Christmas Cause Marketing on TV

I started my cause marketing career back when gasoline cost about $1.15 a gallon, the median price of a house was a little more than $80,000 and a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost ‘just’ $850,000. And yet cheap as prices were back in 1992 do you think any sponsor would spring for even one national cause marketing ad on TV?

The answer is a resounding ‘no!’

Yet right now there’s goodly number of sponsors whose Christmas ad mix includes cause marketing messaging on behalf of a cause. At left are two current ads that I found on YouTube, one for Coke’s campaign on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund and the other from Macy’s Believe effort benefiting Make-a-Wish.

It may be that the version running in your market is different, but it’s enough to say that both firms are actively advertising their cause promotions on TV.

I won’t bother dissecting either ad beyond saying that the Coke ad is just a little too earnest while the Macy’s ad strikes just about the right tone.

But I want to have a little fun with these ads, so I’m launching a little contest. The winner will receive a copy of Joe Waters and Joanna MacDonald’s book ‘Cause Marketing for Dummies.’

Here’s the contest. Whoever comes closest to predicting the total number of views both videos will have on their respective YouTube channels at 11:59 PM (Mountain Time) on December 31, 2011 will win a copy of the Cause Marketing for Dummies book.

As of this writing the Macy’s ad currently has 18,346 views, while the Coke ad has 20,281.

To enter the contest email your predictions to aldenkeene at gmail dot com. The deadline to enter is Dec. 15, 2011.

Getting the Nose of Your Cause Marketing Under the Tent

The last installment of the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study released yesterday found that social media cause promoters aren’t the ‘slacktivists’ that they’re often portrayed to be.

The study was conducted for the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University and sponsored by Ogilvy Public Relations.

Instead, the study finds, people who engage with causes via social media are:

• Just as likely as non-social media cause promoters to donate money to the cause
  (41 percent vs. 41 percent).

• Twice as likely to volunteer (30 percent vs. 15 percent).

• Two and a half times more likely to participate in a cause walk or event
  (25 percent vs. 11 percent).

• Four times more likely to contact their political representative
  (22 percent vs. 5 percent).

• Four times more likely to request donations to support their charitable work
  (11 percent vs. 3 percent).

• Five times more likely to recruit others to sign a petition for a cause
  (20 percent vs. 4 percent).

The bottom line is that social media may in fact be a very good way for a cause to get its ‘nose under the tent’ of potential supporters.
Read the full results here.

Using Cause Marketing to Better Keep Customers for Life

When I saw the cause marketing ad at the left in my local newspaper, my first reaction was, frankly, uncharitable. I thought: my golly hearing aid retailers must have gaudy profit margins! Those uncharitable feelings aside, I think there’s some lessons for using cause marketing to better keep customers for life.

Here’s the offer. When you buy your first hearing aid(s) from My Hearing Centers, the company will donate $100 to “the children’s hearing and speech center,” presumably an in-house entity. My Hearing Centers will also offer as much as $1200 towards the purchase of new hearing aids when you trade-in existing hearing aids. My Hearing Centers promises that your trade-ins will be refurbished for use by kids in need.

My Hearing Centers is a five-unit chain with locations in the Mountain West states of Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.

In a 2009 review, Consumer Reports found that the hearing aid market was fractured and that hearing aids were expensive. In Metro New York City, the research agency purchased 48 hearing aids at prices ranging from $1,800 to $6,800 a pair. Of those, Consumer Reports found that 2/3rds were a misfit for the wearer’s level of hearing acuity.

Moreover, hearing aids are almost certainly not a one-time purchase. You can reasonably expect to need a new set every 5-7 years.

Given those realities, you can see why My Hearing Centers structured the cause marketing offer the way they did. A sixty-year-old customer who wants the latest technology might buy perhaps $21,000 worth of hearing aids before dying at 81, the average age of death for women in the United States. Giving up as much as $1,200 in discounts on the purchase of, say, a $7,000 hearing aid to preserve the relationship with a customer is cheap money if the customer comes back three more times.

What the My Hearing Centers is doing with their cause marketing here is meant to tap the lifetime value of customers. Most firms ought to think in terms of the lifetime value of a customer, and cause marketing can help companies to maximize that value.

To illustrate the concept of lifetime value, let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope figuring using automobiles as an example.

Suppose that I’ve got 40 more years of automobile driving left in me before I die or otherwise no longer drive. If I buy a car every 7 years and keep going back to the same dealer or the same make of automobile then I might buy 5.7 more cars over those 40 years. If my next car costs $30,000 and prices go up an average of 4% a year then my second car would cost $37,960, my third car would cost $48,032, my fourth car would cost $60,776 and my last car would cost $76,901. My lifetime value as a car purchaser to one or more dealers would therefore be approximately $253,669. Wouldn’t it be worth it to a favored auto dealer to offer a donation to my charities of choice as an inducement to again buy my next car from them?

What we’re talking about here is investing in customer loyalty and retention, which almost always makes sense. That's because for most businesses it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to find and develop a new one.

Lifetime value isn’t just about big-ticket items like cars or hearing aids. Coke knows my lifetime value. That’s why they offer My Coke Rewards, a customer loyalty and retention program. The four or five grocers that I shop at most frequently understand lifetime value, too. That’s why many of them offer rewards cards.

My Coke Rewards has a cause component (read my August 2011 post about it here) that generates funds for schools, sorta like the label campaigns from Campbell’s and General Mills. Such efforts are a first-cousin to what My Hearing Centers is doing here.

But I think My Hearing Centers could take a page from Coke and regularize their donations to the children’s hearing cause such that trade-ins always generate a discount and a donation to the children’s hearing cause.

But if they made the choice to turn this from a one-time promotion to a long-term loyalty and retention program, then they’d have to commit to staying in regular contact with customers, highlighting their work with the cause and reminding customers that when they buy their hearing aids from My Hearing Centers good is done for children.

One of those communication efforts is a must-do. Since they can probably predict with some degree of accuracy when they project a customer is ready for a new set of hearing aids they must communicate that when they’re ready to trade-in their old hearing aids that they will end up being well-used by needy children.

Happy Thanksgiving Cause Marketers

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, a holiday when we watch parades and American football before eating an enormous feast of turkey, ‘stuffing,’ mashed potatoes and gravy, and then chase it down with slabs of pumpkin pie with whipped cream.

Just yesterday I read how the original feast was perhaps 600 calories. Nowadays... the dietary nannies tell us... the Thanksgiving meal might tip the scale at 5 to 10 times as many calories.

That news almost makes me want to cut back. Almost.

Americans love this holiday. So do Canadians, who celebrate it on the second Monday in October.

We North Americans have done our level best to try and export the holiday, but with very limited success.

Historian Thomas Fleming tells how our British cousins opened up Westminster Abbey on November 26, 1942 during World War Two for a special Thanksgiving Day service for American servicemen and women, the first-time ever the cathedral had been used in that way.

Alas, while the 'Special Relationship' between the U.S. and the UK continues, Thanksgiving remains limited to the colonies.

Part of it, of course, is the holiday's backstory.

We Americans grew up with an elaborate and cherished myth that the first thanksgiving was celebrated when the Native Americans invited the Puritan Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock over for potluck around harvest time.

Every year historians, journalists and other amateur and professional skeptics chip away at the myth.

The latest involves a Spanish explorer named Pedro Menendez de Aviles who dined on bean soup with Native Americans in Florida some 56 years before the more famous meal at Plymouth Rock.

In time no doubt we’ll learn that Leif Ericson in fact broke bread with Native Americans in Labrador around 1000 AD and that the Basques shared their catch of salted cod with the Natives of New England well before the Columbian Exchange.

Nonetheless, Americans are pretty much undaunted by these revelations.

Here’s why: the holiday as we now celebrate it is just so beautiful. Families and friends gather. An enormous meal is prepared. We talk about what it is that we have to be grateful for at the dinner table. We feast. Many of us offer prayers of gratitude. We loosen our belts and take a nap. Then we go home with leftovers in plastic margarine containers.

For my part, I’m grateful to you my readers. Thanks for putting up with my rants. Thanks for disregarding my too frequent errors of spelling, grammar and logic. Thanks for leaving comments. Thanks for suggesting topics and sending examples of cause marketing from where you're from. And, thanks for practicing cause marketing wherever you are.

And, happy birthday Katie!

“It Ain’t Bragging If You Can Back It Up”

Kohl’s the Milwaukee-based department store with about 1130 stores in 49 states has raised $180 million for kids’ education and health through its cause marketing efforts, and with this ad in their weekly flyer they’re bragging a little.

That’s not an unrivaled amount of money for a company to generate via product sales cause marketing: VIVA GLAM is now north of $225 million in funding for HIV/AIDS; Newman’s Own is over $300 million; Geoffrey Beene is right around $150 million.

(Comment below with anyone I've missed).

But all those cause marketers had a jump on Kohl’s.

VIVA GLAM and Geoffrey Beene both started their cause marketing efforts in 1994. Newman’s Own was founded in 1982. By contrast, Kohl’s Care’s for Kids was launched in the year 2000.

Maybe a small brag isn’t out of line!

After all, like the great pitcher Dizzy Dean…the last Major Leaguer to win 30 games in a season…famously said, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.”

Kohl’s can plainly back it up.

Where does all that money go? Much ends up at children’s hospitals. But I was fascinated to see the following news item register on my radar late last week.

Kohl’s has made a $1.25 million sponsorship pledge to TED. Quoting from the press release, “as part of the partnership, Kohl’s will be the sole presenting sponsor of the inaugural TEDYouth event in New York on Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011 and will help TED launch TED-ED, a new resource on TED.com, providing free educational content for educators and students.”

My first reaction was, ‘imagine what a difference $1.25 million could have made to the www.khanacademy.org,’ the nonprofit online educational site with an existing library of more 2,700 lessons on everything from macroeconomics to microbiology. Ironically, all the lessons at the Khan Academy are taught by Salman Khan, who has spoken at TED.

But here’s Kohl’s thinking, again quoting from the press release.

“Kohl’s is committed to kids education and, at a time when school districts nationwide are feeling the pinch of budget cuts, we are partnering with TED to help bring free, exciting new educational opportunities and content to kids across the country,” said Julie Gardner, Kohl’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “TED presentations make learning fun and we believe the new programming created by our partnership will be compelling for kids and will help teachers who struggle to find great educational experiences with scarce resources.”

I hope Kohl's bet pays off.

Cause Marketing to Santa Babies

Huggies is back with another too cute version of their flagship brand of disposable diapers, this time based around Father Christmas. When you buy Huggies limited-edition ‘jeans’ or Santa diapers or baby wipes, Kimberly-Clark will donate as many as 21 million diapers to causes in the United States and Canada on the basis of one diaper per specially-marked package of diapers sold.

Certain social media interactions will also trigger a donation.

Huggies has run much the same promotion with their faux-denim 'jeans' diaper. As many as 17 million diapers will go to Feeding America, the large food bank, and as many as 2 million will go to Food Banks Canada. As many as another 2 million diapers will be spread amongst local diaper banks nationwide.

The promotion ends December 31, 2011.

As I noted back in May 2011, Huggies developed the basic campaign after conducting a survey in 2010 of mothers and their diaper needs. The study, called ‘Every Little Bottom’ was released in June 2010.

The study of more than 2,500 mothers included questions like “Keeping your child in a clean diaper is one of the most important things you can do for them as a mother.” And, “Changing you child’s diaper is a wonderful way of showing how much you love them.” And, “Have you ever done any of the following to ensure you could afford enough diapers for your child?” followed by a list of economizing measures mothers might make to keep diapers in their family budget.

Mothers overwhelming said yes to all three questions.

Needless to say, certain findings in the study represent something of a tightrope walk for Huggies, which carry a premium price. If disposable diapers are taking too big a chunk out of the family budget, why not shift to cloth diapers or cheaper competing brands?

Other questions in the survey address those very issues.

Not surprisingly, rather than dwell on any potential negatives for Huggies, the survey instead turns up the following facts that in turn inform the cause marketing campaign as it stands.

• 1 in 3 American moms have to “choose between diapers and other basic needs like food.”

• Moms struggling with diaper need are more likely to miss school or work.

• Babies that aren’t changed regularly “are more likely to experience signs of irritation and discomfort, cry more, and suffer from worse diaper rash.”

Sponsors don't often declare what lead them to a specific cause marketing campaign. But this Thanksgiving season, we can be glad that Kimberly-Clark showed its hand.

Cause Marketing In the Zeitgeist

Jay-Z, rapper, impresario, and would-be member of the Forbes 400 is in the news because his Rocawear line of clothing sold a T-shirt that co-opts the attention given to Occupy Wall Street, but fails to share with OWS any proceeds from sales.

Sacrebleu! Imagine the cheek of the fellow who “…has the political sensibility of a hood rat …To attempt to profit off of the first important social moment of 50 years with an overpriced piece of cotton is an insult to the fight for economic civil rights known,” as one OWS protester was quoted in Hollywood Reporter. The shirt has since been pulled from the Rocawear website.

It was not always such.

How people or businesses made their money hasn’t traditionally been a matter for the consumer decide other than with their dollars, so long as the commerce in question wasn’t illegal.

Of course there has always been a natural check on people who try to benefit themselves in unsavory ways, as anyone grew up in a small town can attest. But Jay-Z splits his time between urban centers on the East and West Coasts, not in the rural hinterlands.

Instead, what’s at work here is the burgeoning power of the consumer. The developed world has plenty of stuff, and the economy notwithstanding, the purchasing power to buy more. In a world of nearly endless consumer choices, we can afford to be discriminating.

Better still, we consumers can be trusted to make responsible choices, says James Livingston, author of the heterodox book “Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul.”

Writes Livingston in the December 2011 issue of Wired magazine, “when presented with real choices backed by discretionary income, you consumers typically do the right thing, whether it’s springing for a hybrid or shopping at the farmer’s market.”

Consumers don’t need Jay-Z’s sassy T-shirt, but they especially don’t need it if he’s not going to share the proceeds of the group he’s sassing.

The lesson is clear: the consumer culture is prepared to hold anyone to account, even hipsters like Jay-Z.

Helping More Causes Benefit from Crowd-Sourced Cause Marketing

I’m always a little bit chary of the many contests that offer a donation to charities that get the most votes, or Likes, or pageviews, or Tweets. Pepsi Refresh and American Express Members Project are prominent, but hardly the only examples of these kinds of Crowd-Sourced Cause Marketing promotions.

Maxwell House, a coffee brand from Kraft, does its own version of this Crowd-Sourced Cause Marketing called Drops of Good in partnership with the cause Rebuilding Together.

My problem is that such promotions so often become beg-a-thons, and pathetic ones at that. Since promotional money is always tight, only a relatively small handful of humble supplicants ever get funded. After 2.1 million votes, Maxwell House’s top grant was $10,000, which it gave to five communities. Another five got $5,000.

And because of the winners-take-all approach of most of these promotions, a charity that gets even a few hundred less votes than the finalists is basically out of luck with nary a consolation prize.

Now you could argue that a charity’s act of rallying support from its constituents for such promotions probably teaches the staff lessons about persuasion and friend-raising and cements goodwill among supporters.

But that’s a little like kissing your mom; comforting, but hardly romantic.

What if, as a consolation prize, Amex, Pepsi, Maxwell House and the many others left online a searchable list of all the causes who have been nominated over the years and included the details, some kind of comment feature, links and contact info?

It would serve as a kind of seal of approval, an imprimatur the causes could promote around. Just as a film will tout an actor who has been nominated for an Academy Award, a cause could promote the fact that it was nominated for a Pepsi Refresh prize.

The sponsor would have to puzzle over the questions of how long to leave it up, how to allow changes to entries, logo usage, what verbiage they’d permit nominated charities to use in promotions, etc.

The value to the charities would be modest. Maybe some Internet link-love from the sponsor and the occasional referral. But it would be better than nothing, which is what currently comes to those who finish out of the money.

But for the sponsor leaving the list up allows it to be in the company with hundreds or even thousands of causes.

And that’s the very essence of cause marketing.

Cause Marketing for Veteran's Causes Shows Support for Military Vets

In the lead-up to Veteran’s Day, held in the U.S. last Friday Nov. 11, 2011, Time magazine ran a cover package that concluded that the Americans and military veterans have never been further apart culturally.

Why? Well, the warrior culture and mainstream American culture don’t intersect much, the thinking goes. Many American political leaders have never served, in steep contrast to, say, the Vietnam War era when nearly 2/3rds had served in the military. And without a draft the all-volunteer military just doesn’t touch that many Americans.

Nonetheless Time’s conclusion struck me as reaching.

I myself was in the National Guard. My brother retired from the Air Force and one uncle died in the service. My father-in-law served a hitch in the Army. A business associate was in the Special Forces. An old roommate served several tours in Afghanistan as did a neighbor. J.R. Martinez, a wounded vet, is the odd-on favorite to win Dancing With the Stars this season. And my friend and fellow cause marketer Noland Hoshino is an Air Force vet.

And that brings me to cause marketing. Veteran’s causes are well represented in cause marketing. The Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University published a study that found that the cause that most resonates with Americans right now is supporting the troops, something several sponsors seem to have already understood.

Outback Steakhouse has long made cause marketing with a military theme a key piece of its promotional mix and community support. On Veteran’s Day veterans and active duty military got a free Bloomin’ Onion appetizer and non-alcoholic drink. Outback has also sent employee volunteers to the Middle East to feed the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010 Outback also had a special menu called “Red, White and Bloomin.’” When you ordered from that menu, Outback would make a donation to Operation Homefront. Outback’s donation to Operation Homefront came to $1 million in 2010.

The Georgetown study, called the Dynamics of Cause Engagement, found that 71 percent of American were very or somewhat knowledgeable about the topic of ‘supporting our troops’ while 39 percent were very or somewhat involved with the cause. The corresponding numbers for ‘feeding the hungry,’ the second highest scoring cause, were 65 percent and 39 percent. In general, Americans are more likely to be supportive of cause s that they are knowledgeable about.

Internet retailer O.co offers anyone with a .mil email account a free membership to Club O, a loyalty program. Members of Club O get free shipping, exclusive shopping events and “5 percent rewards dollars back on every purchase,” according to a media release from Overstock. The promotion was tied to Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 21, 2011. Overstock also has an existing relationship with the Wounded Warrior Project.

Even the little guy can get in on the action. The Eau Claire Express, a summer baseball team comprised of collegiate players, did a military night in their game May, 19, 2011. The Express played the game in camouflage jerseys and servicemen and woman received free admission. While the Express charges admission, the players can’t be paid or they would lose their amateur eligibility. So the Express commonly donates a portion of home game receipts to local schools, hospitals, Special Olympics, and the like.

Of course there’s much more cause marketing targeting military vets and active duty service men and women, including Chase’s efforts highlighted at the left.

We don’t treat our vets as well as we could. And we certainly don't understand warriors the way they understand each other. But Time magazine’s conclusions notwithstanding, all the veteran’s cause marketing demonstrates America has a soft gooey center when it comes to the military, veterans, and veteran’s causes.

Monetizing Your Cause’s Archives

Some causes have been around long enough that they have a mountainous inventory of really great communications items that could potentially be monetized. But how?

The challenge is more common than you might think. The Muscular Dystrophy Association is sitting on hundreds of hours of variety-show entertainment performed on its annual telethon since 1966. Assuming it owns clear rights to those performances, the MDA ought to be able somehow monetize that inventory. My old employer, the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, has similar if far less extensive inventory of entertainment performances.

Likewise the National 4-H Council has 110 years-worth of posters and the like commissioned from the best graphic artists of the day. I know because I’ve personally seen the tiniest fraction of it. Wouldn’t the 4-H Council love to realize some proceeds from its treasure trove of communications materials?

Long-standing causes like the Audubon Society, the March of Dimes, Federal Duck Stamps, and others almost certainly have asked how they can wrest money from their own extensive archives.

A firm in Seattle has one piece of the puzzle.

During the 1930s a number of American artists did work for the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and an alphabet soup of other federal government agencies meant to put people to work. There are fabulous murals in post offices and other Federal buildings of the era, for instance, and thousands of photographs including Dorothea Lange’s iconic ‘Migrant Mother,’ captured in 1936.

One of the agencies that benefited was the National Park Service. Between 1936 and 1941 the WPA commissioned at least 35,000 poster designs, although only a fraction of that was for the National Park Service. Now an online retailer called Ranger Doug Enterprises is selling reproductions of 16 vintage posters from the era along with contemporary posters designed in the old WPA style, and benefiting National Parks in the United States.

The 13” x 18” posters, both the 1930s era and their contemporary cousins sell at RangerDoug.com for $40. Ranger Doug Enterprises promises to give 1 percent of proceeds to the National Parks for arts education programs. Whether that’s in lieu of or in addition to any licensing fees isn’t clear.

For that matter, in this age of print-on-demand, a cause with a cool archive of communications materials that was willing to set up an e-commerce website could probably manage its own monetization strategy, or at least partner with a printer to print and fulfill orders.

Adding QR Codes to Chili's Create-A-Pepper Effort Gives Campaign Added Dimensions

If you add a QR-code to a paper icon campaign, just how many code scans can you expect?

Chili’s, the restaurant chain, added a QR code to its Create-A-Pepper paper icon which engendered 291,000 scans in September 2011. As of this writing, the Create-A-Pepper campaign generated $3,013,735 in donations to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital so far in 2011.

It’s tempting to conclude that almost 10 percent of people who bought a Create-A-Pepper paper icon also scanned the QR code, but it’s not quite that simple.

Not all the money from Create-A-Pepper campaign comes from the paper icons and Create-A-Pepper lasts longer than just September, which is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Moreover, Chili’s had a different QR code on other campaign marketing materials in restaurants which led people to a thank you from a St. Jude patient.

“As the latest trend in mobile technology, QR codes gave Chili’s a unique way to say thank you while encouraging guests to donate to the Create-A-Pepper to Fight Childhood Cancer campaign,” Chili’s spokeswoman Julie Flowers told Mobilecommercedaily.com.

“By incorporating the QR codes into this charitable campaign, it was a great way to relate to Chili’s tech-savvy guests while giving St. Jude supporters another, easily accessible way to donate to the charity,” she said.

But wait, there’s more.

Chili’s patrons who scanned a QR code and opted-in to receive emails got an unique trackable donation link they could send to friends and their social network. The more people who donated to St. Jude via the link, the more benefits…think free appetizers and desserts… accrued to the patron.

Smart!

My friend and fellow cause marketing blogger and author Joe Waters and I were once talking enviously about another one of St. Jude’s admirable and compelling cause marketing efforts. Joe said, St. Jude puts out ‘cause marketing porn.’

Here’s yet another case in point.

Cause Marketing from Dillard's That Doesn't Quite Fit

Dillard’s, the department store chain, has a cause marketing effort benefiting Feeding America that hits all the high points, until… cue the record scratch sound-effect… it doesn’t.

So what is Dillard’s doing right? It’s a pretty good list.

• First off Dillard’s choose a venerable cause marketing partner, Feeding America, which has an accomplished record in cause marketing and a vitally important mission.

• At $2 per transaction, the donation amount is generous.

• The promotion itself is activated through this ad in my local newspaper.

• There’s a QR code in the ad that leads to a video about Feeding America’s Give a Meal holiday campaign, so check off that cool tactical implementation.

• Dillard’s, which has about 300 stores across most of the country, specifically states that the total donation amount is as much as the value of $40,000 in meals, so mark off the transparency checkmark, too.

So far, so good.

But here’s where Dillard’s stumbles, the promotion in question is for bras, shapewear, sleepwear, and other lingerie items. Like I said, cue the record scratch sound-effect.

What do well-fitting bra and panties have to do with hunger? Darned if I can guess.

And that would be OK if Feeding America had as much affinity as, say, Susan G. Komen for the Cure or St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, both of which have enjoyed all kinds of outrageously unrelated cause marketing tie-ins over the years that were no problem because they generate so much affinity.

I’m not saying Feeding America can’t get to the point when bra fittings benefiting the charity don’t even raise an eyebrow from most people.

I’m just saying I don’t think they’re there yet.

Join the Cause Marketing Blog Google Newsgroup, Get a Tool You Can Use Today

Kind Readers:

William F. from Tampa, Florida is the latest to join the Cause Marketing Google Newsgroup.

It couldn’t be easier to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

When you subscribe each new post comes directly to your email, usually every business day.

And like William, when you subscribe I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix that 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.

Rest assured that I will never sell your name or contact information.

So join today.


Warm regards,

Paul
Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Is it Time for Share Our Strength to Rebrand?

On the heels of yesterday's post about rebranding the two big label campaigns benefiting education, in today's post I show how when one anti-hunger charity rebranded itself, it doubled in size, while another anti-hunger charity is also growing, if less impressively, under its old branding.

The nation’s largest anti-hunger charity, Feeding America, has been knocking it out of the park in terms of its fundraising since its rebranding in September 2008.

Here are the numbers: In 2008 it raised $577 million; in 2009 it raised $639 million; in 2010 $706 million; and for fiscal year 2011 it generated $1.2 billion. For those of you keeping score at home, Feeding America has doubled in size since its rebranding, and in the teeth of the worst recession in America in a generation.

Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger charity that focuses on children, has also been quickly growing. In 2008 it raised around $14 million (not including results from its subsidiary called Community Wealth Ventures), in 2010 revenue was just less than $26 million and David Slater, the nonprofit's director of communications, tells me they're on pace to raise $34 million in 2011.

It would be intellectually dishonest not to point out that Feeding America’s donation numbers are inflated by the amount of in-kind donations it receives. By the same token, it's very much easier to double the size of $14 million charity in four years than a $577 million charity in the same time frame.

In terms of its brand, Share Our Strength is kind of a mess. There’s the cuteness with the S.O.S acronym, even though Share Our Strength hasn’t openly embraced it in at least a decade. Regardless, the full name just doesn’t mean much in an age of search-engine literalness. Before it rebranded, Feeding America was known as “America’s Second Harvest,’ which, like Share Our Strength, is both wonderfully aspirational and delightfully nondescript.

Then there’s the logo which I find too precious. Oh, I see the faces. But I can’t figure out what an apple core has to do with helping to feed hungry children. There’s just too many negative ways to read that visual for it to communicate effectively.

Share Our Strength works to build the capacity of local organizations to feed hungry children. It doesn’t actually send food anywhere… that’s what Feeding America is all about.

Feeding America is more about tactical day-to-day feeding of the hungry. Share Our Strength's approach is more strategic. Both nonprofits have worthy missions. But Share Our Strength is better positioned to positively effect the long-term future of hunger in America.

Too bad Share Our Strength’s current branding doesn’t better reflect the strength of its position.

Time for Labels and Boxtops for Education to Rebrand for Growth?

For some time now the two big prominent label collection efforts, General Mills Boxtops for Education and the much more senior and yet smaller Label’s for Education... founded by Campbell’s... have opened their respective campaigns to non-competing brands. It’s the classic win-win.

In so doing, they broaden their exposure and increase the amount of possible funds raised for schools. I suspect Campbell’s and General Mills also broaden their cost structure.

Meanwhile, the new partners are happy to participate with either of these well-established efforts because all the groundwork has long since been laid down and because both efforts enjoy strong relationships with tens of thousands of schools nationwide.

To get to this point both of the original sponsors have made efforts to erase their names from the efforts. ‘Boxtops’ is no longer named for General Mills. Label’s no longer features Campbell’s name or branding.

With all that now behind them one of label campaigns has the opportunity to take it to the next step by stripping out the increasingly anachronistic nouns in their names; ‘boxtops’ and ‘labels.’

Boxtops for Education participants now include such non-boxed items as Green Giant broccoli, Boise printer paper, and Hefty paper plates and platters. The ad at the left announces that seven Time, Inc. magazines titles have now joined Labels for Education campaign. Clip the UPCs from the magazines and take them to the schools; just the same as clipping the Label’s for Education seals off containers of Emerald nuts or Glad storage bags.

Plenty of brands have made this kind of transition. When it was becoming a computer company way back in the 1940s and 1950s, International Business Machines was hampered by its name, so it became IBM. Kentucky Fried Chicken wanted to get away from all three of its names, so it became KFC.

Making your name an acronym is the easiest way to rebrand. BFE and LOE don’t exactly sing. But neither did AT&T the first time anyone heard it.

‘Boxtops’ or ‘Labels’ could go all the way and completely rename their efforts. I won’t suggest any names, but it would be fun to help them rename their campaigns.

Why would they bother?

Think back on the IBM and AT&T examples. How does IBM sell business services if its name still says ‘Machines’? How does AT&T sell wireless telephony if its name still says ‘Telegraph’?

To be more pointed, how does Boxtops expand its effort to companies that don't have boxes?

The counter argument is that Labels for Education and Boxtops for Education have decades of built-in brand equity. There’s no denying that.

But more valuable still is all the infrastructure both efforts have in their relationships with tens of thousands of schools nationwide. Leaving aside Scholastic, what other brand can you name that is literally in every school in the country and for whom schools and parents both have largely positive feelings?

Given that, Boxtops and Labels could both be much bigger if they were willing to jettison their legacy names.

What if Denny’s Threw a Cause Marketing Fundraiser and Everyone Showed Up?

Denny’s, the restaurant chain with about 1550 outlets across the country, wants your nonprofit to hold its fundraiser at one of their restaurants. When you book an event there, Denny’s will donate “10% of pre-tax sales generated by your group” back to your cause, church, team, school, club, advocacy group or fraternity/sorority.

This is familiar ground trod by plenty of restaurants, both chains and single-store outlets alike. As I’ve written before, bookstores, office supply chains, even bakeries could do the same promotion.

My question is, why limit the promotion to just causes?

Seriously, is there any reason why Denny’s shouldn’t extend the same deal to any group of, say, a dozen or more people, for-profit or not-for-profit?

That is, when a dozen or more people in your firm meet for a meal at Denny’s, then a donation of 10 percent of pre-tax sales generated by your group goes to a favored cause.

I’m guessing Denny’s has to cut a check for the donation. So what’s the difference between cutting a check and sending it to a cause when the donation was generated by a for-profit group or a by nonprofit group?

Let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that if a 15 construction guys from the same company come in to Denny’s for breakfast that they get a 10 percent discount or kickback. The 10 percent still goes to a charity. The only difference is that the promotion is opened up to other sizable groups.

Denny’s could either have a defined universe of charities it supports or it could cut a check to any 501(c)(3). The former would be easier, but the later isn’t impossible given the number of databases of causes.

Denny’s would certainly want to set some kind of threshold for the number of people in a party. I’m suggesting 12, but Denny’s knows what that number ought to be. Denny’s might ask that the bill be paid on one check or that require that the group give advance notice so they can staff appropriately.

Why would Denny’s entertain such an option?

Well, the regular promotion almost certain is meant to increase the number of people who eat at their stores. By extending the promotion to regular for-profit groups, Denny’s greatly expands the number of people who might participate in the promotion. Likewise, the number of causes that would be benefited would also increase.

Five Pieces of Unsolicited Cause Marketing Advice to Actor Hugh Jackman

Versatile action star and Broadway song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman has started a new ‘all-benefits company’ that he explicitly says was inspired by Newman’s Own.

Here’s five bits of entirely unsolicited cause marketing advice to Mr. Jackman from yours truly.

1. Put Your Face On the Packaging. I don’t know what Laughing Man means and probably most of your potential customers don’t either. Speaking of Newman and yourself, you told Entertainment Weekly magazine, “This is a really great to, uh, exploit your popularity, basically. It is shameless exploitation.” Except the name Laughing Man is hardly shameless exploitation of your celebrity. To really be shameless and to get the most bang for your buck, you need to put the face of one of World’s Most Beautiful People on the packaging of Laughing Man.

2. Turn Your Face Into a Caricature. Brands including Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, KFC, the Quaker Oats Quaker dude and even Paul Newman are all represented by illustrated characters. Betty Crocker looks different now than she did even 10 years ago. As an illustrated character Paul Newman could wear a chef’s toque or a beret or an apron. Making yourself into a caricature allows you to distance yourself a little from the brand, remain ageless. It means you don’t have to do new photo shoots every time you roll out a new product, just a new drawing. And it allows your brand to survive even after your death.

3. By All Means Continue to Tell Stories on The Packaging. Right now the packaging for Laughing Man tells the stories of the farmers and small businesspeople that the company works with and for. By adding your cartoon visage, I’m not suggesting that you get rid of those important back stories. You can and should keep them. I once did an informal study of the packaging for premium food brands and found that they had at least 20 percent more words on them than non-premium brands. Remember what the direct mail guys say: “tell more, sell more.”

4. Find Your Complementary Partner. Newman’s longtime partner was novelist and playwright A.E Hotchner. Read either of their the two books they wrote together to get a sense about their working dynamics on Newman’s Own. But it seems clear that Hotchner and Newman complemented each other greatly. You can’t do this all on your own. You need a partner who can do things you can’t or won’t do.

5. Be Prepared to Do this ‘til You Die. In his later years Newman joked that he was better known for Newman’s Own than for his acting career. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But it is true that Newman spent much more time in his role as an indefatigable social entrepreneur and philanthropist than he did in other role except as a husband and father. He was still personally approving and distributing the company’s profits until just two years before his death.

Finally, and this is a bonus suggestion; figure out how to sell goods manufactured in Africa under your brand. Africa, especially, has a very small manufacturing base. It’s a great benefit to Africa’s small farmers to buy their chocolate and tea and coffee beans. But you could bring still more money and benefit to Africa if you could figure out how to have those and other items manufactured there.

Best wishes! I genuinely hope you do at least as well as Newman’s Own, which has donated more than $300 million to charity since 1982.

Head Scratching Cause Marketing

Almost two weeks ago I was in a local two-store pizza chain and my kids found the handcard at the left for me.

But what they found wasn’t immediately clear to me.

At first glance, I thought it might be a way to drive cause marketing to smaller retail establishments, something I’ve called for in the past.

A second glance made me think it might be a cause marketing powered inducement for customers to give some feedback.

Indeed, that is the intent. But a cause marketing appeal is not the actual inducement.

Instead ‘Businesses that Matter,’ the name on the handcard, is a subset of Deals that Matter, a Groupon competitor that offers to donate 15 percent of their proceeds to causes you care about. When you sign up, Deals that Matter lets you name your preferred charity for the donation.

So what is Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals’ logo doing there on something that seemingly doesn’t directly benefit the charity?

From Deals that Matter’s perspective it’s there to suggest at their bona fides. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has been around for coming up on 30 years. Deals that Matter appears to be about a year old. Of the two partners in this relationship Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has much more credibility.

What does Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals get out of the deal?

That’s a darn fine question.

Right now this is an asymmetrical relationship. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals is almost certainly giving more than its getting, although Deals that Matter is listed on the charity’s sponsor page as a ‘Fundraising Partner.’

It could be that Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals is investing in a company its managers think has the chance to grow.

Whatever the case, I can tell you that when I was at what was then called “Children’s Miracle Network” we would have never done a deal like this unless we received no less than $50,000 from the would-be sponsor.

The Winter Doesn't Mean the End to Outdoor Fundraising Events

The snow has already begun to fly here in the northern hemisphere, so that means all those outdoor charity walks, runs, races, golf tournaments and such are done everywhere except in the sunbelt until Spring 2012, right?

Not so fast, Jack Frost.

In fact, plenty of opportunities remain for outdoor events during the cold winter months. You just need to think outside the Summer equinox box.

For instance, I’m helping a friend with a first of December fun-run benefiting the local homeless shelter. Weather in my neck of the woods can be pretty dicey in December. But that will be part of the fun because the short run will pass by the State’s biggest Christmas-lights lighting ceremony.

I’ve heard of snowmobile rallies, cross-country and downhill ski fundraisers, ice skating events, polar bear plunges, ice fishing tourneys, even golfing in the snow!

Add one more. A series of snowshoe events from Tubbs, which makes snowshoes.

Starting in January 2012 at nine locations in Canada and the United States you can participate in Stubbs Romp to Stomp (a fun name which puts me in the mind of the old Led Zeppelin song ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’).

In Canada the event benefits the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (CBCF) and in the U.S. it benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Early registration ends November 15, 2011.

Stubbs Romp to Stomp has generated $1.7 million for Komen in its 10 years. The events last year drew more than 6,200 participants and raised $450,000.

The events are set up almost exactly like any Komen Race for the Cure events. You can participate as a team or individual and there’s a fitness program to get in shape for the event. Money is generated by participants seeking pledges, entry fees, and local sponsors.

The only real difference is the snow!

So put on a warm thinking tocque and figure out how to fundraise in the cold.

"Help the World's Women and Girls." Website Tells You How Many Slaves You Employ

I am reading the book ‘Half the Sky’ right now, a powerful and deeply affecting book about the plight of women and girls in the developing world by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book addresses four major threats to being female in the developing world; high maternal mortality, human trafficking, which can be understood in most cases as slavery; sexual violence; and mundane daily discrimination against girls and women.

Kristof and WuDunn, a husband and wife team, are loathe to recite the statistics because as all of us with fundraising backgrounds know, statistics tend to numb people’s minds and force them into non-action. Instead they tell story after story of individual heroines and victims both. I urge you to read their book.

I don’t have their discipline so I’ll cite one statistic from ‘Half the Sky,’ which I see as a sort of capstone. Thanks to routinized discrimination, violence and neglect perpetrated against women and girls there are at least 50 million females missing from the world, and maybe closer to 100 million!

As a husband and father of daughters, that sickens me.

How different the developing world is from the United States where it is men and boys who are, thanks to a variety of factors, struggling.

The bottom line for me is that I’m committing myself to help the plight of girls and women in the developing world. If that sounds vague and nonspecific, it's because I’m still figuring out what to do and how I can help.

This much is certain, in too much of the world girls and women are abused, trafficked, mutilated, enslaved, and even murdered for largely cultural reasons. Every bit of this is immoral and wrong. It must not be allowed to continue and I can’t sit idly by while it happens, even if I’m not sure yet what I ought to do.

At the very least, I will use this blog to tell stories and, when and where appropriate, rally support.

All posts on the topic will be headlined under the rubric: "Help the World's Women and Girls."

My first post on the topic is about an intriguing project from two ad agencies that are working in conjunction with the nonprofit called Call + Response to raise awareness about 21st century slavery. When you visit www.slaveryfootprint.org you can get an approximation of the number of people it takes, working in forced labor, to maintain your modern lifestyle.

The online calculator takes you through 11 screens and asks questions about you, your lifestyle and your possessions. You can either go through the questions with certain predetermined presets or you can get very specific and name, for instance, the number of suits and leather shoes that you own.

My slavery footprint was 65, which was very unsettling.

www.slaveryfootprint.org is especially well-designed and the methodology seems rigorous, if perhaps not entirely bullet-proof.

It’s available as an app, on Facebook and you can certainly Tweet it out, as I will.

Check it out and see where you stand.

Companies that Rank High in CSR Also Known for Cause Marketing

On October 18 2011 I wrote a post about the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2011 CSR Index and how by my reckoning six of the top ten and 33 of the 50 companies listed did at least some cause marketing. A few days later reader Jessica Marlo left the following comment.

"It really bothers me that you can't share this information with the rest of us! What companies make up the the "six" of the top ten and "33" of the 50? Sheesh!"

I left the list out of the post not to perturb Jessica or anyone else, but because most such lists tend to be like chloroform in print; real snoozers.

But I promised Jessica that I’d post the list. So fortify yourself with a good strong belt of caffeine and plow in.

Now, this is admittedly idiosyncratic. Some of these firms may have done cause marketing that I’m unaware of. By the same token, the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has more than 5,000 cause marketing images. I don’t see all the cause marketing in North America much less the world, but I see a lot of it.

Likewise, this is a list of cause marketing. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Caterpiller… number 19 on the Boston College list… does a benefit golf tournament somewhere for a worthy charity or two. But that’s not cause marketing. Likewise Texas Instruments… number 15… is almost certainly a generous corporate philanthropist. But that’s not cause marketing either.

I’ve counted as cause marketers companies whose subsidiaries do cause marketing. Berkshire Hathaway, which is basically a big stock index, gets counted because subsidiaries like Dairy Queen do cause marketing.

What follows is the Boston College list redacted to include only the 33 that I know for a fact do cause marketing. The number at the left represents where they finished on Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2011 CSR Index. The number at the right is Boston College’s cumulative score. The full list is here.

If you feel like I’ve mislabeled any company herein, please let me know. Comment below or send me an email at aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

1 Publix Super Markets Inc. 80.59
2 Google 77.10
4 Kellogg’s 76.16
6 Berkshire Hathaway 75.78
7 FedEx 75.73
8 Campbell Soup Company 75.40
11 Johnson & Johnson 74.49
12 The Walt Disney Company 74.35
13 Coca-Cola Bottlers 74.14
14 Hershey Company 74.06
17 Clorox 73.88
18 Microsoft 73.87
21 Lowe’s Home Improvement 73.53
22 Procter & Gamble 73.46
23 Kraft Foods Inc. 73.31
24 PepsiCo 73.31
25 Toys ‘R’ Us 73.30
26 Home Depot 73.24
27 Quaker Oats 72.94
29 Target 72.78
30 Avon Products 72.73
31 Timberland Company 72.50
32 General Mills 72.31
33 Kohl’s 72.19
34 Whirlpool 72.17
35 CVS Caremark 72.10
37 Macy’s, Inc. 72.00
43 Costco Wholesale 71.53
44 BMW 71.44
45 Dannon 71.31
47 Staples 71.31
48 Dean Foods 71.18
49 Samsung Electronics 71.16