My Blue Sky Audit From Rocky Mountain Power

In December 2008 I signed up with 'Blue Sky,' a wind energy offsets program from my electric utility, so as to help mitigate the carbon footprint of the Cause Marketing blog.

Earlier this month I got the first full-year statement from Rocky Mountain Power, my electric utility, which you can see on the left.

The statement explains how many offsets I bought and totes up the total number of kilowatts purchased by my fellow customers and I.

Better still, they give my numbers some real shape and meaning. My 2009 Blue Sky purchase helped avoid the release of nearly 3,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of NOT driving nearly 3,000 miles in the car.

But Rocky Mountain Power nonetheless stumbles with this statement. The paper it was printed on should have been recycled!

I'll Be in Wash D,C, and Available for Meetings Feb 24 and 25

Dear Friends:

I'll be in Washington, D.C. next week for business and have some availability for meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 24 and 25.

Want to talk cause marketing, marketing, corporate social responsibility, fundraising, nonprofit innovation, or the like? Or just catch up?

So would I.

Email me at aldenkeene[@]gmail[dot]com and suggest a meeting.


Warm regards,
Paul

Cause Marketing to Children

The other day a new friend asked, “Is there such a thing as cause marketing targeted at children?”

Of course cause marketing to kids would be a conundrum. While 4 to12-year-olds influence at least $128 billion in household spending, perhaps 5 percent of that total is money kids can actually spend on their own.

And influence is a fuzzy notion. In my household, for instance, my kids have never influenced me to buy the sugary cereals whose ads run in hot rotation on Nick Jr., although I might ask them whether they prefer Oreos or Pepperidge Farm cookies.

But I couldn’t think of any cause marketing targeted at children so I promised to consult Alden Keene’s voluminous database of cause marketing ads.

I was slightly surprised to find the example above, which comes from the September 2007 SI Kids magazine.

Above is the third page of a three-page ad for retailer JC Penney. The first two pages are in a double-truck configuration and feature NFL player and all-around good guy Michael Strahan, who was still playing for the New York Giants when the ad dropped. Strahan retired before the start of the 2008 season.

JC Penney’s Afterschool Fund, which is organized as a charity, supports Boys & Girls Clubs of America, YMCA of the USA, *National 4-H, United Way and FIRST. Since 1999, JC Penney reports, it has donated more $80 million to after school programs.

JC Penney’s tie-in with the NFL is through the Afterschool Fund’s sponsorship of the ‘Take a Player to School’ sweepstakes whereby school kids can enter to win the chance to bring an NFL player to their school for show and tell.

I’m torn about whether cause marketing aimed at kids could be effective.

But in this specific example, I have a hard time believing that this ad really worked. It just seems too darn earnest. “When you purchase these cool items… all net profits are donated to the JCPenney Afterschool Fund, a charity that provides children in need with access to life-enriching afterschool programs…”

That’s a little syrupy even for my sweet tooth.

As for the offer, the readership of SI Kids is 69 percent boys to 31 percent girls. Given that, I have serious doubts that much of SI Kids readership has been pining for albums from Ashley Tisdale, the cast album of High School Musical, or episodes of That’s So Raven.

In short, the product mix is not quite right and the creative strikes me as being too treacly.


* Full disclosure: Alden Keene has done work for the National 4-H Council.

Cause Marketing… um… Magic

After a show in Palm Beach Florida in April 2006, David Copperfield and two companions were mugged at gunpoint by three assailants who asked for the magician’s wallet. Instead, Copperfield performed a sleight of hand, palming his wallet, phone and passport while turning out his pockets to suggest that he didn’t have anything to steal.

We have something like a sleight of hand going on with this ad for Clorox Bleach. It looks like cause marketing, with a dot.org website, something that looks like a nonprofit logo, and a mission to stop an eradicable tree disease, but in fact, there’s no cause marketing here.

This ad is from the Dec-Jan. 2009 issue of Parenting magazine and it’s the first of three consecutive pages of ads for Clorox Bleach. The headline reads: “Saving Trees Big and Small: Clorox Regular Bleach.

The art shows an ornament hanging from an evergreen branch. The body copy suggests that using Clorox Bleach to kill bacteria in water will prolong the life of live Christmas trees.

Ignore for a moment that the premise of the headline… ‘saving trees’… is a logical nonstarter since before a Christmas tree enters you home it has to be cut down first!

Concentrate instead on the column on the right that mentions that the State of California uses bleach-treated water to treat oak trees in the state suffering from a disease called Sudden Oak Death. So the bleach that the cash-strapped State uses to combat Sudden Oak Death comes as an in-kind donation from Clorox, right?

Who can say? The copy reads: “To help stop the disease from spreading, water used by the California Department of Forestry and nurseries is treated with bleach.”

Hm. Does that mean Clorox bleach or the house brand at Safeway?

The body copy continues, “The Clorox Company is providing funding to support tree planting efforts around the state. For more information about California oaks, go to www.californiaoaks.org.”

So, then, Clorox pays the Oakland nonprofit called the California Oak Foundation to plant California oaks around the Golden State?

Not so fast. The California Oak Foundation is not a tree-planting charity, it’s an environmental advocacy group. I checked the Foundation’s website and 990s (tax returns) and it doesn’t appear that Clorox makes donations, at least for tree planting, to the California Oak Foundation.

This ad is all legerdemain.

Like David Copperfield to look at The Clorox Company you’d think there’d be some money there. And there is. The Clorox Company made $5.44 billion last year. Its market cap is $8.49 billion and its EBITDA was $1.29 billion.

But just as you won’t figure out how David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear by watching more closely the distracting sleight of hand, this ad won’t tell you anything about how The Clorox Company really “saves trees.”

Why Doesn't Your Cause Marketing Generate as Much Money as the Super Bowl?

An open letter to my friends in the nonprofit world.


Dear Nonprofit Marketer:

The Super Bowl was yesterday. It attracted the largest TV audience for any TV show ever in the United States with 106.5 million viewers. The Winter Olympics are a few days away. The World Cup is about 4 months from now. So I'm opening up Peabody's Way Back Machine to a post I wrote in 2007 that asks, 'why doesn't your cause generate as much money as any of those sports properties?'

Short answer; it's a failure of imagination.

The September 27, 2007 Forbes listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are:

1. Super Bowl… $336 million
2. Summer Olympics…$176 million
3. Fifa World Cup…$103 million
4. NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million
5. Winter Olympics…$82 million
6. Rose Bowl…$72 million
7. MLB World Series…$61 million
8. Kentucky Derby…$59 million
9. NBA Finals…$58 million

I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second.

But cause-related marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $103 million per day like the World Cup?

Think of all the advantages you enjoy.

• You have tremendous heart.
• You have a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times a year.
• Some are as passionate about your cause as any face-painting fan of the World Cup or the Olympics.
• You powerfully impact the lives of millions (or thousands) every year.
• Your name recognition in your market segment is very high.
• You get plenty of (mainly) positive publicity.

Look at the list of sponsorships again. What’s the second reason why you don’t generate even $58 million per day in sponsorship money?

In a word, it’s a TV contract. Or, rather, TV contracts.

While you’re busy pitching story ideas to get free publicity for your cause campaign, all those people on the top 10 list are signing rich contracts for TV coverage of their event.

The result is your sports marketing peers measure their sponsorship results in millions per day and you measure it in thousands per year.

It’s like they’re baking up hundreds of items at once a big industrial range while you’re baking up cute little individual tablespoon-sized cupcakes in an Easy Bake oven. They’re cooking with thousands of BTUs and you’re cooking with the watts thrown off by a tiny light bulb.

But wait, you say, that’s not fair. The Super Bowl has something to show. It’s visually perfect for television.

But no one thought so at first.

According to Forbes:

“The first Super Bowl was played in 1967 in the Los Angeles Coliseum, and there were so many empty seats you could have bought a ticket right before kickoff for next to nothing. Television viewership was not much better. Super Bowl Sunday is now a quasi-national holiday and tickets are next to impossible to get (less than 1% of the game's tickets are available to the general public through a random drawing) and very expensive (the average price for a ticket during the 2007 Super Bowl was $614), and ratings are through the roof (three of the four most-watched television programs in the U.S. have been Super Bowls).”

I’ll bet the story’s not so different for the first televised World Cup, either.

To be sure, you can get your cause on TV right now. Contact my friends at the Starfish Television Network and they’ll almost certainly be able to carry your existing programming for free.

The TV contract however is a taller order. You’re going to have to come up with a pretty good concept and you’ll have to sell it like crazy.

But take a lesson from the Super Bowl. It took the NFL 40 years to grow the popularity of Super Bowl to the point where the average Joe or Jane can’t really even buy tickets to the game. When the NFL started they didn't know that the Super Bowl was going to be The Super Bowl. You have the advantage of a path that has been trod by many others, even if none of them were nonprofits.

Don't get discouraged. Remember the journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step.

Warm regards,

Paul Jones
President
Alden Keene and Associates

Instant-On Cause Marketing

One of the remarkable things about the Internet is the way it enables you to turn on a cause marketing campaign in about an hour.

Old style cause marketing relied on the old media, which is a little like an electric stove. Turn it on and after a while it’s hot.

By contrast, cause marketing on the Internet is like a gas stove. Turn the dial and the heat is on.

Short case in point. The small website for artists called Booooooom.com... which is basically a blog... decided to do something for Haiti relief. So they petitioned artists with a pitch. We’ll carve out a space for your art on a special page of Booooooom if you’ll donate proceeds from the sale of your art to Haiti.

And boom, just like that the page was up.

(The piece above is called ‘The Healer’ by Betsy Walton.)

Ignore the problems this effort has in terms of transparency (Where does the money go? How much does ‘a portion of the proceeds’ mean?) and instead marvel at how fast the Internet makes it possible for even small media outlets to respond to the desperate need in Haiti.

Cause Marketing Wiki

For about eight years now I’ve been collecting all the cause marketing I come across in a database, mainly expressed as advertising creative.

Alden Keene and Associates now has a database of more than 1,500 cause marketing examples.

The problem, of course, is that while I probably see more cause marketing than the average person on the street, even with RSS feeds and Google Alerts, I almost certainly miss more than I see.

Moreover, since I'm in North America and only speak/read English, no doubt there's much more cause marketing that I wouldn't even recognize as such.

So I propose to set up a Wiki of examples of cause marketing that would be open to everyone. Could be links, could be images or descriptions, or some combination thereof.

If this sounds like something you’d like to participate in please email me at aldenkeene [at] gmail [dot] com.