The Ethical Dilemma of Accepting Tainted Donations

Cause marketers and others have made much of the recent cause marketing campaign by KFC benefiting Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

My old pal Joe Waters at the Boston Medical Center and his many commenters have stated very well the ethical dilemma that charities can face in forging cause marketing relationships.

But, of course, the charititable fundraising business as a whole is fraught with ethical challenges.

Here’s a particularly challenging and recent one from the UK that has come to my attention.

Reginald Forester-Smith was a ‘photographer to the stars’ and royalty in the United Kingdom the 1970s.

In 1999 he was tried, convicted and jailed for repeatedly raping his young daughter over an 18-year-period. He spent eight years in prison. At least two other girls came forward to say that Forester-Smith had sexually abused them as well. His daughter, now aged 42, published a book about her experience in 2002.

Forester-Smith served his time and died last July at the age of 77. His wife, Sheena, died in 2001. Forester-Smith’s estate bequeathed more than £1m to three charities, including £312,291 each to the Macmillan Nurses Cancer Association and Cancer Research UK.

Now news has come out that Forester-Smith had also bequeathed £400,000 to Girlguiding Scotland, an analogue in the United States to the Girls Scouts.

So if you’re Girlguiding Scotland, do you take the money?

Here’s a few things to keep in mind.

• Forester-Smith served his time.
• Forester-Smith is dead.
• Forester-Smith left nothing for his daughter.
• Neither the Macmillan Nurses Cancer Association and Cancer Research UK have announced yet whether they will accept the gift, so Girlguiding doesn’t have any cover from them.
• The estate made the gift to the Girlguiding Scotland in memory of his wife, who was an active supporter of the Girl Guides and Brownies.
• Girlguiding Scotland is particularly well-placed to use the money to fight child abuse in all its odious forms.

All that said, you can appreciate why Girlguiding is taking its time thinking about this bequest.

• Isn't accepting it tantamount to a whitewash of Forester-Smith's horrible crimes?
• Forester-Smith's money is all but blood money.
• His daughter has so far remained silent, but a family friend has said that it would be reprehensible for Girlguides to accept it.

I’d love to get your opinion. Should Girlguiding Scotland accept the donation or not?

Cause Marketing with Your CEO

Until I saw the free standing insert (FSI) on the left from Marcal Manufacturing on Sunday, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen a CEO featured in a cause marketing type ad. Heck, I could count it on one finger.

That CEO was the wonderfully avuncular Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s as well as its long-time pitchman. Thomas died in 2002 at the age 69.

Thomas was famously adopted as a child. As an adult he started the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, which Wendy's sponsored. Wendy’s continues to support the foundation… along with other charities… with cause marketing initiatives and corporate giving.

Now Marcal is using its CEO in a cause marketing type appeal. Since 1950 Marcal has made paper products from recycled paper. It goes without saying that Marcal was decades ahead of its time. Marcal was purchased in 2008 by a private equity outfit and Tim Spring, the man in the ad, was installed as CEO.

Spring has extensive experience in consumer package goods, including turning around existing brands like Vlasic. In his 25-year career Spring has been worked with or turned around numerous other brands including French’s, Tegrin, RedHot, Bagel Crisps, Easy-Off, Airwick Stick-Ups, Log Cabin, Open Pit, and Mrs. Butterworths.

In other words, Spring’s almost certainly a short-timer at Marcal.

I can’t say for sure how the Marcal purchase took place, but private equity outfits usually buy out existing owners by leveraging the business with debt. They then typically bring in a turnaround specialist like Spring to grow the business and pay down the debt. At a certain point the owners cash out by reselling the business.

Now one of the oldest rules of thumb in advertising is to never have your CEO be your pitchman. That’s because the traits that make you a good CEO don’t necessarily overlap with the traits that make you a good pitchman.

More to the point, a CEO’s average tenure is right around 6 years for Fortune 500 companies. That’s like 25 minutes in advertising years.

For instance, the CEO of Sprint is a frequent pitchman for his company. He’s been on the job since 2007. Without Googling him, can you tell me what his name is?

The only effective way to pull off the CEO as pitchman is if he’s going to be there forever, like Dave Thomas was, and you advertise a lot, like Wendy’s does. It helps if you’re willing to have a little fun with your personality in the ads, like Thomas did.

No matter who owns or runs Marcal, it will probably continue to position itself as a pioneering green paper company. That’s good strong positioning in this day and age.

But Marcal’s use of their CEO as pitchman is either an act of naiveté or an act of ego.

Given Spring’s impressive marketing experience, I doubt the former.

Cause Marketing With the Highly Trusted

Buried well into a recent Pew Research Center survey was the graph to the left which illustrated that while the American public has deep distrust of government, there are institutions they still do trust. And that has resonance for nonprofit cause marketers.

That most-trusted institution is small business.

At 71 percent favorable ratings, small business has higher positives than Congress (24%), labor unions (32%), the President (45%), colleges and universities (61%), and churches and religious organizations (63%).

What does this mean to nonprofit cause marketers?

We’ve long known that the cause marketing between causes and sponsors that are both highly regarded tend to have the best results. Likewise, if the sponsor is more highly regarded than the cause, the cause tends to benefit more from the relationship than the sponsor.

And vice versa.

Of course small business is not all positives for nonprofit cause marketers. Small businesses are diffuse, often underfunded, and usually very local.

To work with small businesses you need a campaign that is super inexpensive, simple for the business to implement, and easy for the customer to understand.

Paper icon campaigns fit that bill and have for more than two decades. (My colleague Joe Waters calls them ‘pinups’).

But I’m confident that a creative nonprofit cause marketer could invent some other fresher approach.

'Cause-nitive Dissonance,' Bad Postioning or Both in KFC Cause Marketing Campaign?

Through May 9, 2010 each bucket of specially-marked KFC chicken sold generates a $.50 donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The KFC bucket also invites you to visit bucketsforthecure.com to make an additional donation.

As the website URL suggests, the campaign sports the unwieldy name of 'Buckets for the Cure."

The redoubtable Scotty Henderson, and many others, have raised the issue of "cause-nitive dissonance,' to coin a term.

That is whether fried food should be supporting breast cancer research, since research has shown obesity be a risk-factor for breast cancer and since fried chicken is high in fat. Many, many others, including the Wall Street Journal, have weighed in.

This issue of 'tainted money' is one I've raised more than once and can appreciate.

Back in 2007 Newsweek reporter Jessica Bennett asked me, "Advertising is obviously not about morals. But isn't there a moral conflict in the idea that cause marketing is tapping into consumption guilt while at the same time feeding that excess?"

Here was my response then and I think it also speaks to this case as well.

"It seems to me that you're asking the tainted money question. Every charity in the country sooner or later deals with the question of 'tainted' money. And they have to decide for themselves what kind of money... for them... is tainted."

"And it's a different answer for one charity than it is for the next. When I was at Children's Miracle Network, for instance, we had the chance to do a deal with a beer company but we choose not to. But I believe the MDA still has a relationship of longstanding with Coors. Hard-core environmental charities might not take money from the oil companies."

"What your question suggests to me is that money that comes from a promotion that encourages consumption is considered by some to be tainted. My response is: that depends on the charity. "

"Personally, if I were the executive director of a charity that filled some basic human need; shelter, food, clothing, maybe some kinds of healthcare, there probably wouldn't be any money that was 'tainted.'"

"I believe that's the way Mother Teresa looked at the large donations from Charles Keating, a man she praised effusively at the time even though he eventually did jailtime for his crimes. On the other hand, if I were the executive director of a symphony, I would certainly turn down money from someone like Keating."

But I've got a different question. Why is KFC telling me that they're trying to raise the 'largest single donation to end breast cancer forever?' That is, KFC has guaranteed a $1 million donation to Komen and has set an $8 million goal for the campaign. That would be the largest-ever single donation to Komen.

Am as I as a potential patron of KFC really supposed to care about their internal fundraising goals?

How different is that from Exxon telling me that they're trying to trying to have their best quarter ever?

What do I care about KFC's apparent sense of competition with other Komen sponsors?

Shouldn't the appeal that's inherent in Komen (added to the ridiculous volume that KFC does) be enough to put the Buckets for the Cure campaign over the top in people's hearts and minds?

It seems that KFC, and one supposes, Komen have confused marketing goals with marketing positioning.

And that strikes me as laziness by the creatives at both KFC, Komen, and any agencies they used.

Dove’s Cause Marketing of Self Esteem, Part II

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty was launched in September 2004 on the heels of global study commissioned by Unilever called ‘The Real Truth about Beauty.’

Among the findings was that a scant 2 percent of all women defined themselves as beautiful. Better than 3/4th (81%) strongly agreed with the statement “The media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t achieve.”

The Campaign for Real Beauty launched with an ad showing six ordinary woman (that is, non-models) flaunting their curves in white underwear. Many similar ads followed.

It proved to be an influential campaign. In 2006 Spain outlawed overly thin models on runways. In 2009 Glamour not once but twice featured model Lizzi Miller, who at 5’11” 185lbs confidently sported a small paunch!

The campaign continues, but to make best use of an existing relationship with the Girl Scouts of the USA, Unilever started the Dove Self Esteem Fund in 2006.

The initial cause marketing effort was more PR than marketing. When you signed a Dove Self Esteem pledge banner at a photo shoot of the original six women in Times Square, Dove would donate $1 to the Girl Scouts.

In 2008 Dove commissioned a second study, “Real Girls, Real Pressure,” this time on the self esteem of girls 8-17. The study included two components. An online survey of 1,029 girls with a follow-on study that involved interviews of 3,344 girls in 20 major cities in the United States.

The findings showed that self-esteem woes identified among women in the original 2004 study were first manifest in girls as young as age 8. Among the findings: 57 percent of girls have mothers who criticize their looks; 62 percent feel insecure or not sure of themselves. Among those with low self-esteem 75 percent report negative activities like smoking, drinking, bullying and cutting classes.

In the wake of the Real Girls study, Dove invested the Campaign for Real Beauty with more substance and added two more charity partners, including the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and Girls Inc.

Nowadays, to my reading, the Campaign for Real Beauty concentrates more closely on girls than women. Better to arrest the epidemic of low self-esteem before it develops rather then after it’s exhibited itself.

So Dove has developed and distributes online self-esteem workshop curricula, workbooks for moms and daughters, and an online self-esteem workshop. There’s been a raft of ads… the one above is called Onslaught… along with the usual social media outreach.

Each of the three charities has their own take on building self-esteem among their members.

All this has led to much deserved praise for Dove and Unilever. I could certainly do the same.

But rather than merely add my own encomiums, I encourage Unilever to cut the Campaign for Beauty loose, the way pink ribbons and the Boxtops for Education are now bigger because they’re no longer associated with just one sponsor.

When I say cut the CFB loose, I don’t mean to cut it from its moorings in self esteem among girls. In fact, the branding and the ideals of the Campaign for Beauty are now easily and widely enough understood that Dove couldn’t make it about anything but self esteem.

What I mean is that it’s time to set the Campaign for Real Beauty free from the constraints that are inherent with one-company sponsorship so that it can really grow to the next level.

The CFB is at a point when the only way it could get bigger… and more effective… is if Unilever allows people and other companies into the movement.