The Cause Marketing Blog Jumps on the Star Trek Bandwagon

The day was March 9, 1967 and NBC had a challenging ratings failure on its hands called ‘Star Trek.’

The conundrum for network executives was that bad ratings notwithstanding, the people who loved the polarizing series loved it with the fire of a 1000 Vulcan suns. And so after threatening to cancel the series after the first season, NBC executives felt obliged at the end of the show that March 9, to make an odd live announcement. “‘Star Trek’ will be back in the fall,” it went. “And please don’t write any more letters.”

Fans had in engaged in an adhoc letter writing campaign that buoyed the series through that first season and through three more. In total, just 79 Star Trek episodes had aired. But to the degree that Star Trek has become a science fiction franchise it’s because in 1974 a group of 10,000 like-minded geeks gathered in at the Americana Hotel in New York City to dress up like their favorite Trek characters, screen individual shows and extol all things Trek.

People with single minded devotion to a topic are called ‘fanboys.’ Every year fanboys of all stripes gather to celebrate everything you can imagine and a few things you don’t want to imagine. But the International Star Trek Convention was the Alpha fanboy convention.

To my readers who work at nonprofits and to marketers everywhere I ask, what would you do to generate fanboy-like devotion?

Increasingly one logical answer is social media.

A new survey of 980 nonprofit professionals shows that nonprofits have taken to social media with a vengeance.

The survey (registration required) asked respondents three groups of questions about their use of social media, their ‘house social networks,’ and the demographics of their firm.

The respondents came from nonprofits small and large and included charities, labor unions, associations, churches, and mutual banks. The survey was the work of the Nonprofit Technology Network, Common Knowledge, and ThePort.

Among the findings:

• 74 percent have a presence on Facebook, 46 percent on YouTube, 43 percent on Twitter, nearly 33 percent are on Twitter and 26 percent are on MySpace.
• Average number of followers: Facebook 5,391; MySpace 1905; Twitter 291; LinkedIn 286; and, YouTube 268.
• On which social network are respondents fundraising? 38.9 percent said Facebook; 12 percent said MySpace; 8 percent on Change.org; 6.7 percent said Twitter; 5.6 percent said YouTube; 1.9 percent said LinkedIn.
• 30.6 percent said that they have in-house social networks. The networks are mainly used for marketing and most have 10,000 or fewer community members. Nearly ¾ say they don’t use their in-house social network for fundraising, and more than 85 percent don’t allow advertising on it.
  

Social networks may not turn your charity into raucous scene like that first Star Trek Convention at Americana Hotel circa 1974. But they do give you an extraordinary way to reach our and connect with would-be fanboys.

Use social media well and your nonprofit or company might just “live long and prosper.”

10-10-10 Cause Marketing

I’m still waiting for my copy of Suzy Welch’s first solo book 10-10-10 from Amazon, but I’ve already started to think of the 10-10-10 decision-making instrument in terms of cause marketing. (The photo at left comes from Welch's book website).

The premise of 10-10-10 is straightforward. When you come to important decisions you ask how you will feel about the implications of the decision in 10 minutes, in 10 months and in 10 years.

As a self-help approach 10-10-10 helps you make determinations according to your own moral compass. For that matter it helps you determine what your moral compass is.

For instance, Welch relates an anecdote from when she was the editor of the Harvard Business Review and giving a speech to a group of insurance executives in Hawaii. Her two eldest children, ages 5 and 6, break from their hula dancing class and storm into the room where she’s giving her speech.

There’s a 10-10-10 moment for anyone who has ever been a parent!

Here’s one from my professional experience.

Years before I had a sponsor account at Children’s Miracle Network (CMN), one of my distant predecessors had sold them on a recognition scheme that would allow them to claim in-kind donations of volunteer time as a dollar donation according to a specified formula. Let me hasten to add that this was a matter of what number to promote to its various audiences, not the sum the firm was claiming on its tax returns. It was also a major exception to CMN’s stated policy.

The higher-ups on both sides had passed off on it because the sponsor’s donation growth had leveled off and no one wanted to report static or negative growth numbers.

The arrangement effectively stifled creativity for Children’s Miracle Network and the sponsor both. In effect, everyone got a pass. The arrangement made people lazy. They quit thinking about how to grow the sponsorship. Certainly it was dishonest, even distasteful. It bred distrust and suspicion. CMN’s management worried that other sponsors would learn of the practice and demand a similar deal.

Eventually the arrangement had to be unwound, which was painful experience for all involved. I wish I could claim credit for being the person responsible for ending the loathsome practice, but in fact my immediate predecessor did it. After the change and the account was my responsibility, both parties had a flood of ideas to grow the sponsorship.

A little 10-10-10 at the time when the arrangement was created would have stopped it dead in its tracks. All anybody had to ask is, ‘how will I feel about this in 10 years?’ to know that the arrangement was untenable.

But 10-10-10 isn’t just a governor meant to prevent ill-conceived decisions or to restrain ‘irrational exuberance.’

• It could be used as a brainstorming tool creating cause marketing proposals. Ask; ‘could the things I’m proposing (or versions thereof) still be in place in 10 years?’ If not, keep working.
• 10-10-10 could be an ally for a charity when prospecting for sponsors. Ask; ‘are these people I’d still want to be doing business with in 10 months? What about 10 years?’
• For businesses looking for nonprofit partners to sponsor, 10-10-10 helps bring focus to the discussion. The missions of some charities are meant to self-eliminating. A food bank for instance. The ultimate measure of success for a food bank isn’t how many tons of food they successfully distribute each year, but how soon they can close their doors (or change their mission) because there were no more hungry people to feed. In such cases, a sponsor might rightfully ask; “Does this charity have the staff or the approach to successfully ‘go out of business?’”
  

What about you? How would you use the 10-10-10 tool in your cause marketing? Please comment below or email me at aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

Macy’s Cause Marketing for the National Park Foundation

Today, Saturday April 25, 2009, when you go into Macy’s and give $5 to the National Park Foundation, Macy’s will give you $5 off a $15 (or more) purchase and a ‘shopping pass’ that allows you 20 percent off basically anything else in the store.

In addition some undefined amount of the money generated will go to ‘local participating organizations that conserve and protect our environment.’ It’s all in celebration of National Park Week, which I was not previously familiar with.

The local charitable partner in my market is the Hogle Zoo, a facility and organization that I’ve always found underwhelming.

There’s a lot to like here. First off, I like the idea of the National Park Week, although so hard on the heels of Earth Day I don’t know whether or not this is the right week for it.

Other nonprofit organizations like heart disease and the breast cancer charities have successfully tread this path before. But it’s not clear to me that the National Park Foundation has the promotional juice of Go Red for Women or the affinity generated by Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

The $5 donation to receive sales pricing puts cash into the National Park Foundation coffers in a way that a single transactional cause marketed product probably wouldn’t. For instance, note on the bottom right side of the ad that highlights a $1.95 reusable tote and generates a $1 donation to the National Park Foundation.

I also appreciate the paragraph of explanation of the National Park Foundation. Few cause marketing campaigns get that right.

For Macy’s part, this is just another sales promotion. Hardly a week goes by that Macy’s doesn’t have similar sales offers in their weekly newspaper ad. Macy’s sales are driven by sales, if you catch my meaning.

At any rate, when this promotion is over, it will be very clear to Macy’s management whether or not this promotion worked. (And if anyone from Macy’s would like to share results with me, I’ll happily publish them in this space.)

National Park Foundation doesn’t have ‘boots on the ground’ in very many markets. A split with local charities gives the promotion local relevance.

And so I applaud the National Park Foundation’s willingness to share with other worthy organizations praiseworthy. Too few charities understand that donors and the public expect them to play well in the sandbox with other charities.

They should have spelled out the split, however.

Likewise, I think a zoo as the local partner in this market or most markets is leap of logic. Rare indeed is the zoo that “conserve(s) and protect(s) our environment.”

On Earth Day This Cause Marketer Profiles Favorite Green Blogs

In honor of Earth Day I’m going to step aside from my usual emphasis on cause marketing to talk about 10 green blogs that can help you make a difference for the earth and its inhabitants.

1. Treehugger.com, owned by Discovery Communications is kinda the 800 pound gorilla in this space. It’s a big spread out blog and sometimes that sprawl works to its favor and sometimes in gets in the way. But you can't ignore it.
   
2. Greenbiz.com’s name tells you about its editorial focus. The surprising thing is how uncompromisingly true it is to both parts of its name.
3. Afrigadet.com gets a lot of good press because it’s so refreshingly bright. The site follows the progress of Africans who by dint of hard work and ingenuity turn something silly (usually from the Developed World) into something useful in the Developing World.
4. I’ve highlighted Echoing Green in brief last week. Echoing Green is a 501(c)(3) microenterprise lender to social entrepreneurs in 40 countries on five continents. Echoing Green's social entrepreneurs aren't exclusively green, but when the news on CNN weighs me down, a visit to Echoing Green reminds me that all hope is not lost.
5. What I admire about Cleantechblog.com from Neal Dikeman is that it has a point of view. With Treehugger and others there are so many voices it’s not always coherent. Cleantechblog.com is coherent, even if I don’t always agree with his point of view.
6. I read Ecoprenuerist.com but I do so with a wary eye. Sometimes their posts seem like product placements. I don’t believe they do it. But Ecoprenuerist.com doesn’t have all the resources it needs and sometimes it shows more than others.
7. Grist.org has a lot of screw-you cheek, which I kinda like, although it can wear thin. I check perhaps once a week.
8. Used to be that out-of-work actors waited tables. Nowadays they put up websites with instructions on how to live greener. Check theguidegirls.com (see above) for instructions on how to compost, how to eat less meat, how to save bathroom water. The Guide Girls, ‘Maxine’ and ‘Winnie’ manage to be simultaneously hysterical and creepy.
9. If Perez Hilton were green, he’d probably have started ecorazzi.com, a chirpy, gossipy, celebrity-drenched blog on green living.
10. Alternativeconsumer.com seems to find every ‘upcycled’ product out there, making me frequently marvel at human resourcefulness.

Cause Marketing Odds and Ends

Electrolux is back with perky daytime talker Kelly Ripa just in time for Earth Day. The most interesting wrinkle in this year’s campaign is a kind of virtual paper icon campaign for the benefiting charity, Global Green USA. The money is donated by Electrolux a dollar at a time to Global Green USA’s green schools initiative when you virtually plant a flower.

KaBOOM, the nonprofit playground builder, convinced two-time Dancing With the Stars winner Julianne Hough (who spent part of her growing up years just a few miles from where I live) to pony up $100,000 for charity. The donation is also released a dollar at a time when you enter photos and descriptions of playgrounds in your neighborhood. Notably ecumenical, the $100K goes not to KaBOOM, but to six other charities like Jumpstart, First Book, YMCA, etc. There’s also a contest element to meet Hough. (The picture to the left comes from juliannehough.com)

Portland, Oregon-based fashion e-tailer saraseven.com launched with the promise to donate five percent of sales to two charities: 3 percent to Compassion International’s Unsponsored Children’s Fund and 2 percent to International Justice Mission.

Throughout April, when you buy Ariel Aparicio’s cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ classic Pretty in Pink on iTunes, Aparacio will donate $0.54 cents to the New York affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

OyHello in India, a competitor with social networking sites Orkut and Facebook, was founded with the tagline ‘Unite for the Cause.’ OyHello is less than six months old, and so far the charity partner is unidentified on OyHello’s site.

In March, social entrepreneur enabler Echoing Green in conjunction with Crowdspring, the site that helps small business find graphical design and other kinds of help, held a t-shirt design competition called Designed for Change. The winning t-shirt was sold on the Echoing Green website and proceeds benefit new social entrepreneurs. The winning designer, Audree Rowe, received a $250 cash prize for her birds on a wire design.

(BTW, what's a fellow got to do to get nominated for one of Echoing Green's famous fellowships?)

With each pain admission to its new movie grandiloquently called Earth, Disney will plant a tree in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. The movie opens Wednesday, April 22… Earth Day.

GAS Your Cause Marketing

By profession, Tal Ater is a web programmer and affiliate marketer. But by inclination he is a “treehugger,” and, how to put this? … a bit of a subversive.

Go to his website called Green Any Site (GAS) and drag his bookmarklet... also called Green Any Site... to your browser’s toolbar. When you press the resulting ‘Green This Purchase’ button every time you make a purchase online a donation is made to green cause. Right now it’s Conservation International, but in the months to come GAS will benefit a rotation of green causes.

How does it work? Well, many e-tailers have affiliate relationships with other websites. If you steer someone to the e-tailer through your site and that person buys something, then you get a referral fee. Amazon and all the other big e-tailers you can think of have affiliate programs. (Order one of the great books from the Amazon column to the right and you’ll see what I mean.)

Well GAS donates 100 percent of that referral fee to their green cause du Jour. Referral fees vary according to e-tailer, products, promotions, etc. so GAS can't list an amount at the time of purchase. But you can track total donation amounts on Tal's

See what I mean when I say Tal is a subversive? Consumption… usually thought of as un-green… generates a donation to a green cause.

I interviewed Tal about GAS.


I certainly don’t understand affiliate marketing very deeply, but it seems to me that in order to work that GAS needs to have existing affiliate relationships with basically every website with a shopping cart. What am I missing here?

Actually, that is exactly they way it works. We need to manually add support for each site, but because we use existing affiliate programs, and don’t have to negotiate new deals with retailers, adding support for each site takes about 10-20 minutes.

Every couple of days we go over a list of shopping sites people used GAS on the most, and we make sure to add them to the sites we support.

Every week we support more and more sites, and as long as we can green about 90% of the transactions our users make, I feel comfortable calling it Green Any Site.

But yes, it will always be true that sometimes you will use GAS on a site that we still don’t support. But even then, you’re still helping by letting us know about it (anonymously of course) and hopefully next time you shop there, it will be supported.

Doesn’t GAS have some hard costs; servers or AWS or something aside from your coding costs.

GAS is completely self-funded, and there are of course costs to maintain and develop it.

But it is my plan to make it completely sustainable in the near future, through two main methods:

Extremely targeted, ethical advertising at the time of purchase… Knowing what a user is about to buy and where he is about to buy it, is an amazing opportunity to advertise other products to him, and to help him make greener choices. This is one of our plans on how to not only raise money for the environment, but also help our users make smarter, greener buying decisions.

For example, when you’re about to buy a book online and click “green this,” you may see a small notice next to the GAS window suggesting you save an extra tree and buy the audio or e-book instead. This space may also be used for green tips such as suggesting places to recycle your old phone when you purchase a new one.

It should be noted, that GAS uses the data about a user’s purchase only for the duration of the transaction. No personally identifiable information is kept on a user’s shopping habits, in order not to intrude on his privacy.

Packaging and providing our technology for use by other non-profit and for-profit companies, so they can create their own version of GAS, completely branded to their charity, and benefiting different causes.

GAS currently benefits Conservation International. Are you likely to change that? Could it be multiple green charities?

Yes. Conservation International is the current beneficiary of our donations, and they were chosen after consulting with a number of prominent green bloggers. But they will not be the only ones.

Soon we will let our users nominate charities and vote on which charity they would like to benefit from GAS that month. We may support a different charity every month, or perhaps divide the donation among a few charities every month, depending on the amounts and what our community votes for.

How are you promoting GAS?

This is actually our weakest link right now. I am looking for opportunities to reach more people, and increase the number of users we have.

Why did you put together GAS? Do you get something out of GAS aside from the experience of building it?

I have always been a treehugger. When I first came up with the idea for GAS, I had every intention for it to be something I do in my spare time... My way of using my web skills to do something good for the planet.

But the more I worked on the site, the more I realized that besides doing a lot of good, GAS could also be a viable sustainable business.

These days, GAS has taken over my life as a full-time job, and it is my hope to see it profitable in the near future.

Couldn’t the methodology and the back end of GAS be used to benefit other causes. That is, couldn’t the United Negro College Fund (or any other a charity) promote this to their internal audience and have the proceeds benefit them?

Exactly. A part of my plan is to offer GAS as a hosted service to other organizations in different verticals, so that they could use it with their community and to benefit their cause.

Folks, web-enabled cause marketing is making some remarkable things happen. Like never before, it's time to cozy up to a programmer.

Cause Marketing With Internet Games

It was my initial intent to shower praise on the cool The Bread Art Project, sponsored by The Grain Foods Foundation, a trade group, and benefiting the domestic anti-hunger charity Feeding America, (aka America's Second Harvest) But I can’t.

The Grain Foods Foundation will donate $50,000 and as much as another $50,000 based on the number of Bread Art submissions. When I visited the counter said 10,433 donations had been made.

It’s a fun promotion. When you go to breadartproject.com you can create a piece of bread that toasts a picture or an image of your design. As things load, there’s a stream of nutrition and hunger facts. When you save the Bread Art image, and enter your name and email address, a dollar goes to Feeding America.

A pity there’s was no way to forward your image to friends or post it to your Facebook page. At least I don’t think it had the capability. I created my Bread Art image easily enough. But so far as I know the image was never saved and the donation was never made because I kept getting IO error messages.

They have a gallery of the images that have been created by Food Network host Ted Allen and regular folks like us. No doubt there's some wonderfully stylish images there. But I never got that page to load either. I wondered if there was a gallery of celebrity Bread Art images. Alas, I never found out.

[The image above came from Feeding America's Flickr page.]

The press release says that The Bread Art Project has a Facebook page and that you can follow the project on Twitter. I hope so. Because on the day I checked The Bread Art Project, the website just didn’t like my Firefox browser. Internet Explorer worked only marginally better.

I’ve posted before about the use of Internet games to pass on information in non-transactional cause marketing. But here’s the sticking point; no matter how well conceived or promoted, the darn thing has to work. Could be the site didn't like my version of Macromedia Flash. But if so, the usual prompt never came up.

As with so many other things, if you’re going to conduct cause marketing using Internet games God is in the details!

Bolted-On Cause Marketing

On the left is an FSI page from Sunday April 5. The FSI (or Free-Standing Insert) is for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in the grocery store, and the advertiser is Smuckers, which makes the coffee and licenses the Dunkin’ Donuts mark.

Opposite the coupon on the bottom left is a small blurb from Dunkin’ Donuts itself which promotes a cause marketing effort on April 21, 2009 that benefits Homes for our Troops. The 501 (c)(3) charity in Taunton, Mass. helps severely injured servicemen and women either build new homes or adapt existing homes for handicapped accessibility.

Homes for our Troops is a good and worthy cause

The trimmed size of the full FSI measures 10.75" x 6 7/8" (27 x 17.5cm), which is plenty for Smuckers’ purposes. But the 2.25" x 3 5/16" (5.7 x 8.5 cm) size of the Dunkin’ Donuts portion of the FSI is quite small. You can make out the black type that explains the campaign just fine, but reading the details in the reversed white type at the bottom is challenging.

So I’ve copied it for you here:

“For each small iced coffee you buy on Iced Coffee Day, 10% of the purchase price will go to the Dunkin Brands Community Foundation to support Homes for our Troops. Guaranteed minimum donation $100,000. Visit DunkinDonuts.com for more information. Valid all day. Price and participation may vary. Limited time offer. ©2009 DD IP Holder LLC. All rights reserved.”

Except for the legal information, that’s all pretty important language. It tells us what the donation is, that Dunkin’ is guaranteeing $100,000. We also learn that the money will be filtered through Dunkin’ Donuts’ foundation.

I don’t know how Smuckers and Dunkin’ Donuts corporate worked this out. Maybe their contract allows Dunkin’ Donuts corporate some amount of space in Smuckers’ FSIs. Maybe Dunkin’ Donuts asked for the space in the name of the greater good and Smuckers obliged by carving out that 2.25" x 3 5/16" (5.7 x 8.5 cm).

However it came about, it feels bolted on.

And it's clear that Smuckers would have gotten more glow from the reflected halo of a cause they don't actually support had they just given up 1/2" (1.3cm) more of vertical space.

Now, to be fair, this FSI is only a small piece of the sponsorship activation that Dunkin’ Donuts is doing to promote Iced Coffee Day.

The problem is, it’s too small a piece.

As Quoted in Pizza Today

Along with David Hessekiel of the Cause Marketing Forum, I was quoted in the April 2009 issue of Pizza Today on the subject of cause marketing (the article "Just Cause" begins on page 55.)

It’s not the New York Times, to be sure.

But there’s an interesting side benefit to being quoted in Pizza Today; you get a special voucher that’s accepted at most small pizza parlors across the country that allows you to get extra cheese on your pizzas for free.

I plan on giving it a try tonight!

Me... Paul Jones... in the Company of Seth Godin, Malcom Gladwell and 97 Other "Visionaries"

This blog received notice yesterday that it has been named "100 Best Blogs for Those Who Want to Change the World" by the website Bestuniversities.com.

That puts me in the company of Gladwell, Godin, the U.N., Kiva.org, Treehugger.com, and dozens of others.

From the opening paragraph:

"The world is full of visionaries and people who want to make a difference in the world, and many of those people share their knowledge online through their blogs. Whether you want to change the world through environment, humanitarianism, business, or any other way, there’s a blog out there that can offer you guidance and inspiration. Read on, and you’ll find 100 blogs that can help you change the world."

If I was H.L Mencken, or Twain, or even Groucho Marx, I'd write something snarky right now about 'not wanting to be a member of a club that would have me for a member.'

Instead, I'll say thank you, Bestuniversities.com. That's very nice!

Causemarketing.biz Now Offers Job Board for Positions in the Fields of Corporate Social Responsibility and Cause Marketing

Faithful Readers:

As a service to you, the cause marketing blog now offers a job board listing current jobs and internships in the fields of cause marketing and corporate social responsibility, primarily in North America.

It’s in the column to the immediate right of the posts, the second item down called ‘Alden Keene Joblist.’

In the near term, the blog will also offer the capacity for hiring managers to post jobs here for a modest fee.

Warm regards,

Paul Jones

Buy One Give One Cars

At its launch on March 23 in Mumbai, Tata Motors Chair Ratan Tata announced that when you preorder a $2,500 Nano, a needy family in India would get a matching Nano.

Details are sketchy right now. Apparently this was something that Mr. Tata said at a press event and it was picked up by the Associated Press. But there were no PR materials available regarding the buy one, give one scheme and Tata’s PR staff was flummoxed when asked for details.

At a later event when Tata, who looks a little like Harrison Ford, was asked to comment, said only that the marketing scheme was in formulation and details would emerge in April.

Needless to say this is the most intriguing buy one, give one offer since the buy a house, give a house campaign I posted about in February 2008. But in that case the house you bought was in Sacramento, California and the house you gave was in rural Burkina Faso in sub-Saharan Africa.

When I learn more I'll pass it on.