Displaying Multiple Cause Marketing Allegiances

We’ve all seen how causes recognize multiple sponsors for, say, races and events. If you got a t-shirt from participating in a Team in Training race for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to pick on just one, you know what I'm talking about; it’s logo-soup spilled all over the back of your t-shirt.

But suppose your company supports multiple causes. How do you display that without doing the same thing to your ads? That’s the question I had when I pulled this ad for Cabot Cheese from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database.

Cabot Cheese, a co-op in Vermont, supports a handful of causes in different ways and in pretty different spaces; the arts, schools, women and children’s causes, environmental causes, even the Girl Scouts.

How does Cabot pull it off? Quite admirably, I’d say.

Each of the causes is assigned its own icon, even the Girl Scouts. One of problems of the logo-soup approach is that logos come in all sizes, colors, and orientations. If you regularize their size or go with just one color somebody’s logo inevitably looks like crap.

But by representing causes as icons, everything is uniform and eye-pleasing. And you can represent causes without having to get permission to use their logos. Now I’m not advocating dishonesty, misrepresentation, or even a lack of transparency by sponsors or would-be sponsors.

But I am on the record for advocating that causes, especially the largest ones, figure out a way for the little guy to give without requiring sponsorship fees that are unapproachable for the smallest sponsors. This might be one way to achieve that goal.

What do you think?

Some Questions to Answer When Cause Marketing With Franchises

In the United States there’s one place where you’re all but guaranteed to run into some kind of cause marketing and I'm not talk about a nail salon.

No the kind of place you're most likely to see cause marketing is at a retail franchise outlet.

The ten largest franchise systems, ranked according to worldwide sales volume as ranked by Franchise Times follow. Where known I’ve added the cause with which each franchise system is most publicly affiliated.

1. McDonald’s… Ronald McDonald House Charities
2. 7-Eleven… Muscular Dystrophy Association
   
3. KFC … KFC Colonel’s Scholars
4. Burger King… ?
5. Subway Restaurants… American Heart Association
6. Ace Hardware… Children’s Miracle Network
7. Circle K Stores… United Cerebral Palsy
   
8. Pizza Hut…Book It reading incentive program
   
9. Wendy’s… Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption
   
10. Marriott Hotels, Resorts & Suites… Children’s Miracle Network.
    

It’s not surprising that consumer-oriented franchises would tend to have a cause marketing focus. Academic research consistently finds that corporate social responsibility makes good business sense for businesses that target the consumer market.

But doing cause marketing campaigns with franchises can be complicated.

Local franchisees have autonomy. If a McDonald's franchisee in Saratoga, New York doesn't want to support the nearby Ronald McDonald House, he probably doesn't have to. Although he certainly gets plenty of pressure to do so from the local McDonald's owner's group. I've been told that one of the main reasons why the once narrowly-focused Ronald McDonald House became the broader-focused Ronald McDonald House Charities is because owners and owner's groups wanted to be able to support their own 'pet' causes.

Go down the Franchise Times list and you'll find plenty of franchise systems that don't have a cause affiliation. It's a prospect list for charities, in other words.

For charities you need to ask yourself the following before you start making phone calls:

• Does my cause have the breadth of appeal that can attract a franchise?
• Is there a 'fit'?
• Are the target franchise systems close enough to consumers to be able to ask for money/support?
• Can I get the support of powerful individual franchisees?
• Can I physically support the efforts of franchises that may be spread out all over the country?
• Can I put into place a mechanism for collecting money?
• Do I have the wherewithal to promote the relationship in the media?
• How will I recognize and reward the achievements of individual franchisees?
• If there are materials to distribute, does the franchisor have an effective way to deliver them?
• When selling your charity to the franchise system, does the franchisor have an efficient way for me to get in front of the individual franchisees?
  

For franchisees and franchise systems, the questions you have to ask of would-be charity partners are almost a mirror image:

• Does the charity's mission have broad appeal?
• Will your customers know who anything about the charity?
• Is what they know good?
• Do they have any scandals in their past?
• Does the charity have unique appeal?
• Does the charity have the support of influential franchisees?
• Is there a 'fit'?
• Does the charity fulfill its mission well?
• Are they efficient with their resources?
• Is the relationship or any of the elements promotable in the media?
• Can they help you with promotions?
• Do you have budget to help them produce and distribute campaign materials?
• Do they have people on the ground in the markets most important to you?
• How will they acknowledge the franchisee's efforts?

Retail franchises are ripe for cause campaigns because consumers expect them. But make sure you have good answers to the questions above before heading into cause marketing relationships.

A Cool New Platform for Cause Marketers to Launch Virtual Paper Icons From

SupporterWall.com is an interactive grid wall that displays pictures and links to your website that you could use for fundraising for you nonprofit or crowd funding your business idea.

Presently in beta, the individual grids sell for $100, $20 and $10. The donations from the beta wall go to SupporterWall. But when it comes out of beta the app will be released in three rounds, first to $100 donors, then $20 donors, then $10 donors.

In effect, SupporterWall is crowd funding its own startup with the sale of an app that helps you crowd fund. It’s sorta like looking at your reflection in an infinity mirror.

The money deposits into your PayPal account. SupporterWall is customizable and can be installed on your website. There’s no deadlines or timelines. Leave it up as long as you see fit.

SupporterWall also has teeny-tiny little grids that it gives away for free. If you look really closely, you can see my photo on the top row of the freebies section in the 45th square from the left. That’s also my photo in row two in the 45th square. And in row 3-45, 4-45, etc. all the way down to row 10.

You could probably charge a buck for those little squares, but the PayPal transaction fees might not be worth it for you or the $1 donor.

Just to play fair with SupporterWall and to get access to the app I’ll also put up a $10 square.

SupporterWall positions the app as a crowd funding option. But I see it as a really cool virtual paper icon campaign. It allows you to sign your name to an icon, and post it in a public space. Plus, it allows you to easily link to a website, something paper icons can’t do.

This is the online equivalent of those low-rent capital campaigns where you pay your money and get a custom brick that leads up to the main entrance of a hospital, for instance. Except the price is better. I spent about $90 putting up a brick in the Olympic Plaza in the lead-up to the 2002 Winter Olympics. By contrast, $10 seems almost like throw-away money.

This is very clever, although SupporterWall is the first to admit it's not entirely original.

Book Review: “The Facebook Marketing Book”

I joined LinkedIn way back in 2005. I started this blog in October 2006. I was on Twitter early enough that the handle ‘paulrjones’ was still available. In fact, it was so soon after it went live that the early adopters… tip of the hat to Jason Alba … who turned me onto it were using Twitter to enable lunchtime meetups.

My LinkedIn account was half-finished for years before I could imagine any value in completing it. The blog paid off right away, but the value of Twitter puzzled me for months after I started using it.

I’ve known about Facebook since the time when it was still limited to college-aged students. I joined Facebook pretty early, too. But I doubt if there’s anyone with the reach of these words that uses Facebook less than me. Simply put, Facebook leaves me cold.

And that’s a problem for a marketer, because Facebook is close to being a marketer’s… and a cause marketer’s… dream.

That’s why I was so glad when the friendly folks at O’Reilly, the tech publishers (et al), sent me a review copy of The Facebook Marketing Book, by Dan Zarrella and Allison Zarrella.

The Facebook Marketing Book is arranged almost as picture book with long captions. As you open a page spread on the left hand side is a screen grab or a graphic. On the right are two or three or four paragraphs of explanatory text.

Ambrose Bierce, the acid-tongued satirist and author of The Devil’s Dictionary once reviewed a book by writing, “the covers of this book are too far apart.” Ouch!

But the covers aren’t too far apart here. The arrangement and brevity of the book is actually a selling point for me. Any more and I’d have never gotten through it.

The Facebook Marketing Book is like eating a fancy cupcake; there’s enough to satisfy, but not too much to lead to diminishing returns. And anyone who watched Brendan Frasier in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” knows what I mean by diminishing returns.

Since almost everything in the book was new to me, I’m not sure what bon mots from the book to share with you my faithful readers. The pages on how to use keywords in Facebook for SEO struck me as important. I appreciated the discussion on when to use Facebook Pages, when to use Profiles and when to choose Groups. The pages in chapter 10 on promotions were pithy and helpful. Chapter 12 on analytics and ROI gave me an idea about this blog.

If, like me, you’re a rookie on marketing with Facebook, The Facebook Marketing Book is a nice bite-sized introduction.

Here are the chapter titles:

1. Introduction to Social Networking
2. Facebook Profile Basics
3. Facebook Page Basics
4. Facebook Group Basics
5. Facebook Events
6. Facebook Application Basics
7. Customizing Your Facebook Page
8. Developing a Facebook Content Strategy
9. Cross-Promoting Content on Facebook
10. Facebook Page Management
11. Advertising on Facebook
12. Analytics and ROI

Cause Marketing Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Pizza Hut would like to do some cause marketing with your charity. I know this because a flyer pasted on top of the box of the Big Dipper pizza we ordered the other day said as much.

What Pizza Hut has in mind is discount card promotion. You can find plenty of similar efforts from other food retailers. If Pizza Hut’s is compelling to your audience, consider calling the number listed.

But instead of this rather standard issue campaign, what if instead Pizza Hut offered a donation to your charity of choice… say $0.25… plus the opportunity to donate a much larger amount when you respond to customer satisfaction survey?

The idea was waiting for me when I turned over the self-same flyer. When you complete the customer satisfaction survey on the phone or online, you are entered into a drawing for a free iPod along with 10 chances to win a daily prize of $1,000.

These kinds of offers are commonly printed on the back of receipts (see below).

If you read the fine print, it appears that Pizza Hut has approximately $438,000 to award every year ($1,000 cash plus $200 per iPod x 365 days, assuming they award prizes every day).
Now a quarter per survey isn’t very much for a $14 food order, the price we paid for our Big Dipper. But it’s on par with the price and the donations made by Procter & Gamble when you redeem a coupon for a 48-load bottle Tide detergent from one of their charity brandSAVER FSI’s.

Moreover, I’m suggesting that Pizza Hut keep the contest element so that one charity would get a bigger payoff every day. Assuming that Pizza Hut donated to a universe of perhaps 5 charities, they would average about $90,000 each. Not world-beating, but respectable. Especially since each of the charities would also get exposure every single day on Pizza Hut’s automated survey system.

As in: “If you want your donation to go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, press 1. If you’d like it to go to the Nature Conservancy, press 2…”

Or, for the sake of simplicity, Pizza Hut could give the full $1,200 a day to the one charity which gets the most votes every day.

Why wouldn’t Pizza Hut go for this?

• The idea is a little out there, I confess.
  
• They’d have to choose the charities smartly. Pizza Hut is already involved with the World Food Programme among others. The WFP might be put out by being just one of several benefiting charities.
  
• The potential total payoff for charities is rather low, especially for the Komens and the St. Jude’s of the charity world. They might not go for it.
  
• I’m not a lawyer, but there may be some legal hassles involved with registering in the 40 or so states and municipalities that require it, although I suspect Pizza Hut has already dealt with that issue.
  
• There’s always the question of whether it would ‘pull’ better than the approach Pizza Hut is already taking. But that would be pretty easy to test.
• There may be some internal and external silo issues. Pizza Hut probably hires out these customer surveys to an outside vendor, and that vendor may not have the inclination or expertise to try something like this.
  
• While I’ve made suggestions on how this might work, the fact of the matter is you’d almost certainly want to test several different combinations of donation and daily prize amount to find the optimum. It could be that Pizza Hut thinks the idea wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
  

Finally, adding in a charity component might be enough to turn a customer satisfaction survey into a lead-generation vehicle. After the survey is over and the vote is registered for one of the charities, why couldn’t you then ask people for their cell phone number or email?

Effective Reporting Back in Cause Marketing

Alden Keene & Associates got its annual renewable energy report the other day from our electric utility, Rocky Mountain Power.

In December 2008 we signed up with ‘Blue Sky,’ a wind-energy offsets program, so as to help lessen the environmental impact of Causemarketing.biz.

At left is the statement for the last 12 months. The back of the statement is below.

Last time around the statement included a bulleted list of the positive effects of the program, customized to Alden Keene. This year Rocky Mountain Power gave the list a little extra graphical punch and with it more relevance in my view.

I think there’s a lesson here for cause marketers. Even if such customization isn’t usually possible for most cause marketing campaigns, cause marketers need to report back campaign results. Such reporting builds transparency and as I posted earlier this month…

“Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And part of transparency is to report back on how it all went. Such reporting reassures supporters that whatever efforts they took helped in some way.”

What might the metrics look like in real world cause marketing?

Let’s just take a couple of recent posts to offer some potential examples of what those reports might include.

The Red Dress pin from Macy’s benefiting the American Heart Association could certainly put a little graphic on the back of the card that holds the pin. It might declare the money raised by the campaign, number of lives touched, and, ideally, the number of people who changed to more heart-healthy behavior as a result of the campaign.

For TAG Heuer’s efforts for Maria Sharapova’s Foundation the reporting might include the donation amount and the number of students completing a year of school at one of the Belarusian universities. Over time she’d want to include the number of scholarship recipients productively contributing to Belarusian society thank to the Sharapova Foundation.

Volvo’s support of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation might include the total donation, and the number of families with kids with cancer who were supported by that donation.

What metrics would you include in an after action report to your cause marketing campaign supporters? Please comment below.

How to Pay Your Nonprofit Cause Marketers

Can’t We Just End the Hypocrisy?

If you’re a charity that does or wants to do cause-related marketing or sponsorship, how do you pay your cause marketers?

For those of you on the corporate side or in agencies, this probably sounds like an easy question. You pay them a base salary plus a percentage-based commission based on how much they raise. No different than paying your top salesperson. It rewards performance and punishes mediocrity. Great cause-marketers should make more money, right?

In fact, for nonprofits it’s fraught with worries, concerns, and ethical dilemmas.

Notice I didn’t say commission-based pay is illegal. So far as I know paying nonprofit fundraisers a commission is not illegal. But you can’t be a member of the prestigious Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) if you accept commission-based compensation. And good luck finding a grantwriter who will work on a commission basis.

Here’s why commission-based compensation is frowned upon. In the United States, some donors flat out won’t give you money to pay for overhead like salaries. A number of grant-making foundations won’t allow their money to be used for commission type pay. That's because, the argument goes, personal inurement in a nonprofit setting should always be secondary to furthering the nonprofit's mission. Donor trust can be damaged if fundraiser were commission-based or self-dealing could result.

There's no denying that commission-based pay feels unseemly in a nonprofit setting. It generates images of sales sharks in boiler rooms, ala the 2010 movie Wall Street Money Never Sleeps, with Michael Douglas and Shia LeBeouf.

What can you do to reward especially-effective employees? Well you can give them bonuses and perks. So far as I know the AFP has no problem with paying higher bonuses to the fundraiser who raises more than her peers.

Let me give you an example. I worked at a marketing-driven nonprofit that had a bonus structure for employees who worked in sales-type positions. Meet agreed-upon fundraising goals and you received a bonus.

A colleague did a sponsorship deal worth $1 million a year over three years that was well above and beyond his established fundraising goals. The nonprofit we worked for wouldn’t pay a commission. Instead my colleague and the nonprofit negotiated a bonus that was paid out over the life of the sponsorship. Strictly speaking, there were no percentages involved and so it wasn’t a commission. But for those three years he was one of the highest-paid staffers there.

Moreover, both parties knew that if and when he did more such large-scale deals, he would get another “above and beyond” bonus. It wasn’t a commission, it was a bonus. But with or without the percentage it was a distinction without a difference.

That’s my argument with the anti-commission folks. Top performers end up with compensation schemes that do what commissions do.

There are ways to do this without turning into the nonprofit world into Glengarry Glen Ross. And let's not forget that fraud is illegal, inside or outside of nonprofits. Ethical rules by nonprofit fundraising associations against commission-based schemes are hardly the last bulwark against fraud.

So why continue the hypocrisy?

Breast Cancer Awareness Cause Marketing? It’s Still Needed.

I saw this ad in one of the local daily newspapers and groaned audibly. Breast cancer awareness! Really? By now isn’t every person in the developed world who can fog a mirror aware of breast cancer?

Apparently not. And the irony may be that it is the very fittest who are most immune to the message.

No woman sees breast cancer coming. But it’s probably even more true when you’re young, strong, and healthy.

Listen to the breast cancer story of Annabeth Eberle. The elite athlete was a seven-year member of the US National Gymnastics team, a featured performer in the 2006 Touchstone gymnastics movie Stick It and an eight-time All American at the University of Utah. She was diagnosed at age 27.

Eberle was the veritable poster girl for fitness when she noticed one of her breasts was getting smaller. A visit to her doctor brought the bad news.

“When you are young you think no way will this happen to me,” she told the Deseret News. “It really does happen. It helped me to tell her my story and to get it out. I really think that talking about it helps.”

The breast cancer awareness message still needs to be heard, especially by the rising generation.

“I’m not trying to be conceited, but maybe seeing me, people will realize this can happen to anyone, even athletes and you need to go and get checked and be aware of your body,” Eberle told the Salt Lake Tribune. “That is what saved my life.”

After a mastectomy Eberle is currently cancer-free. The University honored Eberle in her fight with a ‘Pink-Out’ during the meet against Arizona State University on Feb. 4, 2011. Everyone who wore pink got free general admission seating. Both teams wore pink and 4,000 Power of Pink t-shirts were handed out to the crowd. The crowd of 12,836 was treated to a number of tribute videos about Eberle.

I like the promotion, but the University of Utah, which has a medical school, could have closed the loop a little better. Mammograms aren’t typically recommended for women as young as Eberle, but the University could have handed out brochures, offered screenings, delivered post-meet lectures and the like.

Cause Marketing Won’t Save a Bad Business

Borders appears headed for bankruptcy. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection back in September 2010. Circuit City is gone. Ultimate Electronics is about to fade into the dust heap of failed electronics retailers.

And I’m having a hard time finding any current signs of life of the hot jeans brand PRVCY Premium, whose distinctive back-pocket stitching adorned the patooshkas of starlets like Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Paris Hilton, Christina Applegate, Jennifer Lopez, Miley Cyrus, and Jessica Alba. PRVCY was founded by Carolyn Jones in 2002.

Blockbuster did some great cause marketing back in the day with Children’s Miracle Network. Borders still touts its community giving programs, with a special emphasis on literacy causes. I posted in this space on one of Circuit City's cause marketing efforts. I'll bet Ultimate Electronics had active community outreach programs as well.

Here’s what PRVCY Premium’s website says about its purpose.

“The company was founded with a noble goal in mind: to share the profits with various breast cancer research foundations across the country and help in early detection and cure for the disease. Today the company continues this legacy and is expanding its support to search for cure of various types of cancers in cooperation with established charitable and other organizations.”

The three threads of the back-pocket stitching are meant to stand for ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love.’

Like the company says, noble. But it appears that the company has gone dark. The Facebook page and Twitter postings are old. There’s no current press clippings. The blog posts have stopped.

I hope to learn that PRVCY Premium is actually thriving. In the event it is not it underscores a sad truth: cause marketing won't save a bad business.

In the absence of good information I won’t speculate about PRVCY Premium, but Blockbuster is still producing buggy whips long after the horse has been replaced by the automobile. Circuit City and Ultimate Electronics were done in by a combination of Best Buy, the sour economy, and bad business models.

Borders doesn’t have enough stores to compete with Barnes & Noble in convenience or the negotiating muscle to compete with Amazon on price. And almost all failed businesses have some version of the same problem: they run out of cash.

None of those business challenges is mitigated by good or even great cause marketing. While cause marketing can hold a strategic place in a business; think Newman’s Own, for instance. You still have to practice smart business to be successful.

It bears repeating. Cause marketing won’t save a bad business.

Peggy Lee Cause Marketing

The water business used to be a pretty sweet deal. You package water, which might have come from a municipal source, for a fraction of a penny per gallon and you sell it in individual plastic bottles for dollars per quart. Best of all, people need to drink gallons of water a week just to survive. All you needed was a cool bottle and a fancy brand and the distribution to match and you were in business.

And then the world began to wake up to the silliness and waste of bottled water. There’s no need to recount the ridiculousness of it all or even cite sources. We all know about that ginormous plastic island floating in the Pacific Ocean. We all know about the crazy amounts of landfill space going just to water bottles that won’t ever degrade. We all sense the folly of water being shipped from Fuji (or even New York) to your store in Texas or California or Minnesota.

It would be easy to defend if water was bad in all those places. Only it’s not. In most of North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan water from the tap is reliably wholesome, if not always tasty.

What used to be a great business model has turned into something more difficult. Now the water business requires genuine innovation. Increasingly the water bottlers are turning to cause marketing to help them differentiate and remain commercially viable.

One of the big dogs among water bottlers is Nestle Waters North America, a division of the Swiss food giant, which sells Poland Spring, Perrier, Pellegrino, Callistoga and Arrowhead, among a few others.

On the Arrowhead website the tab about corporate responsibility, called ‘Doing Our Part’ runs to 1600 words!

For Arrowhead part of that is figuring out ways to make plastic bottles ever thinner and encouraging recycling. A big piece of Doing Our Part is a cause campaign with the National Parks Conservation Association, the august nonprofit that has been helping preserve and protect America’s National Parks for more than 90 years.

Last May Arrowhead and its Nestle Waters sister organizations announced it would make a $600,000 donation to the NPCA with a special emphasis on “trail maintenance and building, removal of non-native, invasive plants and planting of native species, wetland restoration, and general park maintenance” in select parks. Arrowhead’s also did an ancillary Facebook promotion worth $40,000 to select National Parks in the west. (Go to Arrowhead's Facebook site today and you'll see a different cause promotion benefiting the American Heart Association.)

Last fall members from the company participated in a trail remediation effort in Yosemite National Park.

I live within a day’s drive of at least a dozen national parks, including the bid daddies like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. My family and I spend time in the parks basically every summer. Thank goodness for them and the efforts of the NPCA and the National Park system in general.

So while I value this campaign and its results, it kinda leaves me with what I call “the Peggy Lee Question.” The Peggy Lee Question existentially asks, “Is That All There Is?”

Honestly, Arrowhead and Nestle Waters North America need to do more than just make a fat donation to conservation organizations like the NPCA. Nestle needs a recycling effort with a sweet carrot in it for consumers. Arrowhead's cause marketing needs to give people real incentives to recycle.

Otherwise, their business is going to evaporate like water on a sidewalk in Phoenix in August.

What’s Wrong With This Cause Marketing Paper Icon? Let Me Count the Ways

A friend recently found the paper icon at the left at a bowling alley in metropolitan Salt Lake City, Utah, where I live and asked my opinion.

Where to start?

• There was, my friend said, no indication in the bowling alley of who the benefiting charity is, aside from the pink ribbon, which denotes the fight against breast cancer.
• Susan G. Komen for the Cure would almost certainly consider the phrase “Bowl for The Cure” a copyright and/or a trademark violation. If this were a Komen campaign it would carry their trademarked version of the pink ribbon. The icon would also be a darn-sight more sophisticated.
  
• There’s no identifying marks on the paper icon except the pink ribbon.
• There’s no explanation on the back of the paper icon; just acres of unused white space.
• Speaking of size it’s nearly 10-inches high and 4-inches wide at its widest point. It could easily be two-thirds its present size and be just as effective.
• The paper stock is pretty heavy, I’d say at least 80-pound. It doesn’t need to be any heavier than about 60-pound.
• Shaping it like a bowling pin means a custom die-cut, which is another unnecessary expense. It could just as easily be a rectangle.
• There’s two colors… the pink and the black… which is fine by me. But they probably could have gotten away with just pink, which would have represented another slight cost savings.
• The two typefaces, the script and sans serif at the top look cheap to me.
• Overall, the icon is rather bland looking.
• When paper icons are shaped after the sponsor rather than the cause, as in this one shaped like a bowling pin, it usually strikes me as being too self-referential to the sponsor and self-defeating. In this way the halo is reflecting light from the sponsor to the cause, rather than the cause to the sponsor.
  
• It appeared this month, February 2011, rather than during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, when it could ride the coattails of thousands of other pink ribbon promotions. I assume the intent was to run the campaign near Valentine's Day. But the connection between breast cancer and Valentine's Day is tenuous at best.
  

The analytical among you know the biggest problem is the first one. As powerful and versatile as the pink ribbon is, it nonetheless requires identification with a specific breast cancer cause to be fully effective.

Effective Cause Marketing Sans the Transparency

I have ranted often about the hazards of cause marketing without transparency.

But the fact is, there are plenty of campaigns that manage to be successful without much transparency. Plenty still cling to the obsolete language, “a portion of the proceeds,’ and do just fine. Get Away Today, a family vacation travel agency uses just that language when describing its donations to Children’s Miracle Network

How does that work? Am I wrong about the necessity of transparency? Maybe it’s more of a nicety than a requirement, like Skull Candy earbuds with your new iPhone or stopping by in Maui after staying in Kaua’i.

Case in point is the back page of a small brochure that came stuffed in my credit union statement earlier this month from Get Away Today (GAT). GAT is a privately-owned travel agency with billings of about $50 million a year which built its business booking Disneyland vacation packages for families, although it now books to all kinds of non-Disney destinations as well. Only Disney’s own travel agency sends more people to Anaheim than does GAT.

It’s a nice little niche. Chuck and Julie Smith, the husband and wife who founded the agency, told one reporter, “We’ve been able to make our vacation our vocation.”

So how is it that GAT can raise more than $2.5 million for Credit Unions for Kids using weak language like “a portion of the purchase price?” Credit Unions for Kids is a fundraising effort from credit unions in support of Children's Miracle Network.

Even the firm’s Facebook page, which is currently running a donation promotion for Children’s Miracle Network is more specific. When you like GAT's Facebook page, they’ll donate $1 up to $10,000.

GAT markets extensively in partnership with credit unions in the Western United States. And in general, credit unions in the United States enjoy a sterling reputation.

In effect GAT’s cause campaign for Credit Unions for Kids trades on the reputation of credit unions. Like a favorite restaurant or hairdresser, people trust their credit unions. “If the credit union has blessed it then it must be OK,” the logic surely goes.

So how do you build a cause campaign that can raise more than $2.5 million without transparency? You build a great campaign and borrow from the reputation of a highly-respected organization.

But imagine how much more powerful the promotion would be if GAT just said how they determine the donation for Credit Unions for Kids?

I submit it would be much more than $2.5 million.

Maximizing Your Messaging in Cause Marketing Campaigns

In a post about a paper icon campaign dated 12/23/2010 I suggested that the sponsor use the back of the icon to help explain the campaign, both for the benefit of the consumer and for the cashiers who sell them.

But what might you put on the back of a paper icon or similar effort?

The Go Red for Women campaign from the American Heart Association featuring the Red Dress pin, comes with a little card that the pin is mounted to.

The Red Dress pin is a kind of icon campaign. I bought this one at Macy’s.

The back of the card, which is 3.5 inches by 2 inches (about the size of a standard business card in the United States), has these few lines of text.

"Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in America. Wearing the red dress, which is the symbol of women and heart disease, is a way to speak up against this largely preventable disease. Our Hearts. Our Choice. Join us and Speak Up to Save Lives."

That’s 47 words in five sentences. Which is about right.

I’m not sure I follow the ‘Our Hearts. Our Choice.’ tagline, but I’ll bet it either tested well with women or came up during a focus group.

At the risk of parsing this out farther than needed I find it curious that of all the choices they could have made that the call to action is to ‘speak up against…this disease.’

Nonetheless, the American Heart Association gets way more right than wrong while also acknowledging their sponsors; Macy’s and Merck. They make smart use of limited space.

Brava American Heart Association and the Go Red for Women campaign.

Trends in Cause Marketing: Second Half of Interview with Laura Marriott

If 2-D barcodes represent a kind of bridge between the digital and world of print, what does that bridge actually look like? In this is the second half of my interview with NeoMedia Technologies acting CEO Laura Marriott, gets down to the nitty-gritty of how causes are using 2-D barcodes, and what they ought to consider doing in the future. (Read the first half of the interview here).

Describe how causes or their sponsors are currently using 2-D barcodes in marketing, promotions, PR, or fundraising?

Two examples for how causes are using mobile barcodes is outlined below:

Ed Randall’s Bat for the Cure, a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about prostate cancer and supported by a partnership of mobile companies, launched the One Too Many: One Million Voices Against Prostate Cancer mobile campaign in June 2010, using both an SMS shortcode and 2D barcode to enable men and their families everywhere to quickly and easily sign up to a petition in favor of policy changes being sent to Washington D.C.

The animal campaigner Wild Art Believes is also using 2D barcodes to good effect in its marketing campaigns and online, using barcodes to point consumers towards important information and raise awareness of the ways in which atrocities are being committed against wild animals around the world.

Given your position at the cusp of 2-D barcodes, what are some ways that causes or their sponsors could use 2-D barcodes, but that you haven't seen yet?

Perhaps the easiest means for causes to use 2D barcodes is to simply enhance their existing call to action, whether for fundraising or interaction with the cause, to enable dialogue with the cause. For example, in addition to URL and call center address, include a 2D barcode, to more easily direct the consumer to interact with the cause. After the first couple of campaigns, consumers will come to understand what the code is and how to activate, and then the other traditional call to actions can be reduced or even, removed. Innovation in barcodes is happening but this is more on the creative integration in how they are used in traditional and digital media.

What are some trends in how causes and their sponsors use 2-D barcodes in their marketing?

The key trends for the use of 2D barcodes by causes at the moment are awareness, support and donation – providing consumers with a quick and easy way to access more information regarding a charity’s aims and work and they go on to pledge their support, whether that be financial or moral.

Causes always have to be thinking of costs and expense. What's involved in generating and publishing (if that's the right word) the 2-D barcodes?

2D barcode providers generally price on a CPC or a per code basis but pricing varies greatly depending on the use case, duration, etc and vendors will work with their customers to develop a business model which works for all parties.

Where does a cause or their sponsor find someone with the sophistication to utilize 2-D barcodes?

Although putting a mobile barcode campaign together is relatively straightforward, selecting the right vendor to help guide you, share their expertise and supply the appropriate technology is an important step to successful implementation. Before selecting your vendor, make a list of your needs so that you can better understand what elements you want to evaluate in your partner. Requirements may include type of code, desired interaction, reader, geography and reporting requirements. The partner may provide mobile barcode reader applications, barcode creation, resolution, management and data reporting, while ensuring appropriate geographic coverage and high-quality user experiences. Take the time to select the partner that is right for you. Industry associations such as the GS1 and CTIA can offer good advice on finding the right vendor for your company.

Cause Marketing Trends: An Interview With Laura Marriott

In January I posted on my idea of putting QR codes on paper icons as a way to bridge the digital and print worlds. So far as I know no one has yet done so. But do call me if you want to try. I’ll help you put the campaign together for a bargain rate!

But companies and causes are using 2-D barcodes in their marketing. (A QR code is a kind of 2-D barcode). And one of the leaders in the software that makes this bridging possible using mobile phones is NeoMedia Technologies, led by acting CEO Laura Marriott. Ms. Marriott, at left, kindly consented to an interview on what’s trending now with mobile barcode technologies, how causes and sponsors are using it, and what’s next.

Today in the first half of our interview, she gives a quick overview 2-D barcodes and explains how causes are using the technology right now.


For rookies like me, what's the difference between 1-D and 2-D barcodes?

1D, linear barcodes such as the Universal Product Code (UPC) and European Article Numbering (EAN) codes, have been around for years and are widely used in retail. 1D codes are comprised of a sequence of vertical bars and spaces and when read by a scanner, they generate a product identification number that can be recognized by a point of sale (POS) system so the checkout assistant does not need to key in the number by hand. However, the 1D barcode can only contain 10-20 characters and are also easily damaged, which often makes them unreadable.

The 2D barcode on the other hand was invented in the 1990s to combat these problems, meaning that the size and capacity vastly increased and opened the way for applications that had never been considered previously. As 2D mobile barcodes stores information both vertically and horizontally, it can store thousands of characters of data. Part of this extra capacity can be used to store data-correction information that can be used to reconstruct any data should the barcode pattern be partially damaged. This is similar to the technology that is used to restore damaged data on computer disks and digital broadcasts.

How many phones have the capability of reading 2-D barcodes?

In order to be able to read 2D mobile barcodes, phones must have a scanning application installed on the device. This can be done in two ways: 1) the handset manufacturer has an application preinstalled on the device or, 2) the consumer downloads a scanning application from an app store or from the scanning provider’s website. For example, many Sony Ericsson and Samsung devices already come pre-installed with NeoReader™ NeoMedia’s barcode reading software, which is also on all app stores and available from get.neoreader.com. We expect that consumers will download multiple readers, as well as some specialized readers, in order to scan 1D and 2D codes.

NeoMedia talks about using 2-D barcodes to bridge the gap between traditional and digital media. What are some innovative ways marketers are using it?

We’re seeing a range of marketers using 2D barcodes to bridge the gap between traditional and digital media. One example is in the fast food industry for a campaign that we launched for Papa John’s for its mobile ordering website, enabling consumers to order pizza directly from their mobile phones. Wanting to encourage consumers to sign-up for this new service a 2D barcode was integrated into a direct mail piece. When the barcode was scanned with a mobile phone, consumers were directed to Papa John’s mobile ordering website where they received a promotional code for free pizza. Papa John’s generated more than $1 million in sales from mobile Web orders in less than six months after offering that option to consumers. Moreover, Papa John’s was also able to gain valuable information regarding mobile registration and consumer preferences to be used in refining mobile programs moving forward. The full case study can be seen here.

Kodak has also been implementing mobile barcodes to great success in its business to business communications, creating interactive experiences for tradeshow attendees, for example at the Consumer Electronics Show, by incorporating barcodes into its booth that deliver a variety of experiences and supplied augmented product information, linking to web content or videos with detailed examples, specs, and more.

Why would causes or their sponsors want to explore the option of 2-D barcodes?

Mobile is becoming an increasingly common channel for consumers to support and donate to causes that they value, and 2D barcodes are a great way to encourage donations, creating a quick and simple way for them to link to the charity on the back of marketing or advertising campaigns to gain more information about where their money would be going and to link through to m-payment facilities. Barcodes are much easier to engage with then other means of donation – whether call center or internet site.

What is you sense about the number of causes currently using 2-D barcodes in some fashion?

We have done a number of trials with 2D to support cause marketing but the integration of 2D on a mass scale is still in its infancy.

In tomorrow's post, specifics on causes using 2-D mobile barcodes right now, and what Laura Marriott thinks causes might want to try.

Faux Cause Marketing Ad From Groupon Bombs on Super Bowl

Holy crap, what was Groupon thinking?!

The upstart online marketer airs an ad that starts out looking like an homage to the people and culture of Tibet and it turns out to be actor Timothy Hutton looking smarmy and paying half price at a Chicago Tibetan restaurant thanks to Groupon.

(Groupon produced a second ad with a save the whales theme and featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. It was no better.)

Groupon’s Tibet ad somehow managed to be tasteless, inane, and insulting at the same time. The airtime alone costs $3 million in the high-stakes world of Super Bowl advertising. But that’s the smallest cost to Groupon. Instead the private company just erased millions of dollars in brand equity in one 30-second ad.

This was faux cause marketing at its most reckless.

When Groupon turned down Google’s reported $5 billion buyout offer, many scratched their heads. When the company, which is making money hand over fist, decided to run a Super Bowl ad some analysts chalked it up to tech-company sock-puppet hubris. This ad makes you question management’s judgment.

I’ve had good experiences with Groupon. But Groupon’s got plenty of competition now and I’m inclined to take my business elsewhere.

A Challenge to Cause Marketers on the Eve of the Super Bowl

The September 27, 2007 Forbes magazine 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. 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 marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $336 million per day like the Super Bowl?

Think of all the advantages your cause enjoys.

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

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 like the NBA Finals?

In a word, it’s a TV contract.

While you’re busy pitching story ideas to get free publicity for your cause campaign, all those events on the top nine 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 in a big industrial range while you’re cooking 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 almost custom-made for television.

But not many people 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…[best price I saw for one ticket at Super Bowl 45 was $2200. And it’s in the nosebleed section of Cowboys Stadium] 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.

The TV contract however is a taller order. You’re going to have to come up with a crazy-good concept and you’ll have to sell it like crazy. Even after years of hard work full success will still take years.

Stand Up to Cancer has done it by restyling the decades-old telethon model. You’ll probably have to do something different.

But take a lesson from the Super Bowl. It took the NFL 35 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 others, even if none of them were nonprofits.

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

Reporting Back and Giving Thanks is Vital in Cause Marketing

Before Christmas I posted on the efforts of a local grocery chain benefiting local food banks and utilizing their proprietary paper icon.

Yesterday, February 1, 2011, the chain, called Fresh Markets, reported their results in their weekly circular. In a small rectangle about mid-way down on the right side of the circular, Fresh Markets says it was able to donate $98,000 to local food banks. Whether this included any cash, matching, or in-kind donations from Fresh Markets isn’t clear from this page.

The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has thousands of examples of cause marketing ‘activations,’ but the folder labeled ‘Thank You Ads’ is notably thin. I just don’t see many examples of sponsors or causes thanking supporters for their help.

This is a major mistake for both causes and sponsors.

Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And part of transparency is to report back how it all went. Such reporting reassures supporters that whatever effort they took helped in some way.

(Fresh Markets could have taken the extra step of figuring out how many meals or how many families were helped with that $98,000. But in just announcing the dollar results they went further than 99% of their peers.)

More than that reciprocity demands that people be thanked for their effort, even if it has to come as a collective thanks and even if the gift was just $1. Plus, because cause marketing can be so in-your-face, you risk donor-fatigue even though the donation amounts are small. Continually asking without reporting back makes it seem like the baby bird whose mouth is always wide open and squawking for more. Causes must pause to thank their supporters, even when the support comes in $1 at a time.

Sponsors and causes must bake these “here’s what happened and thank you for your help” communications into the budget, otherwise it will never happen. In the case of the Fresh Markets circular, the marginal cost of added that little notice is very low.

But the thank you ad at the left cost Volvic money. It ran on the back cover of Scientific American magazine. But I'd argue that it was money will spent.

Finally, it’s in the best interests of causes and sponsors to take the opportunity to keep the conversation alive with their customers and supporters. It's a legitimate potential touch point. And thanking them for their help and reporting back the campaign’s results is a no-nonsense way to do so.

Cause Marketing When You’re the Avis of Your Niche

The rental car agency Avis, for years the perennial second banana to Hertz, used to promote itself with the tagline, “when you’re number two, you try harder.” Avis long since changed the slogan to “At Avis, We Try Harder.” The old tagline was advertising as a syllogism. It made an argument rather than just a declaration.

The nonprofit featured in the ad to the left, After School All Stars is in Avis’s position and maybe even further back than that. The big dogs of after school programs are Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a federation of more than 4,000 clubs serving about 4 million boys and girls, and 4-H, with 90,000 clubs and 6.5 million members.

After School All Stars is an after-school and summer program in 450 schools in 13 cities across the United States, with an especially strong showing in Chicago. It was founded by Arnold Schwarznegger in 1992 as the Inner-City Games Foundation and subsequently broadened its focus to include arts and academics in addition to health and fitness. It serves 78,000 kids and has a budget of $30 million.

Schwarznegger and his wife Maria Shriver remain honorary co-chairs of the board. The board chairman is Paul Wachter, founder and CEO of Main Street Advisors. Other board members include Henry Cisneros, who was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration, and Randy Freer, president of the Fox Sports Network. They even have an advisory boardmember from the Avis Budget Group!

Celebrity support comes from all those NFL players in the ad above, plus NBA players Kobe Bryant and Chris Bosh, and rapper/actor Common. Actor Dwayne Johnson is listed on their website. Michael Eisner is in their annual report.

They’ve done sponsorship deals with Hummer, PowerBar, Vitaminwater, Audemars Piguet North America, Walmart and others.

With 71% of its budget coming from governmental sources… which are always subject to changing political realties… After School All Stars must want to broaden its fundraising base. But how do they position the nonprofit against Boys and Girls Clubs and 4-H, both of which serve 50 times more kids and offer more programming choices?

One approach they could take is to be more targeted. Boys and Girls Clubs have a facility to pay for. They have to keep the lights on and pay for the trash to be collected. After School All Stars are mainly based in schools, so because their overhead is lower they can spend more money per child.

Both 4-H and Boys and Girls Clubs are highly decentralized and diffuse; it’s probably the only way they can serve so many kids. But After School All Stars is less so, meaning it can almost certainly act and react faster to changing events. If Boys and Girls Clubs spot a developing trend, their program people can put something together, test it and get it to the field in a year or two. After School All Stars can probably react after a few phone calls or emails. Their smaller size and more centralized structure means they can be more nimble.

If a sponsor wanted to do something specific with Boys and Girls Clubs, the national organization can only really negotiate on its own behalf. That is, it can build new programs and ask the clubs to participate. But because Boys and Girls Clubs are a confederation, individual clubs can always decline opportunities that aren’t in their contract with national. So pouring rights for Coke, one the sponsors at the national level, is probably not possible at all 4,000 clubs. In terms of sponsorship, After School All Stars could certainly build sponsorships that touched all the 13 cities at once.

It’s not all whipped cream and frosting for After School All Stars. No stand-alone facilities means some kinds of sponsorships aren’t possible. And 13 cities is really too few even for the football player promotion above to be as effective as it could be.

Faux Cause Marketing With a Sense of Humor

In the past year I’ve profiled what I call ‘faux cause marketing.’ It’s marketing that looks or sounds like cause marketing, but in fact no cause benefits from it.

At left is a small ad that ran in the back of Golf Digest magazine in October 2009, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. There’s the familiar pink ribbon, emblematic of breast cancer causes. But look closely and you’ll see that the company makes no claims about any charity benefiting from the sale of pink ribbon golf club covers.

Although I found the same clubheads on the company’s website, I couldn’t find any evidence of support for breast cancer causes. If indeed the company sells the pink ribbon clubhead covers without any remuneration to breast cancer charities then the ad is unethical in my book and I pronounce a pox on their business.

A kind of faux cause marketing with a sense of humor can be seen from AirTran, the discount airline. Both the two-color ads on the left, which ran in the same issue of Sports Illustrated magazine in January 2010, feature two players from the NFL, although neither their teams, nor the NFL, nor even the game of football is explicitly mentioned.

Instead the ads brilliantly lampoon the kind of marketing and fundraising that a lot of nonprofits, especially children’s charities, specialize in; the deadly-earnest appeal.

AirTran turns nonprofit advertising conventions on their head. The players... Atlanta Falcons QB Matt Ryan and Super Bowl 45 bound Green Bay Packer wide receiver Donald Driver... both sport faces that border on the melancholy. The headlines and body copy mimic the solemn-sounding (oftentimes soporific) writing common to fundraising appeals.

Says the headline of one: “Attending Even Just One Away Game Per Season Can Make a Difference in an Athlete’s Life.” The other reads: “Last Year, Over 2,500 Athletes Played an Away Game. And You Weren’t There.”

That’s funny!

More than that, I think it’s potentially instructive to people writing appeals for nonprofits. If your copy is as grave and sincere as this ad pretends to be, then part of this satire is directed at you. And rightly so.