It's Time Charity Cause Marketers Started Thinking Like Capital Campaign Fundraisers

Not long ago I took a call from an entrepreneur who had tried to do a deal with a prominent children’s charity that does a notable amount of cause marketing. He loved the cause… still does… but after two years time spent on the project it didn’t pan out, mainly because the minimums and the upfront fees the charity required to participate were two high for the entrepreneur’s budget.

I understand why cause marketing charities have participation minimums or up-front fees. It’s partly a management issue. How do you manage a bunch of $10,000 (more or less) cause marketing campaigns and still make money? To a lesser degree it’s about keeping the cause's image in the main channels of the branding river. And, of course, it’s about harvesting some hard-won brand equity.

But I’ve taken a lot of calls like this over the last 20 years, as a consultant and as a nonprofit executive and staffer, and it’s been frustrating almost every time.

I think it’s time for the big cause marketing charities to rethink their policies on participation minimums. And the thought-model I propose will be familiar to charity executives.

Think of the capital campaign donor pyramid.

In a nutshell here’s how capital campaigns work:

• You do a study to determine how much you could raise.
• You set the campaign fundraising goal.
• You build a pyramid with slots in it at each level. The top of the pyramid is the biggest gift. The base of the pyramid represents a lot of much smaller donations. Combined they equal the total campaign fundraising goal.
• You ask people for money.

Not surprisingly, the donors near the top of the pyramid are lavished with more attention than the donors at the base. But the donors at the bottom are nonetheless vital to reach the campaign goal.

Too many charity managers think of $10,000 cause marketing campaigns as nuisances. And they would be if you had to give them a lot of support. But smart charity managers ought to be able streamline their processes, invent some easy-to-administer campaigns, use the power of the Web to drive down costs, wave or eliminate up-front fees, and still be able to take a bunch of $10,000 checks from small cause marketing campaigns.

The economy in the U.S. and in much of the rest of the globe has stalled. Charity cause marketers can't afford to leave money on the table.

Cause Marketing at Retail With Cash Register Tape

Imagine every time someone buys one of your paper icons at retail that the printed receipt spits out a bounce-back coupon for a sponsor.

That idea occurred to me when I was at the grocery store the other day. I got both a custom-printed coupon and a coupon for a free smoothie with purchase at McDonalds.

I did a little research and found that there are basically two players in the grocery store receipt market with two different approaches. Both claim high levels of penetration in the largest markets. But either would work for the retail promotion I have in mind.

Catalina Marketing offers stores little printers… separate from the cash register printers… that spit out a coupon, oftentimes for a product that competes with the one you just bought. So if you bought a can of Campbell's soup you might get a coupon for a can of Progresso soup.

Register Tape Network preprints the back of paper cash register tape with ads or coupons for chiropractors, fast food, hair salons, and the like that are then distributed to grocery stores.

Either option could certainly be used to drive awareness for your cause or cause marketing campaign.

But imagine instead if the promotion were keyed to a paper icon campaign. When the icon gets scanned the Catalina prints up coupons for the cause’s packaged goods sponsors, for instance. Smart charities would ask the sponsors to underwrite the effort.

The Catalina printer could even print out a 75-word story and picture (give or take) about the cause. Heck, national charities could even program it such that the story that comes out has a local angle.

Register Tape Network would be a little less techy, but still versatile. You could do almost everything with RTN that you could do with Catalina, except customize the offer.

Contact me if you want to try this. I’ve got a few more ideas about how to make cause marketing with cash register tape work.

Remember SPAT When Activating Your Cause Marketing via PR

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by public relations than by advertising.

You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising and public relations. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR.

So how do you activate your cause marketing story using public relations?

One answer is that the story you tell the media have a boy and a puppy, like the story above in People magazine about 7-year-old Evan Moss who wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting dog that he wished his family could afford. In the book Evan imagined he and his seizure dog in various settings, including going to outer space together.

The book… sold at a local café and on Amazon… generated $41,000 and now Evan and three other children will get epilepsy-detecting dogs.

(The only other thing Evan could have done to get better publicity is to marry a Kardashian!)

But maybe your cause marketing story doesn’t involve Kardashians or ever-so-cute seven-year-olds with service puppies. How do you do activate your cause marketing using PR?

Remember the acronym SPAT.

Why spat?

Well a spat is a fabric or leather covering worn over your shoes to protect them from mud and dirt and such.

And while the word and the item are rather antique… military color guards are about the only place you’ll see them in common use in the United States these days… using SPAT will help to convey you your cause marketing idea intact while minimizing the chances that it gets too muddied by the press or the social media.

Summarizable. Even if the dictionary in my word processor doesn’t believe it, summarizable is the adjective form of the word summarize. In this context it means that your basic cause marketing campaign has to be capable of being expressed in a concise form; two sentences or less.

Photographable. What we’re talking about here is memes, biologist Richard Dawkins’ term for ideas, symbols or practices that are carried culturally rather than genetically. Japanese Macaques that learned to wash their food from each other is an example of memes in the animal kingdom. Not all memes require a picture. But washing food wouldn’t have gone very far among Macaques if all they could do was chatter about it. Even for literate humans pictures are much less abstract than words. It’s a whole lot easier pass on a meme with a photo than without. For instance, check out the spat on the left.

Arresting. The best cause marketing stops you in your tracks. TOMS Shoes buy one, give one approach (BOGO), for instance or young Evan Moss above.

Transcendent. The word transcendent carries a lot of bulk around with it suggesting something outside human capacity or even divine. But the first meaning of transcendent is something superior or beyond ordinary limits. And who wants to promote cause marketing that fails to transcend the ordinary?

You don’t have to have all the elements of SPAT to effectively activate your cause marketing via PR. But this clearly a case where more is more.

Paper Icon Campaign at Whole Foods Helps Launch FoodCorps

On the heals of Joe Waters and Joanna MacDonald’s fine book Cause Marketing for Dummies…which dives deep into cause marketing at point of purchase… I came across this paper icon campaign from Whole Foods that benefits gardening in schools.

Called the Garden Grant Program, the goal is to raise $2,000,000 so as to be able to offer 1,000 schools a $2,000 grant to either create or expand an existing school garden. The nonprofit partner is New York City-based FoodCorps, a subset of AmeriCorps so new the ink on the logo isn’t yet dry.

FoodCorps is a service corps of young people…think early post-college age kids… who committed to a three-fold mission:

• “Deliver hands-on nutrition education"
• “Build and tend school gardens"
• “Bring high-quality local food into public school cafeterias"

The first 50 fanned out across the USA early this month. You may have read Mark Bittman’s column on the rollout in the New York Times 23 August 2011. Bittman writes that the inaugural group of FoodCorpsmen and women are, “smart, well informed, and articulate; (co-founder Curt) Ellis told me there wasn’t a day last week that he didn’t tear up from something that one of them said.”

They couldn’t be much more passionate about the cause than the young hipster who sold me the icon. He was bagging groceries when I offered to buy the paper icon. He then went into a sustained speech about how important school gardening is to health and well-being and how the store is currently scouting for local schools to participate.

Successful paper icon campaigns frequently are an example of the Pareto Principle in action: 80% might be sold by people like this clerk/bagger.

There’s a number of other things to like about this campaign.

• Full color front and back, including an illustrative photo.
• The headline is clear and serves double-duty as a call to action.
• Use of the back to help tell the story.
• The option for donations of $1 or $5. Even though most people will choose the $1 option it’s well worth it offer the second option.
• UPC codes to speed transaction time.
• Placement on the little counter with the credit card machine.
• Branding for Whole Foods and FoodCorps.

All in all a well thought-out and well-executed paper icon campaign.

I'm No Fan of This Cause Marketing Ad Campaign

On 14 June, 2007 I posted on the problems I had with Mandarin Oriental’s cause marketing campaign featuring various celebrities and their cause of choice. Now, 4 years later, if anything the campaign is worse because it still does the same thing; a celebrity’s charity of choice gets a mention and a $10,000 donation, and nothing more.

Here’s what I wrote back then:

There are two kinds of celebrities in the world; those that are in the Mandarin Oriental ad campaign running right now and those whose agents are trying to get them in.

It’s an image ad campaign for the 17 (now 23) hotels that are part of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. In it celebrities including I.M. Pei, Zubin Mehta, Helen Mirren, Elle McPherson, and Dame Edna-Barry Humphries are photographed in settings of their choice and they name their favorite Mandarin property. Dame Edna-Barry Humphries got to name two! (Now there’s a new set of celebrity ‘fans,’ with a few holdovers including Mirren, Neeson [see below] and Pei).

Every celebrity appearance carries with it a $10,000 donation to the charity of the celebrity’s choosing. Neeson’s charity is UNICEF and his short profile on the Mandarin's website includes a UNICEF logo (but no link). Most of the other charities are smaller and less prominent than UNICEF.

It goes almost without saying that the donation amount is too small to be meaningful. I don’t know how the deal is structured but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the celebrities wave all or part their cash fee in lieu of the charitable donation and then take the rest in hotel stays.

That’s what makes it so appealing to celebrities… they get to stay in lavish Mandarin hotels for the price of the time it took to do the photo shoot. Better still for the celebrities, the ads feature them, not the hotels. In the process they look like good citizens. If you listen closely you can almost hear agents the world over calling the Mandarin’s ad agency.

By contrast, how interesting would it be if the Mandarin Oriental Group agreed to match what the celebrity donates to his or her preferred charity up to a certain amount? Interesting and unlikely. Most charitable donations from celebrities come in the form of in-kind gifts…read ‘time.’

There’s other things to like in this campaign. The celebrity list is an accomplished and eclectic group, with an especially strong showing of Asians, which makes sense since better that half of the Mandarin’s hotels are in Asia.

However, I think the creative is spare and subtle to the point almost of obfuscation, especially when it comes to the charities. “Liam Neeson for UNICEF” makes sense because UNICEF has plenty of built-in affinity.

But Helen Mirren’s charity is called “Help the Aged” (since changed to Meals on Wheels). Sounds worthy enough, but I’ve never heard of it and there’s no website link, which means that most of these charities will get no more than just the $10,000 out of this promotion.

If I sound especially tart in that post it’s because campaign seemed so unhelpful to the chosen causes, and it’s mainly due to a lack of imagination from Mandarin Oriental's marketers.

Why couldn’t the Mandarin Oriental offer the causes room-nights to auction at their fundraisers, or a specialty drink named after the celebrity that benefits the cause for a few weeks, or an upgrade of some kind when people offer to make a donation to the celebrity’s cause. Luxury hotels have done all these things and more.

After more than four years the Mandarin has six new hotels dotting the globe but the same tired thinking in its cause marketing.

Advisory Boards For Cause Marketers

Charities that do a meaningful amount of cause marketing probably need an advisory board or group whose sole job is to help the organization expand its cause marketing footprint.

At first blush you might think that all you need is a handful of Rolodex warriors willing to do battle on your behalf. But in fact, once corporate types reach a certain threshold they probably all have a hefty enough Rolodex that any competent cause marketer could effectively mine it, to mix the metaphor.

Instead, in homage to Guy Kawasaki and his fine book The Art of the Start, I suggest that are actually five types of people you want on your cause marketing advisory board (CMAB).

• Industry Heavy Hitters. If your cause marketing takes place in different settings, you need a representative number of people from each of those principal industries on your CMAB.
• Captain Rolodex. This guy/gal has more than just a list of buddies from his/her rise in rank and power. This person could get the president of the United States (or the president of Exxon/Mobil!) on the phone if you could talk him or her into it. These people are rare and special. And a surprising number of them seemed to have worked in politics at some point in their career. You’ll recognize them by the fact that they actively nurture their contact list.
• The Scout. Whether a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout, this person has an unflagging sense of morality; of right and wrong. And he or she won’t be cowed by strong personalities or barter away his/her integrity.
• The Artist. This is the person whose creativity in putting together deals (or making connections) is so imaginative your lawyer shudders every time you call after a CMAB meeting.
• The Super Geek. Not necessarily technical, the SuperGeek seems to stay on top of every trend, read everything, and seen every iteration of marketing since Columbus started looking for sponsors. The SuperGeek tends to self-identify because he or she has a heavy speaking/teaching schedule.

As Kawasaki puts it, boards are both “blessings and burdens.” So make sure you can stand the bloviations of The SuperGeek, the angst produced by The Artist, and the egos of everyone else.

Kawasaki also advises that you take away their iPhones before your meetings.

Good luck with that.

Restructure This Cause Marketing Sweepstakes to Get to Something Better

Henkel, the large German consumer products and adhesives company has come in for some criticism in these pages for stingy cause marketing payouts and even bad copyediting. I’ve got more criticism this time out, only of the constructive variety.

Through the end of September 2011 Henkel is running a contest to find the best ideas to improve school fitness in America and get a shot at three $10,000 prizes awarded to one elementary, one middle, and one high school.

Here’s how it works: Enter your school at Henkelhelps.com. Then work your social network to get the most votes from the public. The cause is called Alliance for a Healthier Generation, founded by the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation.

The mission of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation is to “Help cultivate a healthier generation of children today so that we will have a healthier America tomorrow.” The Alliance keeps a database of fitness approaches on its website.

Large cash prizes have an interesting and successful history of inspiring needed innovation. For instance, in the 1700s the British Admiralty held a £20,000 contest (equivalent to about £2.87 million today) for a device or approach that would help ships at sea determine longitude. The contest produced the marine chronometer invented by self-educated clockmaker John Harrison.

More recently, in 2004 Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the first private manned suborbital flight. Google’s version of the X Prize offers $20 million to the first team to land a rover on the moon before Dec. 31, 2015.

Henkel’s onto something with this contest, but they’ve structured it wrong. Right now Henkel Helps is just another popularity contest of the type more grandly done by American Express Member’s Project and Pepsi Refresh.

Instead, Henkel needs to take a page from the X Prize and set up some kind of criteria to find approaches that actually result in more healthy school kids. The X Prize has super specific outcomes before the prize can be awarded. Henkel would have to do the same. The prizes would need to be larger than $10,000 and have a division for non-school entities as well.

This wouldn’t be easy to put together. The human element guarantees that. But the challenge of the epidemic of childhood obesity requires something more innovative… and proven… than another social media-powered sweepstakes.

Book Review of "Cause Marketing for Dummies" by Waters and MacDonald

In the December 1991 issue of Life magazine insurer Fireman’s Fund ran the image ad at the left that describes the insurer’s role in the restoration of Ellis Island. Read the body copy and conspicuous by its absence is any mention of Fireman’s Fund actually supporting the restoration financially.

That was 20 years ago… just eight years after American Express’s seminal cause marketing effort on behalf of the restoration of the neighboring Statue of Liberty… and a lot has changed. Life magazine still ran ads for cigarettes, for instance. Moreover, I submit to you that if Ellis Island were being restored in 2011 Fireman’s Fund would almost certainly make a financial donation to the effort that would be mentioned in the ad.

Joe Waters and Joanna MacDonald both started their careers in cause marketing in the early 1990s, (as did I). And in the process they and other pioneers of cause marketing have changed the way companies think about and communicate the ways that they benefit society, and that’s all for the good in my book.

Now these two veterans have penned their own book called Cause Marketing for Dummies that is a welcome addition to the cause marketing literature.

I’ll bet I’ve read 90% of the books written about cause marketing. The earliest ones were often stuffy or unreadable. A few were both. The first authors on the topic of cause marketing often tried too hard to persuade that the practice was both effective and acceptable to reasonable people.

By contrast, Cause Marketing for Dummies approaches the topic with the assumption that the case for cause marketing has mainly been made. That assumption allows Joe and Joanna to get refreshingly tactical in their book. Cause Marketing for Dummies is especially strong on the topics of paper icon campaigns (they refer to them as ‘pinups’) and on transactional cause marketing efforts.

Joe is also a social media geek of some standing and the book also shines on the burgeoning practice of location-based cause marketing and how cause marketers can use the breadth and depth of social media. Likewise the book benefits from Joe’s wonderful sense of humor. (Full disclosure: Joe and I are friends and he mentions www.causemarketing.biz as a resource in the book.)

Joe and Joanna should also be praised for their emphasis on the importance of selling in cause marketing. “Nothing happens until something gets sold,” the old saying goes, and Joe and Joanna tackle that topic head-on and apology-free with good suggestions and solid advice.

Cause Marketing for Dummies is not the perfect cause marketing book. It doesn’t substantively address the vital topic of cause marketing campaign activation, for instance.

But Cause Marketing for Dummies is eminently readable and chock-full of good counsel. My copy has a number of highlighted sections.

I heartily recommend Cause Marketing for Dummies to any of my readers. Especially anyone who doesn’t have the benefit of Joe and Joanna’s more than 35 years of collective experience in on-the-ground cause marketing.

The Challenge of Sports Celebrities for Charities

I love sports and I love athletes and it’s been my pleasure to be around Heisman Trophy winners, two-sport legends, Super Bowl MVPs, NBA 7-footers, and first-round draft picks, all in charitable settings. I’ve even got an autograph from futbol marvel Pele.

Smart sports agents try to get their athletes involved with causes because it helps broaden their appeal. Not that they necessarily need it. In certain pro sports towns (as well as at all the SEC schools!) highly-paid athletes stroll around among us like demigods down from Olympus.

For instance, I can all but guarantee that Ben Roethlisberger, the controversial Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, has never bought his own drink in Steeltown. A Pittsburgh-area cause that can entice Big Ben to support them with his presence is all but assured of selling out that event.

But just 300 miles away in Philadelphia or 250 miles away in Cleveland, Roethlisberger couldn’t get a cab at the airport or sell his signed jersey for $1 at a charity event there.

That’s one of the problems with national charities taking on athletes as their spokespeople; rare is the player... active or retired... who can transcend his own fanbase.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association has its annual Telethon coming up in a few weeks the Sunday before Labor Day. The MDA has already announced that Founder Jerry Lewis won’t be hosting. And so for the last several months the MDA has been advertising the roster of replacement hosts, among them Nancy O’Dell, Allison Sweeney, and Tom Bergeron.

NFL legend Kurt Warner, seen above in one of those ads, will have an undefined on-camera role, the MDA’s press release says.

Warner is very likeable and a straight shooter whose charitable inclinations ring genuine. He’s got a wonderful personal story. And he came with a hairsbreadth of bringing a Super Bowl trophy to my beloved Phoenix Cardinals before Ben Roethlisberger pulled off some last-second heroics in Super Bowl XLIII.

But admirable and likeable as Warner is, he’s just not a draw for the MDA outside of Phoenix and St. Louis, where he spent his early career.

Mashing Up Loyalty Programs and Cause Marketing

In my wallet are cards and keyfobs for a half-dozen loyalty programs from the sophisticated, like SkyMiles and Marriott Rewards and a couple grocery chains to several no-tech buy 10 get one free punch cards from a bakery and a couple of restaurants. Your wallet or handbag probably holds a similar variety of rewards cards.

But is there a potential match between loyalty programs and cause marketing?

Marketing superstar Coke, which runs the gigantic MyCokeRewards.com rewards program, has placed its bet.

Now to be clear, label redemption efforts from Campbell’s, the Boxtops for Education campaign from General Mills and others are both loyalty and cause marketing programs. But MyCokeRewards was founded as an effort to reward Coke purchasers, not their favored causes.

At the left is an ad that ran in the 15 August, 2011 issue of People magazine. Register your school at mycokerewards.com/sprite and it could receive a $25,000 grant to become a ‘Sprite Spark Park.’ Formatted as a sweepstakes, Sprite will award grants to 25 schools to improve their play areas. The sweepstakes ends 30 September, 2011.

According to Alexa.com, MyCokeRewards.com is the 4735th most-trafficked website on the Internet and 828th in the United States. That compares favorably to Delta.com which hosts my SkyMiles card and Marriott.com/rewards, and is orders of magnitude higher than Kroger.com, with whom I have a rewards card.

MyCokeRewards.com gets so much traffic it takes advertising from non-competing brands! (I was surprised and delighted to see a banner ad from Snickers candy bars for its ‘Bar Hunger’ campaign benefiting the anti-hunger charity Feed America!)

Sprite Spark Park is not Coke’s first or only foray into the mash up of loyalty programs and cause marketing. You can donate your MyCokeRewards points to schools, which can redeem them for items from a small catalog of school supplies.

You can also donate MyCokeRewards points in several denominations to the American Cancer Society, the National Parks Foundation, the USO, and The Hispanic Scholarship Fund.

I was aware of MyCokeRewards.com cause efforts in a generic way, but seeing this rewards program/cause marketing campaign mashup has raised my consciousness. And I can now see a number of ways that cause marketing and loyalty programs could benefit each other.

Teaching Philistines How to Give

There he is at your swanky charity gala; rich, successful, and so bored you're worried he may start gouging at his eyes with a salad fork. He’s got an MBA from an Ivy and a lovely wife… who studied art history… and who drags him kicking and screaming to your events. He’s makes more money than some Caribbean countries, but the most you may ever get from him is the price of the gala’s tickets.

Is it even possible to get this Philistine to change his mind about your cause?

The answer has as much to do with how people learn and what kind of ideas they are exposed to as it does how much money they have to give.

A study by Professor Raymond Fisman from Columbia Business School… along with Shachar Kariv of UC Berkeley and Daniel Markovitz of the Yale Law School… suggests that even mature students can change their minds when presented with powerful ideas.

In this study Fisman and his co-authors Shachar Kariv and Daniel Markovitz studied first year Yale law students to see to what degree their teachers affected their generosity in giving when they played an experimental economics exercise called a dictator game.

Regular readers will recognize Raymond Fisman’s name. Fisman and other colleagues found a positive relationship between profitability and corporate philanthropy for businesses that advertised a lot.

Here’s how this study worked. All first year law students at Yale University are required to take courses in contracts and torts. Some of the professors who teach the courses hold PhDs in economics, some in the humanities, and some have “no strong disciplinary allegiances at all.” The students are randomly assigned to the professors and the professors are allowed to design the course however they wish.

Fisman, Kariv and Markovitz theorized that students coming out of class taught by a philosophy teacher might be more concerned with social justice and equality, while students taught by an economics professor might place greater emphasis on economic efficiency.

They tested their theory by putting 70 of these Yale law students in a computer lab to play a dictator game with 50 decisions relating to giving.

“In some cases students started with $10,” writes Fisman in Forbes Magazine, “and for each dollar they gave up, their (anonymous) partner in the game would get, say, $5. In this case giving was ‘cheap.’ In others giving was expensive (each dollar given up yielded only 20 cents for the partner.”

By definition if you start with $10, give away $10 and still have $8 left as a giver, you’re concerned about efficiency. Likewise, if you give even when it’s expensive to do so, you are almost certainly concerned about equality. If you never give whether it’s easy or hard, you’re probably selfish.

So what were the results?

“It turns out that exposure to economics makes a big difference in how students
split up the pie,” says Fisman, “in terms of both efficiency and outright selfishness. Students assigned to classes taught by economists were more likely to give a lot when it was cheap to do so. But they were also more likely to take the whole pie for themselves.”

Likewise, students exposed to teachers from the humanities… no matter their previous academic backgrounds… were more “sympathetic to equality.”

So what’s a fundraiser to do? Ask to see donor’s college transcripts? Test donors on Fisman’s dictator game? Stay in bed in the fetal position for the next week or so?

Smart fundraisers know that donors are different, and that the pitch that worked for one would-be donor might not work for the next.

Smart fundraisers… like smart marketers… also know that you need to segment your audience. But even when you’re sure you’re addressing people who are concerned about social equality, only the fool or the incompetent doesn’t also mention something about the rational, hard-headed qualities of the cause; that it’s efficient, well-managed, has a good board, effectively accomplishes its mission, uses its resources smartly, etc.

Every message… including those used in cause-related marketing… should appeal to the head and the heart.

Is it worth it trying to convert that rationalist Philistine? You bet. His mind can be changed. Fisman et al demonstrate that. And better, Fisman also demonstrates that when that rationalist gives, he's likely to be the most generous type of donor if you structure it right.

Towards a More Hygienic Cause Marketing Campaign for Lysol

With the approaching start of the new school year Lysol brand of disinfectant has a cause marketing campaign that awards $25,000 in prizes to the school with the highest average attendance from November 1 to 30, 2011.

If you’re like me it took me a couple of beats to understand what school attendance has to do with Lysol. But even after I got it the Lysol Blue Ribbon Attendance Challenge doesn’t seem to do all the things Lysol needs it to do.

Here’s how the Lysol Blue Ribbon Attendance Challenge works. You must register your school online in the contest at Lysol.com. The contest runs throughout the month of November and the winning school gets $25,000 in prizes. As of this writing the contest’s official handbook wasn’t yet available online.

As a part of the promotion Lysol offers a school curriculum on germs and prevention that teachers can use in their classrooms.

That’s really… um… earnest. But it seems like half an effort.

What Lysol really needs out of this effort is to generate good buzz for a brand that’s pretty stale. What part of anything I’ve described above would you Tweet or post on your Facebook or Tumblr page?

Part of the problem is the donation amount. Last year Edgeworth Elementary in Hacienda Heights, California won the (unspecified) Grand Prize. Indeed, the $25,000 in prizes this year may go to multiple schools… Lysol’s website is wonderfully vague on this point.

Total prizes of $25,000 just can’t be taken seriously in a country with more than 90,000 elementary schools! As is, small schools have an advantage in the Challenge. As do schools in states with mild weather in November.

But by itself a better and fairer prize package wouldn’t make you more likely to Tweet out the Lysol Blue Ribbon Attendance Challenge either.

Imagine in addition to better prizes some kind of contest asking schools to produce a small play that depicts germ-free hygiene in schools, and open up divisions for middle schools, junior and high schools. Lysol probably wouldn’t even need to require that its products be portrayed in the plays. The schools would just do it.

Naturally videos of the plays would end up on YouTube. In fact, YouTube oughta be the official entry vehicle for the contest. Call it the Lysol Blue Ribbon Video Challenge.

As I see it, the video challenge would be in addition to the attendance challenge.

And, of course, thousands of videos would be publicity fodder for Lysol and its PR agency, who would pitch this story to media outlets wherever schools enter the Challenge.

Justin Bieber’s Cause Marketed Perfume Should Be More Bieberiffic

17-year-old Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber wants you to buy his new perfume line called Someday, and when you do all net profits “after taxes, royalties, expenses and company requirements are deducted” will go to Pencils of Promise, a school-building charity and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Bieber’s promotional partner for Someday, a New York outfit called Give Back Brands, promises to donate its Someday profits to “restoring after-school programs” and “school food programs.” Someday appears to be Give Back’s only product right now.

But this isn’t just a straight transactional cause marketing promotion. Instead, Bieber has split the middle between a straight-ahead cause marketing promotion and an all-benefits brand of the type that Rachael Ray uses in her dog food line called Nutrish.

It’s hard to say whether or not Bieber is making any scratch on this deal. Royalties is one way celebrities make money from endorsements. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt.

However, in the wake of a $5 million class-action lawsuit filed in June 2011 against Lady Gaga for the way she sold a special bracelet meant to benefit Japan earthquake relief, the fact is Bieber and Give Back Brands need to be a little more transparent here.

Bieber’s rabid fans probably don’t care require an exact breakdown of the transaction, but for the sake of prudence Bieber needs to be more precise.

The fact of the matter is that Paul Newman, the first celebrity to build his own “all benefits company,” set a very high standard of probity and frankness with ‘Newman’s Own.’ And both regular folks and the blood-sucking lawyers who filed suit against Lady Gaga expect model behavior from celebrities.

All the more so since Justin Bieber made a reported $53 million last year. Bieber has a great backstory: he grew up in a household with a below poverty-level income headed by his single mother, Pattie Mallette, and was discovered on YouTube barely three years ago. People love that stuff.

Nonetheless, when you make $53 million people also love to tear you down. The smartest thing Bieber and Give Back Brands could do with Someday is give a very precise accounting of how much money flows in and how much flows out and to whom.

Are Funds from Cause Marketing Tarnished?

All nonprofit leaders must make some accommodation with the issue of ‘tarnished' or tainted money.

It’s a question of morality, that is, right and wrong. Is there money that you cannot accept because of the way it was generated or from whom it comes?

If you’re PETA can you take money from Purina or Hormel? If you’re MADD can you accept donations from beer and liquor companies? If you’re a liberal political action committee can you accept money from the Koch brothers? Or, conversely, if you're a conservative think tank, could you take money from George Soros? If you’re the Sierra Club can you take money from Clorox?

It’s not just a matter of cashing checks. It’s what cashing those checks says to the rest of your supporters. Will taking money from certain individuals or entities stifle dissent or muzzle your voice? Can you retain your independence and still accept money from those you disagree with? Are you enabling ‘causewashing?’

For many nonprofits the indirect nature of the donation in cause marketing doesn’t make the questions any less difficult. For some, cause marketing ‘taps into consumption guilt while at the same time feeding that excess.’

Every charity has to decide what kind of money is... for them... tarnished. It sounds like moral relativism, but it’s a different answer for one charity than it is for another.

When I was at Children’s Miracle Network, for instance, we had the chance to do a deal with a beer company and choose not to. But the Muscular Dystrophy Association has a relationship with MillerCoors.

Personally, if I were the executive director of a charity that filled some basic human need; shelter, food, clothing, maybe some kinds of health issues, there probably wouldn’t be any money that was ‘tarnished.’

And it seems that on that count musician and philanthropist Bono agrees. The page above comes from Elle magazine, for which Bono served as the guest editor in March 2008. He writes of the (RED) campaign and its funding for antiretroviral therapy for AIDS/HIV victims in Africa:

"These are tough times for a hard sell, hard to talk about shopping when everybody’s belt-tightening. Everyone is more conscious than ever about where they spend their hard-earned cash. (RED) is not asking you to flock to the stores for the sake of it. But if you find yourself browsing we are asking you to choose (RED) where you can—for the sake of those who can’t ask you themselves.”

Boxtops for Education Back to School Promotion in Pictures

Last Sunday August 7, 2011 Boxtops for Education ran a tightly coordinated back to school promotion in my market, and probably yours as well. It featured dozens of ads in my local newspaper promoting many of its supporting brands. This post includes a representative number of scans of the ads I spotted in the paper, all of which are now found the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database.

Boxtops for Education was founded by General Mills, but has been adopted by other non-competing brands. The biggest presence overall was General Mills’ themed FSI (Free Standing Insert), which, in my market, had 12-pages of coupons. Mainly it was General Mills strongest brands, Yoplait, Big G Cereals, Progresso, Nature Valley, Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, etc. There was at least some Boxtops for Education branding on 11 of the 12 pages in the FSI. The FSI cover is on the left.



Yoplait, so closely associated with Susan G Komen for the Cure was one of the brands in the FSI, and indeed some cartons of Yoplait carry the Boxtops seal during much of the year.



















Avery, the office products company, used its corner of one page of the OfficeMax flyer to promote its partnership in Boxtops for Education, a co-branding approach that grocers and packaged goods companies have utilized for decades.



















Avery also used an FSI, only in this case to promote its heavy duty binders.



















Walmart used both sides of its one-page insert to trumpet General Mills, including some items that were featured in the General Mills themed FSI and a handful that weren’t.



















Another Boxtops partner brand is Ziploc from SC Johnson. The creative in this FSI was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. This is a back to school promotion. Where’s the mention of using Ziploc bags and storage containers for lunch at school?



















Finally, to give you an idea of the depth of coordination the promotion required, here’s a flyer from a small local grocery chain called Maceys.

Buy One Plant One Cause Marketing at the Outdoor Retailer Show

Over the last few years I’ve profiled about a dozen or so variations on a theme of ‘Buy One Give One’ (BOGO). But at the Outdoor Retailer Show that wrapped up Saturday, August 6, 2011 I found a new favorite.

Footwear company Oboz, which is a contraction of the words Outside-Bozeman specializes in shoes and boots true to its Montana roots. Their BOGO cause marketing is a straightforward and appealing; buy a pair of Oboz and the company will plant a tree. What’s unusual is the benefiting cause, called Trees for the Future.

Headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, Trees for the Future thinks of trees much the same way that Heifer International thinks about domesticated animals; that is, as a provider of wealth for people in the developing world. Trees for the Future plants trees that can become a source of wealth to local families.

Think about it, in addition to the environmental benefits of trees they also provide fruits and nuts, fuel, sap, windbreaks, shade, fertilizer, fodder, a protective canopy for other plants, and more. In baseball terms, Trees for the Future is a stand-up triple.

Since its founding in 1989 Trees for the Future has planted 50 million trees in 12,000 villages in 58 countries. It’s the coolest charity I’ve never heard of. And three cheers for Oboz for finding it.

Here from Oboz with more about the relationship between Oboz and Trees for the Future is Taylor Keeley.

Cause Marketing During Trade Shows

The Summer 2011 Outdoor Retailer Show attracts something close to 25,000 people… about the population of a small city… and puts them in a space about the size of 2 city blocks square.

Several cause marketers realized it was also a good time to do a little cause marketing to a densely populated and captive audience. Gerber, the knife maker repeated a promotion in ran in January 2011 at the SHOT (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) Show in Las Vegas by selling a knife branded to TV adventurer Bear Grylls and benefiting the Boy Scouts of America. Buy the pocket knife for $10 and proceeds benefit the BSA.

Columbia Sports Wear held six fashion shows during the 2011 show featuring willowy models and its tech-savvy outdoor wear. When you Tweeted a picture from one of the shows and included the hashtag #ORshowCA, they made a $5 donation to the Conservation Alliance.

Almost any trade show could do similar cause marketing promotions.

Here’s my good friend Scott Welch from Columbia explaining the promotion and Columbia’s dedication to the Conservation Alliance.

Camelbak Announces New Cause Marketing Effort for Water.org

Camelbak did a cause marketing campaign with Water.org last year wherein the hydration company created a specially-branded version of its water bottles that the charity sold as a fundraiser. You may have seen Matt Damon, Water.org’s cofounder, telling David Letterman about the bottle during an appearance in December 2010.

Thanks in no small part to Damon’s celebrity and the pitch-perfect strategic fit between Camelbak and Water.org, new bottles are forthcoming. Later this month Camelbak will expand the relationship with a Facebook effort.

In an exclusive interview with causemarketing.biz at the Summer 2011 Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City, here’s Shannon Stearns, senior marketing manager at Camelbak, to explain it.

Cause Marketing Sponsors Wanted to Help Save Millions of Lives

World Vision, the very able humanitarian organization, has an ambitious goal to End Malaria by 2015 and they’re at the mammoth Outdoor Retailer Summer Market trade show in Salt Lake City to drum up corporate support among outdoor retailers and brands.

I spoke with Angela Appleton, director of cause marketing at World Vision, and the cause is just. In the developing world malaria kills 2,000 kids a day or approximately 750,000 children a year (!), with Africa bearing the brunt of the scourge disease. World Vision's End Malaria website says that translates to $12 billion in lost economic productivity every year and serves to perpetuate poverty in the developing world.

World Vision wants to put an insecticide-treated mosquito net over every bed in the 62 malaria-endemic countries where World Vision has operations. Insecticides based on DDT eradicated malaria in the United States 60 years ago. But DDT is not an option now.

Insecticide-treated mosquito nets aren’t perfect, but they are about 60 percent effective in preventing malaria, according to the website. At $10 per net, they’re not terribly expensive, but combined we’re talking about billions of dollars in total expense, so Appleton and World Vision have their work cut out for them.

(Text ‘bednet’ to 20222 and you can make that $10 donation yourself.)

I asked Appleton, what kind of cause marketing World Vision was willing to entertain and the simple answer was almost anything.

“We’re really wanting to raise awareness here at the show and invite retailers to ask customers at the checkout if customers are wanting to donate $10. We’d like to engage with corporate retailers and manufacturers if they want to brand the product and donate a percentage of sales or for every tent you buy ‘we’re going to donate 10 bed nets’… whatever works for the company.”

World Vision is changing the endmalaria.org website into more of a blog format to highlight the work of campaign sponsors. They can provide materials for point of purchase donations, banner ads, collateral, logos, and links, to sponsors and partners.

I have nothing but respect for World Vision and helping prevent the deaths of nearly three-quarters of a million children every year is about as worthy and humane a goal as I can imagine. Please consider this opportunity to help.

Finally, my apologies to Angela Appleton, and to you as well. I promised on my Twitter feed that I would post my video interview with Angela today in lieu of my post. But I had unexpected technical difficulties with the video. Mea culpa.

Cause Marketing Signs at the Summer Outdoor Retailer Show

Yesterday at the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market was the Open Air demo. Today the indoor portion of the twice-annual show starts. So when I walked through the Salt Palace Convention Center on Wednesday the aisles were filled not with throngs of people but with the detritus of a giant trade show.

(Reminds me a little of the time when at a charity softball tourney I saw Larry King take his shirt off! :o )

Nonetheless, just walking around the trade show floor I already saw signs (literally) of cause marketing. Today I’ll pay visits to Sierra Designs, Bamboo Bottle Company, and dozens of more, plus nonprofits like WorldVision. And I’ll visit with friends at Eton, Columbia, and a handful more.

I’ll ask them about their cause marketing efforts, what they’re having success with and where cause marketing fits in terms of their overall marketing strategy. Stay tuned.

If you have questions for me to ask, Tweet them with the hashtag #ORcausemarketing or message me @paulrjones.

Cause Marketing at the Summer Outdoor Retailer Show

Starting today in my fair city is the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market, the trade show of the $10.85 billion Outdoor Industry Association. About 25,000 vendors, exhibitors, attendees and the media are expected. But only one person will be at the show covering cause marketing and corporate social responsibility campaigns and efforts by manufactures and retailers, and that’s yours truly.

I’ll snag interviews, get comments and talk to leaders about how they’re using cause marketing to give them strategic advantage in the growing outdoor industry. Then I’ll post them on the blog and at Twitter for you to read and watch.

Follow me here on the blog. My Twitter handle is @paulrjones. My hashtag for the event is #ORcausemarketing.

Finally, if there's question you have for anyone in the industry about cause marketing or corporate social responsibility, send them to on Twitter and I'll try and track them down.

Subscribe to the Cause Marketing GoogleGroup, Get a Cool Cause Marketing Tool

Kind Readers:

I’ve heard from a handful of people over the last few days about whether or not the Cause Marketing Blog has a newsgroup. Good news, it does!

It’s super-easy to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

And when you do each new post comes directly to your email every business day. As an inducement I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause-Related Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix and includes examples.

It's a great brainstorming tool and helps ensure that your campaign has all the components appropriate for that flavor of Cause Marketing.

Your privacy is important to me, so be assured that I will never sell your name or email address.

One other bit of housekeeping: Some idiot… whose reflection looks a lot like me… accidentally deleted the last 25 comments made on the Cause Marketing blog. They’re totally unrecoverable and lost to the ether.

The buck stops here, so my apologies. But rest assured that the brain-dead fool who lost them will be drawn and quartered and then fired and then run over by tractor-trailer hauling pickled herring.

At any rate, if you’ve made a comment in the last little while…or want to cuss me out as an incompetent…I invite you do so now. Anyone that does in the month of August, will also receive the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing.”

Warm regards,

Paul
Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging.

I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships.

That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle.

The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV.

More to the point, none of those other media options is certain to reach only a product’s actual customers. And, once someone is in the store and staring at the array of options on the shelf, cause marketing on packaging may be the last way you can influence whether consumers choose your product or one of your many competitors.

Who’s doing it right and who’s not?

Almost all the cause marketing cognoscenti, with the possible exception of me, hated the KFC campaign Buckets for the Cure. The usual reason cited was that since fatty foods and obesity are a risk factor in breast cancer, KFC shouldn’t be supporting Susan G. Komen for the Cure. My take was that since relatively few obese people hang out at, say, yoga studios, you gotta reach people were they are. And, hello, KFC!

As packaging, the pink bucket was dynamite. The bucket was in three different shades of pink… the Colonel included… and impossible to miss. In darker pink type were the names of hundreds of women affected by breast cancer. The Komen logo was featured prominently, as was the Buckets for the Cure URL. The only thing missing was an explanation of the campaign.

McDonald’s has recently been in the news because all Happy Meals now include a package of apple dippers. If you order French fries with your Happy Meal, you get fewer fries than before. For some time now all Happy Meals have generated a donation to the Ronald McDonald House Charities. The charity’s logo is small and the explanation is almost non existent. The Ronald McDonald House Charities is basically a federated charity that supports many more charities than just the local Ronald McDonald Houses, although it certainly does that too. I suspect that McDonald’s is happy to let you think that Ronald McDonald House Charities supports only the Ronald McDonald Houses. So to give further details would risk muddying the Ronald McDonald House Charities brand.

I can’t do the calculus it would require to compute the exact surface area of this Dominos Pizza box, but counting the bottom it’s better than 300 square inches. Given that, why can’t Dominos do more for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital than give up this little notch of a space at the front of the box that’s basically just 5.25 square inches? St. Jude’s logo and website URL are there, but there’s no room for any more than that. I found this especially puzzling since the bottom of the box is all but empty.

I was critical in this space of Dannon Yogurt’s me-to effort for the National Breast Cancer Foundation. But as cause marketing packaging, I think it’s an admirable. It’s a regular 6oz Dannon cup, but the foil lid is all pink, except for the company logo. There’s the pink ribbon emblematic of the fight against breast cancer, the charity logo, and an easy-to-understand explanation of how to trigger the donation by entering an online code printed on the bottom of the lid.

Coca-Cola’s down-market bottled water brand Aquarius Spring supports Boys and Girls Clubs of America, as evidenced by the terse phrase, “You Hydrate. We Donate.” It’s not visible in the picture, but there’s also a paragraph of information that explains the brand’s support. “Aquarius proudly supports Boys and Girls Clubs of America and the Triple Play program, which promotes proper health, fitness and nutrition for children. Parents, learn how to create an active lifestyle for your kids at www.enjoyaquaris.com.” That’s just 36 words, but there’s a call to action, a demonstration of the match between bottled water and the Boys and Girls Clubs and a hint at what Triple Play is about. On the whole, a nice effort.