Four Publications, Four Sponsors, Four Seal Campaigns

Remember the scene in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off when he’s rhapsodizing about the 1961 Ferrari GT California Spyder he’s been bombing around Chicago in? He says to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, “It is so choice. If you have the means I highly recommend picking one up.” Means indeed. A vintage 250 is said to set one back a cool $10 million.

In a like way, if your charity brand has the means, I highly recommend that you pick up a kind of cause marketing that I’ve come to call a ‘seal campaign.’ Seal campaigns are endorsements or licensing arrangements that carry the logo or seal of a charity, usually following an audit of some kind and the payment of a fee. Think seals of approval.

The one I see the most often these days is for the Forest Stewardship Council, which was founded in Bonn, Germany in 1993. The FSC has a rather complicated organizational structure, but suffice it to say that the FSC seal can be seen in dozens of countries across the globe on every kind of packaging, emblazoned on wood itself and printed on coffee cup sleeves, to name just a few places.

If the FSC were a car, it would be a rare $10 million Ferrari.

But even non-vintage Fords and Chevys can and do have successful seal campaigns.

The Pasadena Tournament of Roses for instance, has offered its seal of approval to Bayer rose and garden chemicals.

The Skin Cancer Foundation offers a seal of approval to a skin-care products, especially sunblocks.

With 1400 or so members and now in its tenth year, One Percent for the Planet isn’t as big as founder Yvon Chouinard says he wishes it were, or thought it would be. But it’s a terrific business model, eminently sustainable and attractive to outfits like Fiji Water.

I’ve opined here in the past that the Fair Trade Certified probably has a better chance at long-term success than rivals with their super-detailed certification processes. By contrast the Fair Trade Alliance requires only that buyers pay producers more for farmed goods and handicrafts than the prevailing market prices.

Could your nonprofit pull off a seal effort? Maybe.

It would probably need to meet a certain level of name recognition. And it wouldn't hurt if your organization’s name signifies what it does. Your organization would need to be able to develop some kind of standard that sponsors must meet. And it would need to have the will to enforce that standard honestly. If you can get away without actually having to physically test stuff, all the better.

Cause Marketing Advertising From Ben & Jerry's

Greyston Bakery, a social enterprise, has been supplying Ben & Jerry’s with brownies since 1990, and now the company has decided to feature the bakery and its mission in an integrated campaign of television and print ads.

The TV ads feature a kind of diorama of the Greyston Bakery factory… designed by Maya Lin… on the Hudson River in Yonkers, New York. We see two hands prepare a cup of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie to house the Greyston Factory, along other Yonkers landmarks, before the hand rings the factory’s bell.

Tiny Greyston Bakers… animated in stop-action…emerge and give flight to their brownies with balloons, all while a plinky-sounding ukulele or tenor guitar plays a simple melody. One of the workers is given a bouquet of balloons and he, too, takes flight, sailing across the closing screen, which features a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie and the line, “Packed With Brownies That Do Good.”

A recent FSI (free-standing insert) has an abbreviated version of the headline that reads, “Brownies That Do Good.”

Greyston Bakery supports the work of the Greyston Foundation, whose mission is to hire and support low income New Yorkers. Greyston famously hires the hard-to-employ, “offering on-site training and fair wages and benefits to more than 65 local residents, regardless of their work history,” the website says.

Greyston bakes 20,000 pounds of brownies a day just for Ben & Jerry’s, which has been owned by the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever since 2000. Greyston’s wholesale business also sells baked goods across the New York metroplex and has an online retail operation as well. The Greyston Foundation has even undertaken real estate development among other efforts to “help individuals forge a path to self-sufficiency.”

The challenge of this kind of advertising is to deliver something as good as the cause (and the ice cream) without turning maudlin. The TV ad isn’t overly-sentimental, but it’s not inspired either.

Instead it occupies that vast middle ground that most advertising does. Fine, but no more than fine. A pity the agency couldn’t find more inspiration from one of the most interesting cause marketing relationships anywhere.

Ketchum's Living in Its Own Private Idaho When it Comes to Cause Marketing

Ketchum, the big PR firm, is currently trumpeting the results of a new study that finds, as the headline for the press release puts it, that when it comes to cause marketing most consumers are “All Talk, Little Action.”

Called the ‘BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study,’ it purports that, “while Americans claim they are more likely to purchase a product if the brand supports a cause, and more than 40 percent have ‘liked’ a brand or posted on Facebook for supporting a cause, barely one in five actually put their money where their good intentions are by switching brands, paying more or purchasing more.”

Let’s unpack that sentence a little. The suggestion is that if you have liked a cause on Facebook... the online equivalent of drinking a Diet Coke so as to mitigate the effect of the slice of cheesecake you had with dinner...you are still nonetheless unlikely to have actually made some kind of a real commitment to a cause. Go figure.

Quick raise of hands here from all the nonprofits. All of you who have made $500 or more from Facebook Causes, please email me at aldenkeene at gmail dot com. While we’re at it, all you for-profits, I want to hear from you if you’ve made $5,000 or more through Facebook.

In my conversations with nonprofits I’ve never found any that were actually making money through Facebook Causes. The numbers bear this out.

Facebook Causes claims just less than 9 million active monthly users and an installed base of 100 million users, 350,000 causes supported, and $30 million raised since its foundation in 2007, according to Wikipedia.

Divide $30 million by 4 years and you get $7.5 million a year. Not bad. However, divide $30 million by an installed base of 100 million and you get $0.30 per user. Divide it by 350,000 causes and you get $85.71 per cause, on average.

Like I said, email me if your cause has taken in more than $500 through Facebook Causes

Now I’m not suggesting that causes should eschew Facebook or Facebook Causes. On the contrary. But right now Facebook isn’t really how people donate to causes any more than liking a cause is how people truly engage with a cause.

Indeed, the only people that have ever made money from Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, his venture capital equity partners, and Goldman Sachs.

So for Ketchum to somehow draw a line of connection between liking a cause on Facebook and one’s propensity to actively participate in cause marketing strains credulity.

Ketchum’s release goes on to say, “this research is significant because it contrasts what consumers actually do versus what they say they would do in reaction to a hypothetical cause marketing situation, said Kelley Skoloda, partner and director of Ketchum’s Global Brand Marketing Practice. In many instances, it appears cause programs have a far greater effect on brand affinity, reputation and share of voice than on sales. But the research also revealed the keys to turn talk into action.”

That’s a rather ironic statement given the fact that the way Ketchum gauged that people were saying one thing and doing another when it comes to cause marketing was by asking them. Ketchum would have us believe that people lie when they answer questions about cause marketing, except when they answer Ketchum's questions about cause marketing.

Given that incongruous fact I wonder why Ketchum’s numbers are more to be believed than the many studies that have come to largely the opposite conclusions.

(BTW, the photo at the left is of beautiful Ketchum, Idaho).

Men and Cause Marketing

Earlier this Summer results starting coming out from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study and among the headlines was women are generally more responsive to cause marketing than men, providing further confirmation of what I’ve long suspected.

But men aren’t absent from the cause marketing equation. I asked the Center for Social Impact Communication (CSIC) at Georgetown University, which authored the study, to parse out responses from men on key issues and they kindly obliged.

Cause marketing targeted to men is a topic of some interest to cause marketers. Cause marketing is a form of sponsorship. Its biggest rival for sponsorship dollars comes from sports, which as a whole is about seven times larger than cause marketing. Men constitute the usual target market for sports. In short, men participate in sponsorship in a big way. But cause marketers are still learning how to target men.

The topic of men and cause marketing came up at the recent Cause Marketing Forum in Chicago. Mike Swenson, president of the PR division of the agency Barkley in Kansas City blogs about the session in his fine blog Citizen Brand.

Barkley’s own research on the topic of men and cause marketing suggests, in Mike’s words, that “men do have a heart.”

So how do cause marketers get men into the cause marketing tent, how do we get them to act and how do we know when their involved?

I’ll list the question the CSIC asked first, followed by the top 5 answers from men, along with the best-finishing ‘cause marketing’ answer in bold. The answers are intriguing and in some cases suggests new entres into the psyches of men when it comes to cause marketing.

The CSIC study asked, “How men first get involved with a cause?”

• Talking to others about it 39%
• Donating money 38%
• Learning more about the issue and its impact 35%
• Signing a petition for the cause 25%
• Donating personal items (clothes, points, hair, etc) 23%
• Buying products/services from companies who support the cause 14%
  

One of the conclusions that Swenson and Barkely draw is that the best way to get to men is to ask them to do something. That’s probably sound. Men and boys bond with each other by doing stuff together. It’s likely they will best bond with a cause in similar ways. Although the CSIC study also demonstrates that men are as willing to practice checkbook philanthropy as they are to support a cause by doing.

This is confirmed in the CSIC study’s second question: “How men most often get involved with causes.”

• Donating money 41%
• Talking to others about it 34%
• Learning more about the issue and its impact 20%
• Signing a petition for the cause 19%
• Donating personal items (clothes, points, hair, etc.) 18%
• Buying products/services from companies who support the cause 10%

Finally, “How Men Are Most Likely to Display their Support of Causes:”

• Wear a cause ribbon pin 18%
• Wear clothing or other attire displaying the cause logo 16%
• Wear the color of the cause on a special day 15%
• Put a cause bumper sticker on your car 15%
• Use a reusable bag showing the cause logo 14%
• Purchase specially designed products to support the cause 14%

In this last one the cause marketing approach is the sixth most common answer. In the prior questions there were other answers in between the fifth response and the highest-finishing ‘cause marketing’ response.

Because of the low percentage of the responses and the tightness of the grouping, there’s two logical conclusions. Either men don’t often display their support of causes or the responses provided by the study didn’t capture the way men are likely to display their support. I suspect the former.

If cause marketers are serious about targeting men, they need a better understanding of what men are about when it comes to supporting causes.

Thanks to the data from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study we have a much better idea.

Bringing Word of Mouth to Cause Marketing

re•mark•a•ble
adj
1. worthy of notice: worth noticing or commenting on
2. unusual: unusual or exceptional, and attracting attention because of this

The success of your next cause marketing campaign (and perhaps all your marketing efforts) may hang on this single adjective. That’s the word from Andy Sernovitz, author of the book Word of Mouth Marketing and founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Word of mouth has been around forever and everyone knows how powerful it can be, for good and ill. But without an assist from the tenets of marketing, word of mouth by itself is incomplete, like pasta without the sauce.

Propelling good word of mouth, Sernovitz says, has never been easier. Email and the social media amount to word of mouth particle accelerators, getting more from word of mouth than it could under its own power.

For instance, Sernovitz says, Gap sends out an occasional email to their staff that is passed off as a super-secret friends-only discount. The email says that the discount is only to be shared with one friend or family member. But Gap has something like 100,000 teenage employees, and their definition of sharing with one friend is different than mine. The result is that the discount code ends up on a lot of Facebook pages.

What are some other word of mouth campaigns that demonstrate the use of the remarkable?

1. The stunning wrapping paper that online retailer Red Envelope wraps gifts in.
2. The annual Thanksgiving release of gross-out flavors from Jones Soda, like turkey and gravy. You buy a case as a novelty, pass around small sips to your Thanksgiving guests, whereupon everyone turns up their nose. And next week, when you’re in the store, you buy one of Jones’s more appetizing flavors, like strawberry lime.
3. Drury lnn, an otherwise indistinguishable $79 a night motel offers its guests one hour of free long distance for each night’s stay. You start calling people and in the conversation you tell them you’re calling because you got free long distance at the Drury Inn. Never mind that you’ve got free nights and weekends on your cell phone. In effect, Sernovitz says, you’re doing outbound telemarketing for Drury from your room!
4. Sun Microsystems’ Project Blackbox, wherein Sun’s servers come in a jet black self-contained cargo container.
5. Heinz’s Top This TV Challenge, which offered a $57,000 (get it?) first prize to people who make the best commercial for Heinz and post it on YouTube, launched with no more promotional support than on-package labeling and a single press release.
6. The first computers from Apple after Steve Jobs had returned to lead the company had… are you ready?... color. Which is little different than subtly changing the hue of the color burst on the box of Tide detergent. And yet Apple began its resurgence with just that one seemingly insignificant action.

The genius of word of mouth marketing is that it’s relatively inexpensive. And if you can’t figure out something remarkable over a long weekend you’re either a dolt or you’re over-thinking it.

As far as the marketing mainstream is concerned, the price for launching a new consumer brand in the United States starts around $100 million.

Speaking only for myself, that's a little out-of-reach.

But in his book Word of Mouth Marketing Andy Sernovitz says there's ways to build a respected brand for less.

The book tackles his five Ts of word of mouth marketing and the challenge of The Chocolate Problem.

1. Find people who will talk. Bear in mind that talkers may not be customers and that if you try and buy their participation, you’ll almost certainly undermine their credibility as talkers.
2. Give them a topic. And don’t couch it in the marketing-speak of features and benefits. Nobody recites a brochure list of features and benefits when they pass on word of mouth.
3. Give them tools to help the message spread. Facebook, blogs, email, coupons, the ‘tell a friend’ option are all key tools.
4. Join the conversation… take part. If your company has stumbled, apologize. Repeat as necessary. Invite people back. Leave thoughtful notes on message boards and blogs. Etc.
5. The last T is track. As Sernovitz archly said, word of mouth is at least as trackable as all other kinds of marketing, which sometimes means not very trackable at all. But you can certainly use BlogPulse, Google, Technorati, Feedster and the like to get a read on your word of mouth marketing efforts.

Finally, word of mouth marketing faces what Sernovitz calls “The Chocolate Problem.” By which he means, no one ever called a friend and said, “Have you tried this thing called chocolate? It’s incredible!”

That secret’s pretty well out.

Likewise, no one emails a friend about getting a great room and attentive service at a Ritz Carleton Hotel. People expect that. It’s baked in.

How do you combat The Chocolate Problem? Well, you keep coming up with new things that people find remarkable. Google search was once remarkable, but no longer. Now, it’s a useful commodity. But Google Earth is still pretty remarkable. My father-in-law, now age 81, is entranced by it.

Now is Google Earth really useful? Let's be honest, it's more gee whiz cool than truly beneficial. But it certainly is remarkable in Sernovitz's formulation. To fight The Chocolate Problem, you must keep coming up with new remarkable things.

Smart marketers and product developers tend to release remarkable new products just as the last hit is cresting.

Buy One Give One Blankets

The New York office of design firm Beattie McGuinness Bungay has designed and is now selling an infant blanket meant to help new parents in the developing world to understand things like vaccinations, average infant growth, breast-feeding, illness-warning signs and the like, and they’re taking a BOGO approach to marketing the blankets.

‘The Information Blanket’ is made of double-knit cotton…loomed in North Carolina and screen printed and lock-stitched in New York City… and features bold info-graphics screen-printed in water-based dyes. You can see the blanket at the left from this article in the June issue of Fast Company magazine.

The BOGO (Buy One, Give One) price is $40 and the donation-only price is $25. Plainly BMB wants you to buy two.

The first batch of Information Blankets are headed for Uganda, where, the website says, the infant mortality rate is 76.9 deaths per 100,000 births. The comparable rate in the United States is 6.3. In Japan it’s almost half again lower at 3.2 deaths per 100,000.

The Information Blanket reminds me nothing so much as the ‘stations of the cross’ in Medieval European cathedrals. When the cathedrals were originally built, few of the parishioners could read, so the stations of the cross told the passion narrative with images only.

In the traditional sense of illiteracy that’s unfair to Ugandans, who have a reported adult literacy rate of 75 percent. But the illiteracy that the Information Blanket addresses is the illiteracy of new parents. As any parent can tell you, no baby comes with an instruction manual. More to the point, the first child also doesn’t come with any parental experience with newborns either. Every little sniffle that you know is normal after you’ve had three children can seem like a crisis when it’s your first.

The Information Blanket isn’t a new baby manual. It’s more like one of those laminated quick reference guides they sell at bookstores that lays out the basics of calculus or how to conjugate verbs in Latin or easy Wordpress shortcuts.

The Information Blanket is a cottony-soft cheat sheet for new parents in the developing world.

I like it.

When Government is the Sponsor

In Time, Sports Illustrated and other magazines there’s been a series of ads running in hot rotation and in support of a website called ‘Takemefishing.org.’ The ads and the website are sponsored by Markel Insurance Company, which insures boats and other things and a slightly murky entity called ‘Sport Fishing Restoration.’

Takemefishing.org is so declarative it’s easy to guess what that’s about. But Sport Fishing Restoration? Therein lies a fish story about the financing of World War Two, habitat restoration and government funded cause marketing.

In WWII, Congress enacted a tax on fishing tackle to help fund the war effort. By 1950, the law was changed so that tax revenues would go to state natural resource agencies to improve sport fishing. Stuff like fisheries research, boat docks and ramps, habitat improvement and education.

In 1998 Sport Fishing Restoration founded the 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (RBFF) with members of the recreational fishing and boating industry. The Foundation’s board members come from industry and state fish and wildlife agencies. Takemefishing.org is the public website for the RBFF.

This isn’t transactional cause marketing, per se. But it is an example of a public-private sponsorship that relies on the principles of marketing to promote a cause, namely recreational fishing and boating. Industry wants people buying boats and fishing gear and such. Governments want the excise and sales taxes. And wildlife habitats get restored or reinvigorated.

Takemefishing.org joins three government sponsored efforts that are distinctly cause marketing: the very successful semipostal breast cancer stamp from the US Post Office; the annual Red Dress campaign from HeartTruth, an effort of the National Institutes of Health; and specialty coins from the US Mint benefiting the National Federation for the Blind.

It’s not common, but it could be that some government agency is the next sponsor of your cause marketing effort.

Space Available Cause Marketing on Packaging

This bottom panel of this box of house brand facial tissue box from Walmart features what amounts to space available cause marketing on package, something many other sponsors could also do.

Magazines and newspapers have long offered space-available ads to nonprofits. If they have your ad in the right form that fits a hole they have in their publication... and if your ad is compelling... they might run your ad for free. But I’ve never noticed anything like that for packaging.

That’s not for lack of proximity. This box has been rattling around my car for some time. The copyright says 2005, although I doubt this box is that old. But since Walmart changed its logo in 2008, and got away from the dash between Wal and mart, the box is no newer than that.

The effort benefits Walmart’s effort in conjunction with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Youth called The Missing Children’s Network. At the front of every Walmart store and Sam’s Club in the United States is a board with pictures of missing children.

Since 1996, when the effort was started, more than 10,400 children have been featured on the board and more than 8700 have been located. Walmart says 205 of those children were found as a direct result of its network of boards.

Other sponsors… especially retailers with house brands… could offer the same thing to their charity partners. Facial tissue boxes represent a lot of real estate. This one’s 8.75 inches x 4.75 inches by 3.75 inches tall. You couldn’t as easily do space available ads on a soup can or other food item which has a lot of labeling requirements facial tissue doesn’t.

For that matter, Walmart could certainly take the co-branding a little further. They could put the faces of the kids from The Missing Children’s Network board on the box's bottom panel. In the United States, cartons of milk have featured such images for years. And, if my experience is common, in most cases a box of facial tissues has a longer life than does a carton of milk.

The box itself was decorated in a kind of red, black and yellow tartan pattern. But it could just as easily be some version of The Missing Children’s Network logo or its colors.

Walmart could work with existing charity partners or it could hold a promotion and take nominations of other worthy charities to feature on package. Considering Walmart’s volume, I’d bet that six months of messaging on the back of boxes of facial tissue would be seen by more people than an ad that ran for six months in Time Magazine (in a space that’s about 3/4 of a full page ad in Time).

For that matter plenty of name-brand manufacturers could do the same thing that Walmart’s done here, especially for non-food items. Xerox could do it with a ream of copy paper. Reynolds Wrap could do it on its boxes of aluminum foil. Procter and Gamble could do it with Tide, etc.

Preparing for Every Contigency in Your Cause Marketing Proposal

Consider this cause marketing hypothetical.

You’ve made your best cause marketing pitch to a would-be sponsor. It’s smart, strategically appropriate, and well activated across new media and old. You’re certain your prospect’s customers will get it and respond. But then a week goes by without hearing back from the prospect. So on day eight you call, but don’t press very hard. The prospect apologizes all over herself.

Everybody back at corporate loves the proposal, she says. Trouble is, unbeknownst to the marketing staff, the CEO had promised a campaign to another cause. The marketing department doesn’t think they can or should do both this year. So sorry. Maybe next time.

While you could play off of their guilt and press for a donation from the company foundation, instead you decide to offer a counter proposal. How about if all the company does is ask their customers for a straight ahead donation?

I don’t know whether or not this is what happened with this effort from big box sports retailer Sports Authority on behalf of the Melanoma Research Foundation. But I do counsel that every charity in the cause marketing space be prepared to offer something else when the first answer from a prospective sponsor is no.

I’m not suggestion anything that smacks of desperation. Nobody likes a sad sack. However, you do need to spend real intellectual time and energy game-planning what the prospect’s possible objections are to your proposal and how you might counter each of them.

Do that right and you won’t sound desperate. You’ll sound like someone with good sense enough to plan ahead.

Pre-planning for no’s and your likely responses does other positive things. It helps you refine your pitch and strengthen your sales skills. It teaches you to think of sponsorship as a negotiation, not just a proposal or pitch meeting. More than anything else, it gets your foot in the door with the prospect. You may or may not ever be able to get the rest of your body in the door with said prospect. But be respectful and play things smart and you might just make a long-term connection that can pay off in ways you couldn’t anticipate.

Here's a for instance: A friend in Atlanta has worked in corporate giving offices for no less than three Fortune 500 companies. If you made nice with her when she was at MCI, you probably stood a better shot at getting money out of GE's community affairs office or Home Depot Foundation, when she moved to those companies.

Improve Your Cause Marketing by Flashing a Little Sock

I happened to catch a few moments of Gene Kelly and Van Johnson dancing in the 1954 MGM musical Brigadoon on television the other night.

As was typical of Kelly’s choreography, when he and Van Johnson danced together their steps mirrored each other. And Johnson, who was a respectable hoofer, acquitted himself very well. But still I couldn’t help looking first and most often at the immortal Kelly.

Little wonder, I suppose. Gene Kelly was so talented, a famous perfectionist, and a grindingly hard worker yet he still somehow managed to make every step look fluid, even facile.

So much so that when the great Latvian dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was considering defecting to the West during the bad old Soviet days, one thing that gave him pause was that all American dancers might be as skilled as Kelly or Fred Astaire. Hah!

(Baryshnikov once said of Astaire, “His perfection gives us complexes, because he’s too perfect. His perfection is an absurdity that’s hard to face.”)

All that’s a given. Even though Van Johnson was pretty good I had to force myself to watch him. As I did so, it finally came to me why it took effort to notice him there next to Kelly.

Part of the reason my eyes gravitated to Gene Kelly was that he wore his pant legs hemmed quite high. As he danced you could see flashes of red socks peeking through. I couldn’t see any of Van Johnson’s socks.

In short, Gene Kelly was practicing showmanship. Maybe even gamesmanship.

Like Gene Kelly and Van Johnson you may be doing the same dance… the same bunch of cause marketing steps… that other sponsors or respectable and worthy causes are doing. What do you do to stand out?

More on that in a moment.

John Wayne practiced showmanship, too. I saw an interview wherein he confessed that he developed his famous rolling walk early in his career… when he wasn’t the featured actor… so that when he was in a scene he wouldn’t be missed, even as a secondary character.

And it’s not just performers who employ the tricks and techniques of showmanship to make them get noticed.

I once watched a debate between William F. Buckley (who launched modern American conservatism) and John Kenneth Galbraith, the eminent liberal economist. The debate took place on the stage of a large symphony hall and featured two podiums set about 20 feet apart. Not far behind them was a massive floor-to-ceiling curtain. Galbraith was 6’9” tall (206 cm) and even in the cheap seats where I was you could see that he towered over Buckley. When Galbraith would score points, Buckley would aimlessly back up to the curtains and position himself between the folds where he would gently sway back and forth, drawing attention his way. It was a rude and brilliant act of stagecraft.

A showman’s greatest technique might be his professionalism or imperturbability. The American writer Mark Twain had intertwining careers as both a writer and a speaker. When he spoke his humor and wit seemed perfectly off-the-cuff. But that was only because his preparations were so exhaustive. Twain would script not only his text, but also his asides and quips, and then rehearse it all until he appeared to be speaking extemporaneously. The great British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who we think of as an unflappable man of the moment, did much the same when he gave speeches.

Some of the same lessons apply to cause marketing.

If you’re a charity or sponsor, look around. No matter how worthy your cause or campaign, you’ve got competition. For money and attention.

How do you make sure that your campaign stands out?

I've already offered three suggestions. Gene Kelly and William Buckley practiced great showmanship. Mark Twain and Winston Churchill prepared and polished with enormous professionalism. All brought panache to their performances.

But by showmanship I don’t mean “cutting through the clutter,” per se. We all are bombarded by thousands of messages a day, commercial and otherwise. That’s clutter. One of the appeals of cause marketing is that by itself it can help cut through the clutter.

Instead, what I want to highlight are three media choices that can help your cause marketing campaign ‘flash a little red sock’ while everyone else contents themselves to show you their plain old pant leg.

For a ‘sale’ (whatever that means to you) to take place a customer typically moves from awareness of your product/service along a continuum to interest, then to desire, commitment and finally action.

For the sake of ease let’s just say that there are six basic tactical media choices available to marketers:

1. Mass media (in its many varieties)
2. Public relations
3. Direct mail
4. Internet including social media
5. Events
6. Personal communications.

Depending on the campaign, the audience and the budget, all may have a role to play. But the most efficient media are those that can move the sales process from interest to action in one fell swoop. While there are always exceptions, mass media can’t do that. Neither can public relations or direct mail.

But certainly the Internet can. So too can events and personal communications.

As you plan your cause marketing campaigns work to make the most of these three media.
Do it right, with showmanship, professionalism and panache, and like Gene Kelly it will be your campaign people notice, no matter who else is also dancing.

Cause Marketing for Struggling Artists

When you donate $1 at beapartoftheheart.com, you help struggling musical artists, enter into a sweepstakes to go to the 2012 Grammy Awards show, and place your picture on a giant online mosaic.

“Proceeds,” the website says, “from the mosaic will go to MusiCares, an organization that helps music people who don't have safety nets for emergencies. When you donate and upload your photo(s) to the MusiCares mosaic, you'll be giving to a good cause and you can share how music has given back to you.”

The goal is to put up 1 million photos.

The ad above, from the June 17, 2011 issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine also mentions the support of six artists: Selena Gomez; Parachute; Sugarland; Owl City; Melanie Fiona; and, Colbie Caillat. The website mentions that Sony is a campaign sponsor and by my count all these artists save Parachute are affiliated with Sony Music.

In effect, MusiCares, which is a nonprofit subset of the Grammy Foundation, has created a kind of online paper icon effort.

Back in February 2011, I profiled technology that makes such online fundraising walls possible from Supporterwall.com, although it doesn’t appear that MusiCares used Supporterwall’s services.

As far as the creative goes, I didn’t get Entertainment Weekly ad until I went to beapartoftheheart.com. If I don’t like any of the artists in the ad, the call to action “Hear them, Join Them,” has almost no appeal. The creative in the ad needs to better explain MusiCares.

Likewise, even after mousing around awhile, I couldn’t find a way to look at the mosaic without signing up. This seems self-defeating. To draw an offline parallel, if I go to a retailer that sells and displays charity paper icons, I’m not charged just for looking at them.

People have a natural curiosity about such efforts. The want to look for names they recognize. They want to see signatures or the names of people listed. Requiring you to sign up first frustrates people and thwarts those who want to kick the tires first.

Finally, my thanks to Greg W. for dinner and a wonderful conversation in Indianapolis last night. Much appreciated!

Angry Faux Cause Marketing from Snickers

Snickers, the candy bar brand from Mars Inc., is a prominent and generous supporter of the anti-hunger charity Feeding America. So why are they doing something that looks suspiciously like faux cause marketing?

The ad in question is from Sports Illustrated magazine and depicts a bee, a roaring grizzly bear, insult comedian Don Rickles, and actor Joe Pesci, who specializes in playing out-of-control-angry mob characters. The ad depicts a kind of gas gauge with an arrow and the headline “How Angry Does Hunger Make You?”

That headline seems custom-made for a cause marketing campaign.

Are you hungry enough to really do something about the crisis of the hungry in United States?, is where this ad could be heading. If so, kill two birds with one stone by grabbing a Snickers. When you do, we’ll make a donation to our long-time partner Feeding America.

But this isn't an ad or an effort in support of Feeding America.

Certainly past Snickers efforts for Feeding America have featured much more benign appeals. Here’s another ad from Sports Illustrated magazine almost exactly two years ago that I found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. It’s a straightforward call to action to support Feeding America with a play on words that reads, “Bar Hunger.”

But perhaps anger is an inappropriate emotion when supporting a nonprofit charity.

Maybe. But anger is used all the time in direct mail fundraising for nonprofits. And anger is the positive coin of the realm in nonprofit political fundraising. In the United States, political action committees, the political parties themselves, and other political groups rely on righteous indignation and fits of pique aimed at political opponents to generate fat donations.

All that said, I’ve never seen anger used, per se, in a cause marketing effort.

Maybe there's an opportunity herein for Snickers and Feeding America.

Using 'Counters' to Your Advantage in Cause Marketing

The National Debt Clock on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan continuously updates, highlighting the amount of debt the American people are encumbered with. Hospital emergency rooms in my market and across the country are currently running wait time counters on billboards. AMD ran a counter on its electronic sign in Times Square in New York City that purported to show how much time is wasted by ‘slow’ Intel chips compared to ‘fast’ AMD chips.

And, on the back page at the bottom of its weekly flyers, the big box pet retailer Petsmart runs a counter that shows how many lives Petsmart Charities have saved.

Counters or clocks can be a powerful marketing concept.

Trouble is, the figures from Petsmart Charities don’t seem to change very often.

Here are two weekly Petsmart flyers in my market, separated by three weeks, that show the same number of lives saved, 4,122,832.

How to account for the sameness of the number?

It could be, of course, that Petsmart Charities’ efforts did not result in any more lives saved in the succeeding days. But I doubt that.

I have no idea how Petsmart Charities determines the number of lives saved. But unless no more lives have been saved, I’m quite sure that it’s bad marketing to keep showing the same figure three weeks apart.

Before he died he founder of the National Debt Clock, real estate developer Seymour Durst, used to check with official US Treasury figures before doing updates to the clock via modem. In short, he had a quantifiable and sustainable way of ensuring the clock was accurate.

It appears that Petsmart Charities is either missing a similar process or that the challenges of getting an accurate count into all the newspapers has proved too daunting. But, of course, Petsmart itself has no problem getting new flyers to newspapers across the company’s service area every week.

I’m not here to give Petsmart Charities grief. But their lives saved counter only has power if it's accurate and timely and updated weekly.

When is Cause Marketing Not a Partnership?

In Zen Buddhism there is the notion of a koan, often a riddle, but sometimes a statement or question or dialogue that can’t be understood through strictly rational thought. A koan is meant to help train the mind to better access intuition, especially through meditation The most famous koan, says Wikipedia, might be ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’

Here’s one for cause marketers; ‘when is cause marketing not a partnership?’

The rational mind says that, of course, cause marketing is always a partnership. The riddle makes no sense. Except in cases where the sponsor is the cause there’s always at least two parties. Boom. That’s a partnership.

But meditate on it a little longer and you can see when cause marketing might not be a partnership. When one party benefits in gross disproportion to the other. Or when one party doesn’t work to make sure that the putative partner benefits to his or her satisfaction.

There’s no partnership in cause marketing unless all parties to the agreement feel fully benefited.

How do you achieve that?

It starts during the courtship between the parties. While there will be plenty of formal written language as the parties determine the scope of the agreement, it’s vital that the process also include less formal conversations. Put directly, people from both parties need to speak with each other.

For a true partnership to emerge a key portion of that dialogue must include the good faith expectation that both sides will and should benefit to their satisfaction. Everybody has to have their say. Neither side should endeavor to take advantage of the other. And, if it feels like the other party is trying to do so, you must register your dissatisfaction.

If, after going through the process, it feels like your would-be partner isn’t negotiating in good faith, you must be prepared to walk away from the partnership. This can be especially difficult for needy nonprofits. But it’s absolutely essential.

Finally, you must also try and put yourself in the shoes of the other party. Ask, “if roles were reversed, what would I want from this deal?’ The ability to understand what the other party wants and needs can be, in the words of Rick Blaine from the movie Casablanca, “the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Cause Marketing Post #600

Every day my RSS reader sends me a fat email with all the day’s listings of the word cause marketing. I see cause marketing campaigns advertised on TV, in magazines, or Facebook and the myriad other social media. My friend and fellow blogger Joe Waters has a Dummies book, for crying out loud, coming out in July about cause marketing. Every business day I add my own content to all the rest with this blog. Today, I celebrate the 600th post on the Cause Marketing Blog.

One of those posts, from a few years back, declared that we are in the golden age of cause marketing, quoting the old Carly Simon song Anticipation, which features the lyrics, “these are the gold old days.” So far as it goes, I believe that’s still the case.

But the current state of cause marketing, I think, could be summarized in the U2 song sung by that old cause marketer Bono, ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

That’s because for almost as long as I’ve known about cause marketing, nearly 20 years now, I’ve been expecting it to begin to make headway against sports sponsorships. And for 20 years now cause marketing has been right around 10 percent of the total sponsorship market.

What I wrote back on October 17, 2006 in my very first post…called ‘Eyeballs vs. Tears… is still true.

For all its heart, cause-related marketing is still settling for the sloppy seconds left over from the NFL, NASCAR and the like. I think that's because while those big guys understand that sponsorship is about eyeballs, the sisters of the orphans and all their charity cousins think it's about tears. When it comes to cause-related marketing, they're only half right.

My friends, we’ve come a great distance in the 30 or so years of cause marketing. But we’re still not even halfway to where we should be.

Catty Faux Cause Marketing from Church and Dwight

In my ongoing effort to identify and root out faux cause marketing I came across this ad in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database from Church & Dwight, makers of Arm & Hammer baking soda products, including, in this case, Feline Pine kitty litter.

The ad depicts militant beret-wearing cats fronted by ‘Che Gato,’ paws of fury raised against clay kitty litter, and the attendant dust, perfumes, and harsh chemicals. Che Gato is even looking left of the camera's perspective, like the iconic picture of Che Guevara.

The headline rages Karl Marx-style ‘Cats of the World Rejoice, We Now Have a Better Choice!’ Placards raised by other protesting cats declare, ‘We Want Feline Pine,’ and ‘We Are C.A.C.’

And that’s where the faux cause marketing comes into play. There’s a website with a dot-org extension; catsagainstclay.org.

Now any of us could go and register an available dot-org extension. It’s not like ICANN, the official registrar of top-level Internet domain extensions, checks anyone’s nonprofit bona fides before allowing someone to register a dot-org domain name.

That said, there’s a widespread expectation that a dot-org extension means that the website is for the public good. But when you go to www.catsagainstclay.org, it sends you directly to the product’s regular URL.

Combining the dot-org extension with this ad that depicts insurrection suggests that there’s a real revolution underway. But Che Gato notwithstanding, there’s no revolution. Just faux cause marketing.

Now I’ve praised Air Tran for its faux cause marketing, which pokes fun at the over-earnest tropes of nonprofit advertising. Had Church & Dwight turned any of the photos of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro into cat versions of the famous revolutionaries, I could laugh at that, too. But Che Gato by himself just isn't revolutionary enough to be funny faux cause marketing.

But as it stands this faux cause marketing effort deserves to be derided as a half-measure.

How Inefficient Charities Can Spoil Your Cause Marketing

The issue of Time magazine currently on newsstands is all about cancer, including a story on cancer research charities called 'Check Your Charity.' One charity highlighted in the article, called the National Breast Cancer Research Charity, made me do a double-take. Time reports that it took $12.7 million in 2009, and spent 52 percent on fundraising. The reporter’s lead says a lot; “It's not that the National Breast Cancer Research Center is a scam….”

What gave me the double-take was that National Breast Cancer Research Center sounds so much like The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, the New York nonprofit which took in $30.2 million in revenue in 2009 and spent a scant 5.9 percent on fundraising.

The phrase ‘cancer research’ has become a marketing conceit. Put the words together and you have fundraising magic. But it sucks to be a well-proven charity like The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, when a less efficient charity can invoke the same magic words.

"I shudder when I look at how many groups have 'cancer research' in their names," Time quotes Greg Simon, a board member of FasterCures, which works to improve medical research. "The general public is throwing its money away."

What's The Breast Cancer Research Foundation to do?

They plainly recognize they have a challenge. The front page of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation website touts receiving a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator for the ninth consecutive year 'above the fold,' as they say. It also calls out a pie chart that shows that nearly 91 percent of funds go to cancer research and awareness, a very high number. The front page of the website also informs us that The Breast Cancer Research Foundation is also the only breast cancer charity to receive an A+ rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy.

What else could The Breast Cancer Research Foundation do?

They could certainly go to their cause marketing partners like Sketchers above and ask them to carve out a little space that says, in effect, ‘The Breast Cancer Research Foundation is the most efficient breast cancer research charity around.’

Although sponsors oftentimes take a ‘you get what you get’ approach to their charity partners when advertising their cause marketing sponsorships, here is a case when it’s in their best interest to promote the efficiency of their partner charity.

Passing The Plate Among the Religious

A new study out Monday, June 6, 2011 finds that contrary to conventional wisdom, religious people are more likely to donate to causes that aren’t strictly religious than to those that are.

The study, conducted by Grey Matter Research and Consulting in Phoenix and commissioned by Russ Reid Company of Pasadena, shows that just 41 percent of donors who attend religious worship services regularly support a cause they described as “religious,” other than the contributions they make to their place of worship.

Instead, religious donors are more likely to have given toward disaster relief (68 percent), domestic hunger or poverty relief (66 percent), helping people with disabilities (56 percent), health care or medical research (54 percent), and veterans’ causes (52 percent) than they are to have supported specifically religious causes.

In short, religious people aren’t ‘lost causes’ for fundraisers and charity work that isn’t explicitly religious.

“There tends to be a stereotype that religious donors primarily support religious work,” says Ron Sellers, President, Grey Matter Research. “In fact, when our own research and other research has clearly shown that religious people tend to give more to charitable causes than do non-religious people, a frequent objection I hear is along the lines of, ‘Yeah, but they’re just giving to their church or to religious organizations, so that doesn’t really count.’ Many individual religious organizations I’ve worked with are shocked when, in focus groups, their donors start talking about how much they give to Juvenile Diabetes, Arbor Foundation, or Red Cross.”

What does this mean for cause marketers?

While Grey Matter’s study isn’t about cause marketing or donations made through cause marketing, it does set on its ear the idea that religious people sit on their wallets when they’re not at church.

Indeed, as Sellers says, “from our research and many other studies that have been done,” Sellers continues, “the simple fact is that religious people tend to be very good donors, and much of the money they give away has nothing to do with their specific denomination or with religion in general.”

The native sense of charity that many religious people exhibit means they are a good likely target for both fundraisers and cause marketers alike.

Our Complicated Feelings for Lance Armstrong

Reporters can be a suspicious lot by nature. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his producer certainly trained all their skepticism on Lance Armstrong during a story that aired on May 22, 2011 that lays out the ways he may have used illegal performance-enhancing drugs on his way to seven consecutive Tour de France wins. Armstrong’s lawyers have demanded an on-air apology from 60 Minutes for reporting they term as ‘untethered to reality.’

Other reporters have rushed to the defense of 60 Minutes.

However the battle of public opinion plays out Armstrong may well get his day in court. After being impaneled back in September 2010, a Los Angeles grand jury is apparently still hearing testimony on the Armstrong doping case. Armstrong’s lawyers have had pointed remarks for the Federal Investigator in the case, Jeff Novitzky, that explicitly wrap Armstrong in the cloak of an anti-cancer hero.

“We know Novitzky,” says Armstrong’s attorney John Keker, “and plan to prove that these are his repeated, illegal leaks aimed solely at destroying a true hero, not just in sports but in the fight against cancer,” he said. “That the government is spending tax money investigating long ago bike races in Europe is an outrage.”

Sports Illustrated reporter and columnist Michael Farber doesn’t believe Armstrong won all those Tours without doping. And as a cancer survivor himself, he doesn’t care that much. “To some, a successful government case against Armstrong would forever change the modern concept of a hero,” he writes. “I don’t see it that way. I don’t really care if the next Floyd Landis or Tyler Hamilton says he has proof Armstrong was climbing the Alps with rocket fuel steaming out of his ears, because Armstrong is transcendent.”

In other words, when Farber weighs in the balance that oft-imitated (and never duplicated) little yellow bracelet along with all the other elements that make up Livestrong, the inspirational anti-cancer charity, it’s newsworthy that Lance Armstrong probably cheated, just not pertinent to him and other cancer survivors and anti-cancer crusaders.

A lot of people are in the same boat when it comes to Armstrong. Like the Facebook category ‘it’s complicated’ describes our feelings for the man.

Farber puts it well in his Sports Illustrated column, “I may not accept Armstrong’s stonewalling in the face of all the accusations. But I accept that he helps men like Parker (the man who gave Farber a Livestrong bracelet when he received his own cancer diagnosis) pay his life forward…At the Church of Lance, we count our blessings along with our beads.”

In effect Armstrong’s deeds with Livestrong have created a kind of insurance policy that has given the man and the his charity brand a little cover.

Will it be enough should the Los Angeles Grand Jury return an indictment against Armstrong? What if Armstrong is convicted of doping?

Stay tuned.

Quien es Mas Macho? More Cause Marketing for Dudes

In the lead-up to World Environment Day, Sunday, May 5, 2011 Budweiser is asking men to save water by forgoing shaving. Called 'Grow One. Save a Million' (GOSAM), the promotion has been going on in a low-profile way since 2010. Budweiser is also donating $150,000 to the River Network, a watershed conservation charity.

But the campaign has since gone Hollywood with the inclusion of Nick Offerman, the butch star of the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation.

GOSAM is premised on the fact that American men use an average five gallons of water per shave. Saving a million gallons of water should be pretty easy therefore, since 1,000,000 divided by 5 gallons is 200,000. Divide that by 20, the number of days a man might shave in a month, and the result is 10,000. So if 10,000 dudes quit shaving for a month in America, we’re there. Since beer starts with water, water conservation is a natural fit for Budweiser.

But Budweiser is relying on GOSAM to save water by being fun. In one release, Offerman is quoted as saying, “The only thing manlier than growing a big, burly beard is ripping a big, burly beard off of a charging grizzly with your bare hands.”

Budweiser’s positioning with Offerman reminds me of nothing so much as the old Bill Murray game show parody on Saturday Night Live called Quien es Mas Macho, or Who is More Macho? (You can watch that episode on Hulu.com, if you have a subscription).

In it, Murray played a game show host who quizzed contestants in high-school Spanish on who was more macho. As in: “Quien es Mas Macho, Fernando Lamas o Ricardo Montalban?” When the contestant rang in to answer Fernando Lamas, Murray’s response was, “No. Ricardo Montalban es mas macho.”

Es verdad!

GOSAM is primarily Facebook and PR-driven. The Facebook page has a pledge form not to shave and not much more. It kinda seems like something the Young Turks at Budweiser’s agency tossed off after drinking a few Buds and watching Sports Center. I couldn’t find any mention of it on Budweiser.com, for instance.

Too bad.

As a hirsute fellow myself, I think GOSAM has whiskers… er… legs. It wouldn’t take much effort to turn this into something very like Lee National Denim Day, only for dudes.

Don't Use Exploitive Images in Charitable Appeals, Real World Results Suggest

A study, published in the December 2009 Journal of Marketing Research, found that children’s charities would receive greater donations if they depicted sad-looking children in their appeals. But real-world results show that the research may not be valid, especially for animals.

“The working theory,” I wrote in a June 2009 post, “was that people ‘catch’ one another’s emotions…something that’s been shown again and again in many other studies… but which had never been applied to charitable appeals.”

“They tested their thesis in a series of experiments, including a behavioral test where they showed subjects randomly-selected charitable appeals and gave them money to give.

“In the other tests researchers tried to zero in on the emotional state of the test subjects.

“The paper, called ‘The Face of Need,’ was authored by Professor Debora Small of The Wharton School and Nicole Verrochi, a PhD candidate, who openly wonder why charities don’t use sad faces of children more often.

“I’ve got a few answers.

1. “It’s potentially exploitative. For years some charities have been willing to say, in effect, ‘donate or this child will die.’ It may be true, but it’s still emotional blackmail. Pictures of sad children will deliver that message without having to say it.
2. “The pictures of children in heart-wrenching situation might quickly lead to donor-fatigue. I’ve got pictures of my youngest when she was in the hospital on her third birthday and desperately ill with pneumonia. While it was quite an ordeal at the time, she’s better now. Still, I can’t bring myself to look at those hospital pictures. Imagine, then, getting nothing but sad pictures of children from every children’s charity that solicits you.
3. “It could lead to a ‘race to the bottom’ of bad taste. It’s not hard to find children in really miserable states and snap a photo. My daughter, for instance, was miserable in one of the best children’s hospitals in the United States. But if a goodly number of children’s charities decide to apply the Wharton findings, we’ll almost certainly see children in ever more desperate situations. It will become a kind of sad-kid porn.”

Small and Verrochi tested their experiments in a laboratory setting using students, which is standard in academic research.

But a real world test using at the Austin Human Society in Texas took exactly the opposite approach and enjoyed great success. Instead of depicting animals in grim circumstances, as had been done in prior campaigns, the Humane Society’s advertising agency Door Number 3, headed by my friend M.P. Mueller, took a happier approach. One showed an adorable mixed-breed dog with tennis ball in its mouth, featured the headline, “I’m not on Twitter. But I’ll still follow you.”

Let me repeat myself for emphasis. The Austin Human Society had taken a 'sad-pet' approach in the past. But the 'happy-pet' approach taken by Door Number 3 was demonstrably more effective.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that “by the end of last year, the Austin Humane Society reported a 13-percent rise in contributions, not including bequests and other planned gifts, and it has maintained the gains this year, says Amanda Ryan-Smith, director of development. The charity’s most recent year-end appeal based on the ad campaign’s approach generated $100,000, double the amount it raised in 2009.”

How to explain the difference between the real-world results and the laboratory tests?

It could be that the results for children don't carry over to pets. It could be that happy-face campaigns are more effective after sad-face campaigns have already been tried. It could be that laboratory research doesn't translate into the real-world very well. It could even be that the creative used in the laboratory tests wasn't very good.

I think it's because people prefer not to see exploitative images with their charitable appeals, whether human or animal.

Multi-Cultural and Cross-Cultural Cause Marketing

Results released yesterday from the ‘Dynamics of Cause Engagement’ study show that Hispanics and African Americans in the United States are more likely than Caucasians to support causes online than offline, more likely to feel social sites networking help causes raise visibility, and more likely to feel that they personally can help causes through online social networks.

The study comes from Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication, and took place in late 2010. Several results have been reported in the last month from the analysis of ‘Dynamics,’ survey, which was funded by Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.

Another study, which also took place in 2010, found that among the 12 countries surveyed, 85 percent of Mexican nationals were likely to buy a brand that supports a good cause, the highest percent of any country surveyed. In that effort, called Edelman’s Goodpurpose Study 2010, Brazil, China and India followed closely behind Mexico. The United States finished fifth, with right around 70 percent of American saying they were likely to buy a brand that supports a good cause.

Between them these two studies address a question I’ve been raising in the Cause Marketing Blog since 2007, namely, how do you effectively cause market multi-culturally in the United States and how do we expand cause marketing across the cultures of the world?

The Goodpurpose study suggests if you have a consumer-facing product that targets Indians, Chinese, Brazilians, and Mexicans cause marketing is certainly worth exploring.

The Georgetown study means that if you want to maximize the trust that Hispanic and African American consumers have for your cause, you should utilize social media.