likeminded people.

SunTweet represents a nice marriage between social media and fundraising with a lot of potential for the right kind of charity and the right group of Twitterers.

But if I were the executive director of  the benefiting charity, I would have wanted three more things from the SunTweet organizers:

1. I’d want the opportunity to address the group, if only for 60 seconds. There’s a great technique you can use when time is short to ask for donations without asking directly. You explain your cause in 30 seconds, then say, “because my time is so short, I don’t have time to address individual questions. But one of the most common questions I get is: ‘how can I help?’ The easiest way to help is go to our website at [URL] where you can donate time or money. After the panel discussion I’ll be back by the cash bar to talk more with anyone.”
   
2. I’d want people to know beforehand that my charity was involved. I’d want a link, too.
   
3. I’d want the chance to collect email addresses and/or Twitter names in advance.
   

Folks, steal this idea!

Cause Marketing Resolution for 2009

This post is endorsed by 'President Barack Obama,' 'Oprah Winfrey,' 'Hillary Clinton,' 'Coldplay' and other high-ranking search terms in Google.

The hope-filled inauguration of President Barack Obama yesterday morning means that 2009 is still dewy enough that we can talk about New Year’s resolutions.

Professionally I set a series of goals each year including sales and profitability goals.

I’ve also set a grand total of one professional New Year’s resolution.

I resolve to spend more time evangelizing the advantages and benefits of cause marketing. 

In the past I have contented myself to talk about the many positives of cause marketing with clients and on this blog.

The blog is easy to find if you know the word ‘cause marketing.’ But not that many people know the expression or the ideas behind it. Google’s keyword search tool says that in December 2008 the search volume for the term cause marketing was 14,800 with another 4,400 for the search term ‘cause-related marketing’ (CRM). [Let’s be frank; Google’s keyword tool is an imperfect gauge of the esteem in which the practice is held. But nonetheless I think it’s a helpful indicator.]

By contrast Google’s search volume for the other ‘CRM’ (customer relationship management) was 823,000. And ‘sponsorship’ had a December search volume of 301,000. For ‘corporate social responsibility’ the number was 60,500 in December.

In short, after more than 25 years of cause marketing, cause marketing is still the redheaded stepchild of marketing, superseded by the newfangled like ‘search engine optimization’ (a volume of 450,000), and ‘email marketing’(301,000). Even ‘green marketing’ (22,200) outpaces cause marketing.

This widespread ignorance is born out by experience. Just yesterday I had lunch with a seasoned marketer who holds an MBA from a prominent university. We exchanged pleasantries and he asked what my specialty was. When I told him cause marketing I got a blank look until I described the oft-cited Yoplait lid example.

All this despite the fact that Carol Cone and her agency has been pounding the cause marketing drum before companies and influencers for decades. There are a number of well-respected charities that derive a substantial portion of their unrestricted funds from cause marketing. There are a number of capable agencies that specialize in cause marketing and are doing innovative, interesting work. There is a good body of academic research that demonstrates not only the effectiveness of cause marketing, but what elements make up successful campaigns.

I’m not sure, exactly, how I will meet my resolution. But I do know that one of the things I’m going to do is broaden my definition of cause marketing. In the past I preferred the term ‘cause-related marketing’ because I think it’s more precise. But now, in the interest of spreading the word about the value of relationships between causes and commerce, I’m going to use the more general ‘cause marketing’ and I’m going to embrace its non-specificity.

I’m also going to broaden what I consider cause marketing to be. I’m going to define cause marketing thusly: 

“Cause marketing is a relationship that bridges commerce and cause in a way that benefits both parties.”

In my new definition cause marketing encompasses ‘corporate giving’ (18,100) and corporate social responsibility ‘corporate citizenship’ (9,900), and corporatecharitable giving’ (40,500). In this new big tent, cause marketing can include ‘employee retention’ (27,100) green marketing and ‘employee morale’ (14,800).

All these things exist now as separately considered ideas. But with all the electrons I can muster on this blog and all influence I can exert everywhere else, my definition of cause marketing will now encircle all the things above and more.

One last point. Strictly speaking, my new definition of cause marketing would include a healthcare contract between a company and a nonprofit hospital group. Or a contact between a nonprofit sheltered workshop and a business to provide janitorial services. That’s business, not cause marketing. So I’m depending on your suggestions to help sharpen that definition. Please comment below or email me at aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

The Worst 11 Cause Marketing Campaigns of 2008

In every bad cause marketing campaigns, ads and research I’ve autopsied this year I’ve tried to find something to praise.

This is in stark contrast to the postmortems they do on all those CSI-style dramas that air on TV nearly nonstop in the States these days.

You’d never hear this dialogue on any of those shows:

“How did he die, doc?” “Well, he ate a high fiber diet that kept his blood cholesterol in a very healthy range. And it looks like he had the resting heart rate of Tour de France champion. But I’d say it was the bullet to his heart that killed him.”

But in the interest of fairness, I tried to do just that in 2008. Right now, though, in the interest of brevity, I'm just going to be snarky.

• I couldn’t believe the little ad I saw in Cookie magazine for a fundraiser for startup charity called Cookies for Kids Cancer. The headline read: “But a Cookie, Save a Life.” As I wrote then, “my reaction was, ‘Oh no they just didn’t!’ The ad was one of seven on a single page; the kind the sales staff bundles together and sells for a bargain rate. So I automatically assumed that maybe Cookie magazine had put it together. After all, no charity would dare suggest that the purchase of a $3 cookie would actually save a human life. It’s exploitive and, well, a lie. And, critics be damned, cause-related marketing is not about lying.” It was an inauspicious start for a startup.
• Back in April I was mostly on board with Tampax supporting orphans and other vulnerable children in Africa with their HERO campaign. But there were so many sometimes disparate elements that they didn’t always mesh. Maybe that was reflected in the creative, which struck me as too clever by half. The call to action read: “Use Your Period for Good.” Rjleaman commented on the post saying: “Maybe if they focused the campaign more narrowly, concentrate[ing] on the girls helping other girls there’d be less dilution and confusion.” Yes, quite.
  
• Over time I have beat up charities for being perfunctory in their recognition of sponsors. But in August I took to task York Peppermint Patties for shortchanging its nonprofit partner the Young Survivors Coalition, which works with women with breast cancer who are younger than 40. The ad, found in Elle magazine, said only this in mice-type at the bottom of the ad: “York is a proud supporter of the Young Survivor Coalition.” How much better, I asked would it have been with this line? “York is a proud supporter of the Young Survivor Coalition, the organization for young women with breast cancer”?
  
• The deeper I drilled down on a small ad in Newsweek magazine in August for a doll called Kimmie Cares, and benefiting a nonprofit outfit called Partners for a Cure Foundation, the more it looked like self-dealing. I’m not a lawyer… and I don’t play one on TV… so I can’t render a legal opinion. But the relationship between the nonprofit and doll makers looked just a bit too cozy to me.
  
• In June I imagined a scenario wherein the winning ad agency pitched the UN World Food Programme an ad campaign using actress Drew Barrymore. “Imagine stark, beautifully-shot images of Drew feeding darling doe-eyed kids in Kenya in haunting black and white with a red cup emblematic of the WFP. The images will underscore that issue of hunger in the Developing World is black and white…” At that point, I wrote, “the UN World Food Programme managers should have kicked that agency to the curb.” The red was a design conceit, I wrote, “a way to introduce color into a campaign that should have had it from the start.”
  
• There was nothing outwardly wrong with Home Depot and Habitat for Humanity signing a 5-year $30 million deal. It made perfect strategic sense, in fact. But the way it came about seemed cheep and tawdry to me since Home Depot’s CEO Frank Blake sleeps with a senior vice president at Habitat for Humanity, his wife Liz Blake. Of course both Blakes recused themselves from the decision and negotiations. The result, I wrote, was that Home Depot’s existing relationships with KaBoom, Red Cross and the Hands on Network were all likely to suffer, especially considering the failing economy and Home Depot’s declining sales.
  
• In stark contrast to the strategic fit between Home Depot and Habitat for Humanity was the absurd fit between fashion designer Shoshanna Lonstein Gruss’s bikinis and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. When you bought one of Gruss’ designated swimsuits at Bergdorf Goodman ‘proceeds’ from the sale went to the esteemed hospital. Cause marketing, I wrote, is now a big tent with room under the canvass for even artless and dorky campaigns.
  
• Poking fun at competitors is always fun and I had a good time doing so at the expense of the big PR agency Ketchum. Ketchum published the results from a ridiculous survey called ‘Food 2020: the Consumer as CEO.’ One of the questions asked was: “If you were CEO of a global food company, which of the following, if any, would be your top priority?” Then Ketchum provided a universe of nine possible answers: “Improving human nutrition; Making food that is safer; Making foods that taste great; Making foods that cost less; Ending malnutrition; …Making a profit.” Those are listed in the order they finished in the survey. ‘Improving human nutrition’ finished first among all with 65 percent and ‘making a profit’ finished last with 33 percent. ‘Ending malnutrition?’ I questioned, “it would be analogous to ask Ketchum’s CEO… who is, after all, a professional communicator… to make a corporate priority of healing the communications rift between the Palestinians and the Jews.”
  
• In October I created a minor firestorm (with emphasis on minor) when I asked ‘where are the Harry Slatkin lighters?’ Candle designer Slatkin along with Bath & Body Works had launched a campaign benefiting Autism Speaks. But the special lighters were nowhere to be found. Eventually Slatkin felt obliged to comment on the post to say that “the lighters sold out in most stores so fast and we were not able to reorder for the holiday period.” Availability wasn’t the only problem. The campaign used the ‘portion of the proceeds’ language that is so meaningless and unhelpful.
  
• Also in October I reviewed Nestle Waters North America’s school label collection campaign called GoLife. But the front office of most schools already has a barrel for Campbell’s Soup labels and another one for General Mills Boxtops for Education. And so I openly wondered if there was room for GoLife as the third label campaign at the school dance, both physically and in terms of mindshare. “Third place isn’t necessarily a bad place to be,” I wrote. “But to be successful in third place you have to be really strongly positioned against the competition. I just don’t think Nestle’s done that here.”
  
• Henkel… a consumer products company… also had a school campaign that seemed not to have learned any lessons from Campbell’s and General Mills. In a doubletruck FSI in August Henkel promoted an essay contest that awarded one lucky school $25,000. The subject of the essay contest asked what your school could do with $25,000? An approach that was certain to turn into a pity-fest. The prize amount was just too little. I wrote: “For one school $25,000 is a meaningful amount. But for the promotion, one prize of $25,000 is almost a joke in a country where there are 55,965 public and private schools in grades K-12.”

The Best Cause Marketing of 2008

First off the usual disclaimers. This is by no mean an exhaustive list. I don’t see much cause marketing from outside North America. I read and speak only English; and, well, a smattering of Esperanto ;).

There may well be… and probably is… some brilliant cause marketing coming out of Senegal or Bengal or Finland or Vietnam or Rio de Janeiro that I just don’t know about.

I certainly don’t even see all the cause marketing done in North America. I only post about cause marketing about twice a week. So needless to say, I don’t review all the cause marketing that comes over the transom. There can be no doubt but that I have blind spots.

But I did review a lot of cause marketing in 2008… more than 135 posts… and I saw much more than that.

So with that said, here’s the best 11 cause marketing efforts of 2008 (as far as I know).

• In January I was besotted by TOMS Shoes ‘buy one, give one’ (BOGO) campaign. Buy a pair of their alpergatas shoes and they give away a pair to a needy child in a developing country. The appeal is easy to understand and TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie, and his staff have proven themselves very adept at word of mouth marketing. How savvy is TOMS Shoes BOGO approach? So savvy it’s inspired others on this very list to take the same approach.
  
• Rosa Loves is a t-shirt firm that designs limited-edition t-shirts meant to raise money and tell personal stories of dispossessed individuals in North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia. The art on the outside of the shirts illustrate the individual stories. Inside, over the wearer’s heart is a printed summary version of the story. It’s a very interesting fundraising model and eminently imitable if you bear in mind the lessons I underscored. 
  
• In February I highlighted the BOGO (buy one, give one) cause marketing approach of real estate developer LJ Urban. When you bought one of their LEED certified homes in Sacramento, California, they promised a home would be built in Burkina Faso. As with TOMS Shoes, from whom LJ Urban borrowed the BOGO strategy, it generated crazy word of mouth.
  
• Fellow blogger Joe Waters has called the cause marketing coming out of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital ‘cause marketing porn.’ That’s praise. I think. Praise was all I had for their multifaceted Create-A-Pepper campaign at Chili’s that generated $8.2 million in 2007, a 150 percent increase over the 2006 effort. Traditionally, the casual dining category has been death for cause marketing. But not for St. Jude, which showed us all how to do it exactly right.
  
• No cause marketer has beat up Jerry Lewis more than I have. But I was exceedingly impressed with the MDA’s electronic ‘paper icon’ campaign. I didn’t think it was perfect, but as I wrote about another icon campaign, “I’ve seen the future of icon campaigns and MDA is [delivering] it.”
  
• I saw the future also in an Internet-only telethon that benefited American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan that aired in June and featured a heavy diet of right-of-center pundits and talking heads. I wrote: “The sound is bad. The video is worse. And it's bogging down my Internet connection. Plus, the giving mechanism (which requires you to go to a different website) is awkward to say the least. But by [gum] I think I’ve just seen the future of telethons!”
  
• In the interest of full-disclosure I have always admired big, ambitious, integrated cause marketing campaigns, especially when the sponsor and charity manage to actually pull it off. And with its Love Bracelet luxury jeweler Cartier did exactly that. There were dozens of stars involved in multiple countries, and dozens of corresponding charities, big donations, free music, romantic eye candy short films, and dogs and cats living together! It was ce magnifique!
  
• Advanta, the credit card issuer to small businesses Stateside, along with the microfinance charity Kiva put small business, cause marketing and microfinance into a shaker and came up with one of the sexier cause marketing campaigns I saw in 2008. Called KivaB4B, when you make a donation to Kiva using your Advanta credit card, Advanta will match your donation up to $200 a month.
  
• The award for the most intriguing non-transactional cause marketing goes to Plus 3 Network. The premise of Plus 3 Networks is that your workouts ought to pay off in something in addition to greater fitness. When you sign up and log your workouts, sponsors at Plus 3 donate a small amount per mile of exercise. If you log the results using certain GPS units the payout is higher than if you self log. I described it as a “cause marketing triple play” that could be adopted by Reading is Fundamental or any of the charities that do ‘tour’ events like the American Diabetes Association or the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
  
• Also in the category of non-transactional cause marketing was an appealing effort from Cigna, the giant health and life insurance company. When you played an online game and answered correctly a number of questions, Cigna would make a donation to Water for the People to provide clean water for school kids in India. The questions related to health and insurance and the game was engaging enough to play more than once.
  
• The third and final admirable BOGO (buy one, give one) campaign in 2008 came from consumer products giant Proctor & Gamble. When you bought a package of Pampers diapers, PG would make a donation of one child’s vaccine to UNICEF. It was transparent, easy to understand, and the fit between the product and the cause was excellent. I was especially fond of Selma Hayek-narrated TV ad for the campaign, which, I wrote: “nearly reduces me to tears every time. And I’m not exactly [the] target market.”
  

100 Percent Cause Marketing from the Rich and Talented

To get into Harvard, jewelry designer Joan Hornig made a deal not with the devil, but with her better angels: if she got in, she told herself, by the time she was 50 she would give away all her earnings to charity.

She does just that with her eponymous jewelry line sold on her website and at retail outlets like Bergdorf Goodman.

Like other ‘all benefits’ companies, 100 percent of her profits… year-round… are donated to charity.

When you purchase it online, you designate where you’d like the donation to go. Hornig also does exclusive lines for retailers that benefit predetermined charities. For instance the earrings above are from her Snowflake line at Bergdorf, which benefited UNICEF. 

Hornig's jewelry is priced in the ‘if you gotta ask, you can’t afford it’ range.

It goes without saying that not everyone could manage this. Town & Country magazine reports that Hornig is independently wealthy. But the appeal to would-be consumers is mighty.

How easy it would be for someone looking at Hornig’s Leaf Cuff bracelet and say, ‘sure it’s $4,800, but all the profit from the sale goes to my charity of choice.' 

The skeptic in me wonders about what incentive Hornig has to keep her costs low. I wonder about just how high her profit margins are. I wonder what salary she pays herself and what her overhead structure is like. As a for-profit business in the United States, she is under no obligation to disclose any of that.

It’s not impossible, of course, to do this completely without taint. Paul Newman… God rest his soul… never took a salary and had a reputation as a fierce cost cutter. I hope, and trust, that Hornig is still true to her better angels and cut from the same cloth as Newman.

Recycled Cause Marketing

Capri Sun, the Kraft Foods brand that packages portable juice drinks in those aluminum-polyethylene pouches has teamed with TerraCycle, the innovative recycler, that promises to keep juice pouches out of the waste stream, while paying schools $0.02 cents per pouch.

[Oops. My bad. That makes it seem like Kraft is actually doing some work here when in fact all the heavy lifting is being done by TerraCycle. That said, Kraft probably paid for this ad in Cookie magazine (and elsewhere) and the attending promotional and PR efforts.]

Here’s how it works. You sign up at TerraCycle and they will send your school four bags. Each bag holds 100 pouches. Fill 'em up and they'll send you more. TerraCycle pays $0.02 cents for each Capri Sun, Honest Kids and Kool Aid pouches. All other pouches pay $0.01 cents per pouch. TerraCycle pays twice a year.

In turn, TerraCycle ‘upcycles’ (their term) the pouches into backpacks, totes and pencil cases. While the materials that comprise the pouches can be repurposed as in TerraCycle's scheme, they can not otherwise be recycled using ordinary means.

You don’t have to think too hard about this to realize that the whole enterprise depends on TerraCycle’s ability to find a market for the pouch-based backpacks, et al.

Back on October 10, 2008 when I reviewed Nestle Waters North America’s school label collection campaign called GoLife, that is similar to this campaign in some respects, I wrote:

I’m all in favor of using cause-related marketing to help companies solve challenging PR issues. But if it’s going to preserve market share Nestle has to do something more holistic than GoLife to counter that perception.

If they can find a market for the resulting products, I think TerraCycle (and Kraft) have solved the problem that Nestle didn’t. And whereas the the GoLife campaign seemed very corporate, Kraft's TerraCycle campaign gives off a much more organic vibe.

I wish ‘em luck. 

Fuzzy Cause Marketing

CA, the $4.3 billion (sales) software company has an interesting cause marketing campaign going right now benefiting the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) that is kind of a head scratcher. 

The campaign… which features celebrity crime fighter John Walsh… centers around CA’s Internet Security Suite Plus 2009 and Internet Security Suite 2009, both of which carry a premium price in a competitive market. When you buy either product CA makes a $1 donation to NCMEC. Customers may also elect to donate all or part of the rebate they receive to NCMEC when they buy the product.

The pertinent CA webpage also runs a ‘crawl’ of the names of people who have donated their rebate to NCMEC. It’s an interesting tactic, borrowed from telethons. I’d love to hear what feedback they get on this.

At the top of the page they also list the amount of money generated for NCMEC. The amount listed when I visited on Jan 2, 2009 was $462,586, which includes $375,000 in in-kind and cash donations made by CA to NCMEC.

So far, so good.

Here’s where it gets fuzzy for me. In CA’s language: “CA may elect to donate, in its discretion, an additional $2 to NCMEC when a new CA customer registers for the Continuous Protection Program.” 

I can’t figure out why they would make that discretionary.

Cause marketing trades on trust, clarity and transparency. The proposition is straightforward; ‘if you’ll do something, we’ll do something good for a cause.’ When you start to fuzzy up that proposition the appeal to the consumer breaks down.