Cause Marketing Fun and Games

GamesThatGive.net allows you to play common video games like Solitaire, Sudoku, and Blackjack for free, while making a sliver of a donation to one of 13 nonprofit charities.

Here's how it works. Behind each of the games a static advertisement runs for sponsors like Domino's Pizza, Dial, Pepsi or others.

GamesThatGive.net donates 70 percent of ad revenue to those charities, including the United Way, UNICEF, and the Wilderness Society.

As of this writing on Sept. 22, 2009, the donations counter at the top of the home page read: "GamesThatGive has donated $2032.13 to charity."

I put a handful of questions to Brian Reich, GamesThatGive's principal evangelist, about where the idea came from, how it works, and how it's been received by charities and sponsors. His responses follow.

How did the idea come about for GamesthatGive.net?

The idea came, mostly, from the experiences of our CEO, Adam Archer. He traveled the world a few years back and upon his return to the United States, he started to inquire with people about why they weren't doing more to support the charities and causes they care about most. The answer always fell into one of three categories -- don't have the time, don't have the money, don't have the outlet. Adam is a programmer by trade, so he started to think about the ways to use existing behavior and the wide array of new technologies that were flooding society. Working with the team he pulled together, they settled on the idea of using casual games to help raise money for charities.

Tell me about the main people involved?

Here are quick bios of some of the key folks on the team:

Adam Archer, CEO: Prior to co-founding GamesThatGive, Adam was a senior software engineer at Apple, working on many aspects of Mac OS X’s integration at its Cupertino headquarters. Adam is also an experienced organic farmer and has backpacked extensively around the world. He lives in San Francisco, CA.

Christopher Bell, COO: Christopher brings experience in strategy and corporate finance, focusing most recently on Innovation and R&D at LeapFrog Enterprises. Christopher has a breath of general management, product marketing, and new product launch experience through roles at Intuit, AOL, and The Industry Standard.

Kris Goss, Lead Software Engineer: Kris has over 10 years of software development experience with a broad range of companies including startups, retail stores, and Fortune 500 firms. Most recently, Kris worked as an independent consultant with Accenture, providing architectural and detailed engineering guidance and review for a variety of initiatives.

Cie Nicholson, Principal Strategist: Cie has over 20 years of marketing experience, most recently as the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Pepsi-Cola North America (PCNA). She lives in New York City.

Brian Reich, Principal Evangelist: Brian is a leading communications strategist, as well as a regular writer and speaker on the impact of the Internet and technology on politics, society, and the media. He is the author of Media Rules!: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience (Wiley 2007). He blogs at WeMedia.com, ThinkingAboutMedia.com, and as a Fast Company Expert. Brian previously served as Vice President Gore's Briefing Director in the White House and he lives in New York City.

I played Solitaire on GamesThatGive for 40 minutes the other night and I couldn't figure out what triggered the donation. Explain how the donations work for the various games.

Every second that a person plays a game on GamesThatGive generates a donation... its a small amount, but when you aggregate a lot of people playing you can raise a substantial amount of money. So, the more you play, and the better you do, the more money you raise. The more people who are playing, the more is raised that day, or for a particular charity.

The sponsor presence is pretty static, no doubt by intent. What are the conversion rates?

It was intentional... we made a conscious choice not to have the advertising interfere with the game playing experience. As a result, we have only one advertiser per gaming session and serve only a handful of impressions per minute.

Other than conversion rates, what do the sponsors say about advertising this way?

The sponsors are over the moon excited about the opportunity to embed their messaging into an immersive experience like a casual game site, while also demonstrating their support for charities and causes in the community. I will send you a copy of our thinking paper specifically focused on advertising when it is released later this week. I also can point you to a guest post on the GamesThatGive blog that the social media strategist at Dominos posted today:

http://blog.gamesthatgive.net/2009/09/21/dominos-pizza-and-gamesthatgive-cooking-up-something-special/

How often do you pay the charities?

Advertisers are billed months. Charities receive payments quarterly. We provide near real-time updates to the charities of the performance of the site and the amount of money raised across the platform.

How do we know that the games are 'honest'? That is, what keeps you from making Solitaire easier or harder than it is in my Windows computer?

Games like solitaire have a set of rules, for example, one deck, draw three cards, place a red queen on a black king. We use the standard Klondike Solitaire rules.

I count 13 benefiting charities. What was that process of in-selling them?

GamesThatGive looked for charities that will not only benefit from the money we raise, but embrace the functionality of the platform; organizations who understand the potential of casual games. We also wanted to have a diverse group of charities represented on the site, so no matter who came to play our games, they would find an organization or an issue that they would be motivated to play for. And lastly, we wanted to welcome organizations who believed in our new concept of charitable fundraising video games, and were willing to help us grow the platform, by welcoming their audience, and by providing us feedback and guidance on how to continue improving. We sat down, we identified charities that fit these criteria, and then we hit the road -- our CEO, Adam Archer, and our Principal Evangelist, Brian Reich, traveled coast to coast meeting with the charities to invite them to be a part of the platform. Everyone they met with signed on immediately.

Of those charities, Ronald McDonald House Charities, United Way, UNICEF, and Feeding America are all umbrella charities. That is, they fundraise on behalf of other charities. Was this a strategy, or did it just happen that way?

We identified a diverse group of charities -- different types, different sizes, different areas of impact. We wanted charities that would benefit from the support, as well as groups that would help us to learn how best to expand and improve the platform over time. By including these charities, we were able to look at ways to grow out the platform to support local affiliates in the future, for example. We aren't there yet, but that is the kind of support we hope/anticipate being able to provide in the future.

At least some of the charities generally require minimum donations when it comes to sponsorship. You probably can't make any guarantees in that regard. So how did you overcome those objections?

Two answers to that question: first, we reached out to organizations that we felt would appreciate the opportunity to be a part of this exciting startup venture and be willing to experiment along with us. In some cases, that meant not approaching some terrific organizations where we knew such requirements exist. In terms of the charities we did approach, and who are on the platform... some did ask about that, and we did not make any guarantees. We simply explained the concept and the potential to raise a significant amount of money and in every case, if they had thought about making such a request, they waived that requirement.

How Corporate Citizenship Can Help HR Build a Better Workforce

Hi Gang:

What follows is my 9-15-2009 presentation to the Crossroads Conference,

the annual conference of Utah state chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management.

Warm regards,

Paul

How Corporate Citizenship Can Help HR Build a Better Workforce

View more presentations from Alden Keene and Associates, Inc..

Cause Marketing, Affinity, and Alignment

Last night at dinner, a long-time reader and a new friend asked: 'How important is alignment between cause and sponsor? What about CEO passion?

Here's how the discussion went.

For years the best conventional wisdom in cause marketing has been that you choose a cause based on ‘strategic philanthropy.’ If you’re an oil company, you pick environmental causes. If you make ladies purses, you pick women’s causes. If you sell toys, you pick children’s causes. If you’re a restaurant, you pick hunger causes. If you sell organic foods, you support organic farmers.

And indeed, academic researchers have consistently demonstrated that a clear alignment between cause and sponsors tend to pay off best. But it’s more complicated than that.

For instance, an auto body shop might naturally align with, say, a high school that teaches auto body repair. But it would be an unusual for that ‘cause’ to have much affinity.

On the other hand, if the owner of the body shop was a woman who had successfully fought breast cancer, then it might make sense for her shop to support Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which is loaded with affinity.

In the real world you see a lot of successful cause marketing campaigns where the relationship between the cause and the sponsor isn’t exactly ‘strategic.’

For instance, Chilis, the casual dining restaurant chain, does a very successful campaign each fall for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

In the traditional sense, there’s no strategic fit between Chilis and St. Jude. But Chilis does it because St. Jude offers so much affinity that customers can easily understand and appreciate the relationship.

Plus, as I often say, children are the 'universal cause.'

As for CEO passion, that’s a hard one because it can cut both ways. It’s hard to imagine a CEO who is passionate about… say… opera being able to carry that over to a cause marketing campaign.

By the same token, there’s a small toy company in California called Munchkin Inc that did a successful campaign for Susan G. Komen because the wife of the company’s VP of marketing, a young mother of two, contracted breast cancer.

Thanks to Patti Burge for a terrific meal and a delightful conversation. Patti took me up on my standing offer to go to lunch or dinner so as to pick my brain about cause marketing.

It's been my pleasure to receive great advice from many people who asked nothing in return other than that I 'pay it forward.'

So if you're in Salt Lake City or visiting, like Patti was, and would like to talk about cause-related marketing specifically, or marketing in general, then take me to lunch.

I'll give you my best advice and when we're done I'll just push the tab over to your side of the table.

Not in Salt Lake City, but still want to talk? Then send me your questions on the back of $50 gift certificate from Ruth's Chris and I'll contemplate them solo over a ribeye steak. [I'm kidding. Mostly].

Contact me at: aldenkeene @ gmail.com.

A Company and Cause Grow Through Cause Marketing

Faithful readers:

The following is from my periodic column in the business weekly, the Salt Lake Enterprise. In it I profile how a fast-growing company and a innovative charity connected five years ago in a way that has greatly benefited both parties.

Warm regards,

Paul

Since its founding a little more than five years ago, Ragnar Events LLC, which produces the super-sized Ragnar Relay Series, has sprinted to become the nation’s premier overnight relay race.

And almost from the day Ragnar strung out its first yellow finish line, the company has had a charity partner, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Operation Kids.

Headquartered in Kaysville, Utah, Ragnar owns and operates 10 relay races around the country in Arizona, Boston, Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Washington, D.C., and Washington State.

(The picture above comes from Ragnar's Relay Del Sol race, which takes place in Arizona.)

The races typically cover 200 miles. Teams of 12, sometimes dressed in wacky attire, start in the day and then race through the night, finishing the following day. Ragnar actively encourages participants to support Operation Kids.

Each team member runs three legs of three to eight miles each. The unique relay format makes it possible for even nominal runners to participate. And indeed, if you’ve been to Ragnar Relay’s seminal Wasatch Back, which starts in Logan, Utah and ends in Park City, Utah, you’ve seen competitive collegiate distance runners and weekend warriors and everything in between.

The reason Ragnar “baked” a charity component into the earliest business plans was both a business and a personal decision. Attorney Stephen J. Hill, a shareholder at Salt Lake City law firm Parr Brown, who co-founded Ragnar with his son Dan and Dan’s boyhood friend Tanner Bell, lost a toddler son in a tragic accident years before.

As an organization, Ragnar wanted to remember Steve’s son (Dan’s brother,) says Bell, senior vice president of sales and marketing. “We [also] believe that in any industry, but especially in ours, we need a cause our participants can rally around Ragnar is so much more than a run. It is a social experiment. It is a bonding experience,” Bell says. “We believe that experience is even better when the group has a common goal to raise funds for children. It is important to us to give back to the communities that we run through. We want to make a difference in those communities Not just by bringing them a really cool event, but by improving the future of their children.”

Operation Kids, now in its 10th year, was an early leader in the choice to fill that role. But the decision wasn’t automatic for the Ragnar executives. The sticking point was that Operation Kids’ brand was only five years older than Ragnar’s.

“Frankly, that is something we struggled with in the beginning,” says Bell. “There is a certain value to being partnered with a well-known brand. At the time, the Operation Kids brand was not well-known. However, partnering with an organization as passionate and dedicated as Operation Kids was what really sealed the deal for us. We wanted to partner with someone who is as passionate about children as we are about relay racing. Operation Kids certainly fits that bill.”

Indeed, academic research suggests that the sponsor-charity pairings most likely to yield the best results are symmetrical ones in which the charity is as well known as the sponsor.

In cases of asymmetry, where either the charity or the sponsor is the more prominent brand, which entity benefits most depends on the circumstances of the sponsorship.

Operation Kids, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity, has an intriguing solution to the sponsor-cause asymmetry. Operations Kids reviews the operations and financials of charitable organizations that serve children and finds the most efficient and effective. Operation Kids serves as a giving strategist for both corporate and individual donors. The staff ensures the accountability of any gifts by managing them all the way through the process.

Operation Kids’ costs are funded by donors and the proceeds from a large investment fund it holds. As a result, Operation Kids can promise that 100 percent of any donations made through it will go to the selected charity.

“The fact is, Ragnar has given — through Operation Kids — to youth fitness programs of the American Heart Association, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Best Buddies and numerous other large and established organizations that serve the communities they traverse,” says Rick Larsen, Operation Kids president. “So the brand association is there for them.”

For its relationship with Ragnar, which really cares about where the donations go and how they’re used, Operation Kids got really granular “Our exact role with Ragnar,” says Larsen, “is to assist them in finding local charities — and by ‘local’ I mean charities in the communities they pass through — who represent two things. One, a commitment to some aspect of kid’s health and fitness, a logical fit for a running event; and two, meet our standards of efficiency with respect to programs and use of funds … We act as the research arm to find those fits and disperse the funds."

“The best part about the program is that it is a cause our participants can really get behind, Bell says. “This program provides participants with tangible results. They can see their dollars at work in their communities.”