Cause Marketing Your Bowl Game

Two of the 35 bowl games held this season… the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl… overtly use cause marketing to appeal to fans.

In the United States the college football season basically ends the first week in December. The bowl games are a series of post-season contests featuring teams that don’t normally play one another. The Armed Forces Bowl, which airs at noon today (ET), for instance, pits BYU against Tulsa, which have played against each other just seven times.

Bowl games are festive, even indulgent affairs. Team members and coaches get the full VIP treatment. There’s plenty of food, marching bands, pep rallies, cheerleaders and in a handful of cases, parades. At the Armed Forces Bowl the cheerleaders and mascots pay a visit to the Cook Children’s Hospital.

The Armed Forces Bowl is meant to call attention to members of the military, present and past, active duty and reserves. “The Dallas-Fort Worth based bowl game has featured a military theme since 2006,” press notes say. “Patriotic overtones recognizing all five branches of the military are prevalent throughout the game. Past Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowls have included fan-fest areas showcasing military hardware; flyovers; demonstrations by several of the military’s top skydiving teams; on-field induction ceremonies; military bands and honor guards; and the awarding of the annual "Great American Patriot Award" (GAPA) presented by Armed Forces Insurance."

At today’s game the honoree at halftime will be Salvatore Giunta, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, one of only 85 currently living.

Bell Helicopter is a brand of Textron, a defense contractor and aircraft manufacturer.

Kraft has been promoting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, which airs Dec. 31., as a culmination of its efforts on behalf of Feeding America. On Tuesday, Dec. 27, Kraft announced at press event that it was donating more than 25 million meals to Feeding America. Last year, the first for Kraft’s sponsorship of the bowl, the company donated 21 million meals.

Starting in August, Kraft drew on a number of football greats along with celebrity chefs Pat and Gina Neely, whose faces graced a number of ads during the course of the season. That's them at the left in an ad from People magazine.

“To further support the mission of the bowl,” promotional materials say, “organizers are donating a meal for every ticket sold, as well as in the name of every player participating in the game. Players and coaches from the University of Illinois and UCLA also plan to volunteer at Bay Area food pantries on Friday.”

Of the two, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl is much better marketed, and more of a pure-play cause marketing effort. That’s probably because ESPN owns the Armed Forces Bowl and treats it like just another media property. By contrast the San Francisco Bowl Game Association owns the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and appears to have turned over all the marketing to Kraft.

It’s a clever use of a bowl game, by Kraft. But they do walk a sponsorship tightrope here.

The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl is at best a second tier bowl game. That’s why they could so fully take over the marketing. By the same token, in most years it features teams with mediocre records. This year’s contest pits Illinois, which is 6-6, against UCLA which at 6-7 has a losing record! So on game day itself, Kraft is marketing to a pretty small TV audience in a baseball stadium (AT&T Park in San Francisco) whose capacity is just 40,184.

Of course, neither contest is the first to mashup a bowl game with a cause. That honor goes to the East-West Shrine Game, an all-star game that features college seniors and benefits Shriner’s Hospitals for Children. The East-West Shrine Game debuted in 1925!

The next game takes place on January 21, 2012 and sponsorships are still available.

Seven Simple Steps Cause Marketers Should Take Before the End of the Year

The end of the year is fast approaching and with it your final opportunity to improve yourself as a cause marketer. Here are seven simple-steps you could do in the next 30 minutes to improve your cause marketing career before year end.

• Make an Appointment for Early 2012 with Your Opposite Number at the Charity or Sponsor. Finish reading this list then call your partner at the cause or sponsor you work with and plan a casual meeting. The explicit purpose of the meeting, whether you admit to or not, is to help improve your personal relationship with this person, even if the relationship is already good. Here’s why: much rests on how well you work with your colleague. If you two don’t work well together your career could suffer and you’ll be less likely to achieve key goals.

• Create a Swipe File. Smart copywriters keep a file of proven and tested sales copy, letters, ‘packages,’ and the like. You should swipe this idea. Only, load it up with cause marketing examples. Your swipe file could be something electronic like Dropbox or a wiki. Or an actual paper file. Or both. Either way, load it up with cause marketing you admire or could adapt for your own purposes.

• Review the Best of Lists. Everyone has a best of list. Mine will appear in this space on Jan 3. Read them for ideas, for new thinking, and to get a sense not only what went right, but what went wrong and why.

• Commit to Continued Cause Marketing Education. Education and self-education determines how successful your cause marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income and your lifespan. Some studies have even shown a correlation between happiness and education. Cause marketing is so dynamic you must commit to continued education in the practice.

• Create a Cause Marketing RSS Feed. Think of RSS as feedstock for your swipe file.

• Open a Correspondence with a Cause Marketer You Admire. There’s somebody out there who has the answer to your future cause marketing questions. But don’t wait until the question arises to track someone down. Begin to cultivate relationships with skilled and experienced cause marketers right now.

• Make a Year end Charitable Donation. Don’t tell me you gave at the office. That’s lame. Cause marketers should be active charitable donors. Give to your own cause, for sure. But find other charities to admire and donate to them as well. Then watch how they communicate with you. Learn about how they position their cause in a noisy marketplace. Get a sense for what they do well, and what they don't.

The Importance of Proximity in Cause Marketing Relationships

AutoZone, the car parts dealer with more than 4500 stores across the United States is headquartered in Memphis Tennessee. So too is St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Not surprisingly AutoZone is a cause marketing supporter of St. Jude. Fedex, another Memphis-based company sponsors the St. Jude Classic, a PGA Tour event held each year at the TPC Southwind golf course, also in Memphis.

It isn’t always the case that cause marketing tie-ins take place between companies and causes in the same area code. For instance, another of St Jude’s sponsors is Target, headquartered 700 miles upriver in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

But if you’re a cause looking to start a cause marketing relationship a logical place to look for cause marketing sponsors is in your own backyard.

Here’s five reasons why:

• The prospect is more likely to take your call. Locality improves the chance that the sponsor will respond.

• You probably already know someone there or can more easily make a connection than if the prospect is some distance away.

• The people at your prospect sponsor are more likely to understand and care about your cause. A local museum probably doesn’t have to explain what sets them apart to a company in the same city. AutoZone probably has staff and executives whose kids have been treated at St. Jude.
  

• The development cycle is faster. You could pass an idea by a would-be sponsor over coffee at Starbucks. If they’re lukewarm, you can be back at your desk later that morning working on the next iteration.

• A yes is easier because there's less friction. Proximity leads to trust. In the case above, when you buy a Polar Bottle with a picture of your pet imprinted on the bottle, the company made a $5 donation to the local Humane Society chapter. The promotion ended just before Christmas. Who can doubt that the promotion was enabled in part by the fact that Polar Bottle is less than a mile away from the Human Society of Boulder Valley?

Swearing For a Cause

Got a potty mouth on Twitter combined with a yen to do good? You may want to sign up for Charity Swearbox.

Here’s how it works: After you sign up every time you use a bad word on Twitter, Charity Swearbox takes note. At the end of the month they send you a notice along with a suggested donation. The default amount is $1 per word, but that’s a suggestion only.

Charity Swearbox has whole host of tweets with naughty words. So don’t go there if you’re offended by profanity.

Currently four causes benefit from Charity Swearbox: Eff Cancer, 50/50, an aid effort for famine victims in East Africa, BeatBullying, and Instrument Lenders Canada. Charity Swearbox is actively looking for other charity beneficiaries, too. So far Charity Swearbox has generated $38,147.

This is the kind of grassroots cause marketing/fundraising that’s only possible with the advent of cheap social networks. And, of course, it’s way more accurate than the self-policing version like the picture at the left.

Another difference from the old analog version of the swear jar is that if you Tweet out a bad word it’s premeditated in a way that verbal swearing may not be. In other words, Charity Swearbox members might be swearing for a cause!

@jaylardi tops the leaderboard with $28 in donations. Lest you think he is particularly profane, @jaylardi signed up 124 days ago and has 1842 Tweets in that time. He averages one profanity approximately every 74 Tweets.

Great job @jaylardi. Keep up the good work!

Merry Christmas From the Cause Marketing Blog

The long-standing Christmas Eve tradition at the cause marketing blog is to show the video of the prior year’s appearance of Darlene Love singing 'Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)' on the Late Show with David Letterman. You can see Love’s 2010 appearance above.

Indeed, she's scheduled to perform on Letterman again tonight, Friday Dec. 23, 2011. Check your local listings for times.

Love first recorded ‘Baby’ in 1963 and is still going strong at age 73 (according to Wikipedia). Watch the video and you’ll know not only why they (finally) inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2011, but you'll wonder how Love could possibly be 73.

But surely there’s a rocking good Christmas song that’s less 30 than years old (‘We Are the World’ doesn’t count because, God bless 'em, Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson didn't write an actual rock song. For the same reason, 'Feed the World' doesn't fit the criteria either).

The good news is that I found a Christmas song that actually rocks and is right around 30 years old. That is to say, I remembered this great song from rocker Billy Squier when he performed it on MTV in December 1981 (when I was about 7 months old). Watch closely for MTV’s original VJ’s: Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, JJ Jackson, Mark Goodman, and Alan Hunter.

When I played the song for my wife, she vaguely remembered it. But her first reaction was: "wow, Billy Squier has got a great voice!"

So in 2010 I added Squier’s ‘Christmas is the Time to Say I Love You’ to the blog's Christmas tradition.

Here's 2 more additions for 2011.

The first is for those who like their Christmas music with a strong dose of irony. It's called 'Twist of the Magi' by the country sister-act SHeDAISY and features Rascal Flats.

I'm not a big fan of country music, least of all when it comes to Christmas music, but this is my exception. There's no video, but here's the audio track.

The last addition for 2011 is my favorite Christmas song, 'O Holy Night,' which is based on an old French carol. The recording I've posted is sung with real depth of emotion by Josh Groban.
The best verse is about social justice, and, therefore, entirely appropriate to the cause marketing blog.

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise us,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Many suffer this holiday season. Now and in the New Year please be generous with your time and resources to help those in need.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Adding a Seal Campaign to Your Cause Marketing Repertoire

‘Seal’ campaigns defy easy categorization in cause marketing. They’ve been around forever. Witness the American Dental Association (ADA) Seal of Acceptance which dates from 1930.

Strictly speaking seal campaigns are a kind of licensing deal. Generally they involve pre-set criteria and or testing.

(The even older Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval was begun by the magazine of the same name in 1900 and the Underwriter’s Laboratories first opened its doors in 1894. Both were founded as for-profit entities).

If your product or service meets the criteria and passes applicable tests you are eligible to apply to display the seal of approval/acceptance. Usually the license involves a fee, sometimes a hefty one.

And like sponsoring the Olympics, all paying the licensing fee does is give you the right to spend more money on activating the deal! If other forms of cause marketing are a kind of partnership, seal campaigns are more like a business deal.

For the most part if you meet the criteria and pay your fee, what you get from the provider of the seal is a contract, a logo, and a usage guide.

The handful of seal providers that publish magazines might also periodically list the companies or products that received their seal. The Campbell's Healthy Request ad at left appeared in More magazine.

If you’re a sponsor, you have to decide what it’s worth to display a seal from a reputable provider. But if you’re a charity or an association, especially in the health field, it might be worth it to explore the idea of a seal campaign to broaden your range of cause marketing 'inventory.'

The ADA, Underwriter’s Laboratory and, to a degree, Good Housekeeping maintain laboratories and physically test items. The ADA tests to see if items in question do what they profess to do. UL famously tests for safety. Since items that bear the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval carry a 2-year warranty, Good Housekeeping tests for efficacy.

But your seal campaign needn’t require a laboratory. I’d be willing to bet that the American Heart Association certification only requires that Campbell’s contractually assert that its Healthy Request soups fall within the guidelines the organization has set for sodium, cholesterol and fat per serving. I’d be surprised to learn that the Heart Association actually tests Campbell’s Healthy Request soups.

Likewise, the certification of the Burt’s Bees toothpaste from the Natural Products Association probably only requires the company to legally declare that the ingredients in the toothpaste meet the Association’s criteria as natural.

This is not to say the certifications from the Heart Association or Natural Products Association are unscientific or illegitimate in any way. The American Heart Association has spent tens of millions of dollars determining healthy amounts of sodium and fat and cholesterol in food. The Association’s seal campaign, therefore, helps them leverage that research.

Could your nonprofit launch a seal effort? That depends in part on the degree to which your nonprofit possess key scientific understanding that could be monetized with a seal.

The Business Value of Serving as a Drop-Off Point for Food or Christmas Gifts

There's just a few more donation days before Christmas for your local food bank... or Toys for Tots, or Sub for Santa, or the Salvation Army’s Giving Tree... and this ad that appeared in a Walgreen sales flyer in late November made me wonder about the business value to a retailer or firm of serving as a drop-off point.

Here’s what I came up with:

Publicity
Walgreens got a little positive publicity from the Ellen DeGeneres Show. You might get something similar in your local market if your local Giving Tree or Sub for Santa effort has media sponsorship.

New Sales
Walgreens put the ad on the same page as a spread of fairly inexpensive toys, the subconscious message being that if you’re of the mind to do so, you could just buy one or more of these toys and deposit it in the collection barrel.

Likewise, if you’re outlet is a grocery store, someone could certainly add a couple extra cans of tuna or chili con carne to their shopping cart and drop them off in the food bank’s bin on your way out.

Increased Foot Traffic
If your business is an insurance office or a dry cleaner or another kind of service-based storefront that doesn’t generate a lot of foot traffic, then you’d probably be well served by some kind of matching program. That is, “with every can of food you drop off at Acme Dry Cleaners, we’ll match it can for can.”

Bounceback
Once in your doors, you’d want to do couponing or sampling some other tactic to get people to come back to your business. As in, “Drop off an unwrapped toy at Salazar Brothers Insurance and we’ll give you a free smartphone calendar app that stores important birthdays, anniversaries, and other reminders, including when renewals are due.”

Engaging Your Employees I think there’s also value in enlisting support from your employees. Unless you have a well-developed internal distribution system, chances are someone from your office will probably have to collect the items and deliver them to the Salvation Army or Toys for Tots or the food bank.

If someone agrees to volunteer for a half-day or a day, pay them for their volunteer work. People love the sense that they’re valuable to your company. But even more people… Millennials especially… crave the feeling that they’re contributing to the greater good. People with a generous impulse want to volunteer, but extra time during the holidays is always in short supply. So if they can volunteer while on the clock, so much the better.

Associate Your Company With a Respected Nonprofit Brand
Everyone loves the Salvation Army. Pound for pound the Sally Ann is one of the most efficient and effective charities around. My local food bank is almost as highly esteemed in my community. Why wouldn't your company want to be associated with causes like that? Especially since your expense for doing so is almost nil. By making your storefront a drop-off point, you enjoy a small halo effect of being associated with a venerable charity.

Christmas Cause Marketing from Lockheed Martin

Unless you subscribe to some publication like the Army Times or Aviation Week and Space Technology, or you frequent the Yellow or Blue lines of the Washington D.C. Metro subway on the Virginia side of the Potomac, chances are you don’t often see much advertising from military contractors. But this is Christmas. And to hear Lockheed Martin tell it, sometimes Santa himself needs their C-130 aircraft to see that needy kids have toys to play with come Christmas Day.

The ad features Lockheed Martin employees supporting Toys for Tots, a charitable effort of the US Marine Corp Reserve.

With revenues of $47 billion in 2010, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest defense contractors in the world with specialties in aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft. On the left side of the ad you see a photo of a row of C-130s, which the company has produced since the 1950s.

Quoting a Mother Jones article, Wikipedia says that Lockheed received 7 percent of all the funds paid out by the Pentagon in 2009.

I don’t have a problem per se with defense contractors doing cause marketing or advertising their support of a cause like Toys for Tots. But I do wonder why they did it so poorly.

I found this ad in the Dec. 5 issue of Time magazine, not on a billboard face at one of the subway stops near the Pentagon. And yet to read it, you’d swear you were reading one of their dry B2B out-of-home ads that litter stops on the Blue and the Yellow lines.

For instance, the headline speaks of the call of ‘duty,’ which is powerful imagery in the military, but less so for readers of Time magazine, much less Joe Six-Pack.

The last sentence of the body copy may be the most telling: “Of all the missions our aircraft perform around the world, delivering holiday joy is definitely the happiest.”

(It must have taken all the self-restraint the Lockheed Martin copywriter had not to use the phrase ‘mission-critical’ in that sentence).

But the ad doesn’t really support the assertion that Lockheed Martin aircraft delivers holiday joy.

There’s nothing in the ad that tells us how the C-130 has been used as a ‘flying sleigh.’ Has a C-130 has ever been loaded up with toys donated by Lockheed Martin and its employees to deliver to kids in the developing world, or to an American Indian reservation, or a poor urban center? This ad is mute on that count.

But if Lockheed Martin has done something like that, well, then, that’s 10 times the ad that this one is.

1 Exemplary Cause Marketing Effort, 4 Activations

Last Saturday found me Christmas shopping and in two very different retail settings I came across examples of St. Jude’s Thanks + Giving effort, which are integrated in an exemplary fashion.

At the left is an ad from Entertainment Weekly magazine for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital which activates the Thanks + Giving effort with the call to action, “This Holiday, give thanks for the healthy kids in your life, and give to those who are not.”

Sponsors support their participation in Thanks + Giving with in-store promotions. I bought the gift card at the left at my nearby Old Navy where I had a choice between several versions of these kids’ art cards. Aside from the gift cards, the Old Navy I went to had little else that demonstrated their support of Thanks + Giving.

By contrast, at AutoZone where I picked up a new lamp for my car’s headlights, Thanks + Giving was evident in several places. The front doors had a window cling that announced AutoZone’s support. Likewise, there was a printed screen-surround for all the computer monitors at the front counter that invited people to make a donation.

That screen surround served to remind the parts clerks to ask for a donation. But since the monitors turn around to display information to customers, the surrounds were also meant for customers as well.

Dick’s Sporting Goods also supports Thanks + Giving with in-store promotional material. But they also advertise the promotion on their weekly flyer, as seen at the left.

The reason why St. Jude is supporting Thanks + Giving with advertising while sponsors activate the campaign in-store is to create synergy and momentum for the campaign. One of the oldest rules of advertising and promotion is that almost no one buys after the first mention. It is only by dripping away at people that you can hope to reach them at the time they’re ready to make a purchase or donation decision.

St. Jude’s ads demonstrate that it is an active partner in the promotion. It’s not just a free-rider lapping up the publicity spilled from the dishes of its deep-pocketed corporate partners.

Trouble is, by itself St. Jude can’t profitably do enough advertising to really move the sales needle for its partners or donations for itself.

But every day hundreds of thousands of people will walk through the doors of Thanks + Giving’s retail partners. Once in the doors there’s little external advertising that could influence those potential customers. So signs, screen surrounds, and employees who mention the company’s participation in Thanks + Giving are the last influencers.

Cable and telecommunications companies talk about the last mile of their network. It’s a reference to the expense and challenge of getting cable or telecommunications services into the home or business.

In a like manner, the last 100 meters for a retailer comes once a prospect is in the store. Cause marketing efforts like Thanks + Giving or Macy’s Believe campaign can bring people into a retail setting. But for cause marketing to influence purchasing decisions once there, the customer either has to know about it, be reminded of it, or learn about it inside the store.

Making Christmas the Most Wonderful Time of the Cause Marketing Year

As a holiday, Christmas is surprisingly challenging to cause market around, but a local homebuilder has the bones of a good campaign based on a gingerbread house-building contest that could be duplicated almost anywhere.

Cause marketing is commonly linked to holidays. I’ve even argued in this space that the pink ribbon campaigns offer retailers, in effect, an extra selling season.

But with some notable exceptions, like Christmas benefit albums, the redoubtable Salvation Army bell ringers and a few Christmas festivals scattered across the country, Christmas cause marketing isn’t as common as you might expect, even though for most of America’s charities the end of the year is when a hearty chunk of funds are raised.

There’s reasons of course.

Unlike Valentine’s Day, to name another holiday selling season, Christmas in the United States is for many still a holy day, notwithstanding all the commercialization. And it tends to be a very busy time with family and friends.

But think of all the potential advantages Christmas holds for cause marketers and fundraisers.

• Christmas is a time of giving.

• There’s countless potential ‘hooks;’ Santa and his elves, Christmas trees, bells, carols, holly, brass bands, mistletoe, candy canes, reindeer, etc.

• It comes at the end of the year when Americans are mindful of tax deductions.

And a Christmas festival based on gingerbread houses has great potential, even if it’s not yet widely exploited.

The gingerbread house campaign in question asks you to build a gingerbread house patterned after a home model built by Ivory Homes. The top prize is $1,000 for you and $1,000 for your charity of choice.

The campaign, which benefits United Way of Salt Lake, is direct, easy to explain and understand, and appropriate to the sponsor.

Good for Ivory for charging admission to the event.

Since one of Ivory’s goals is almost certainly to drive traffic to their many developments, they might consider some kind of round-robin ‘tournament’ that begins at four or eight their developments before culminating at the larger event where the winners would be crowned. The gingerbread houses that get the most fan or judges votes (or some combination of the two) moves on to the next round.

Ivory should probably also consider divisions for children say ages 5-8, and 9-12. I can imagine a men’s division, even a division for professional chefs and bakers, and a people’s choice award. To involve its own staff, Ivory could even challenge its own construction crews, vendors and contractors to build gingerbread-style children’s playhouses and then auction them off to benefit United Way.

This campaign cries out for social media elements as well.

And notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday about the tawdry way Skechers stole TOMS Shoes branding and cause marketing approach, there's nothing wrong or immoral about basing a Christmas fundraiser/cause marketing promotion around gingerbread houses.

Stealing Your Competitor's Cause Marketing Approach

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then TOMS Shoes must be beaming with pride.

Skechers a brand of shoes that occupies the vast middle range of pricing and quality offers a line called, I kid you not, BOBS, which promises to give a new pair of shoes to a needy child when you buy a Shoe Carnival gift card valued at $25 or more through Dec. 24.

TOMS, of course, did more than anyone to popularize this buy one, give one approach (BOGO) by giving away a free pair of TOMS Shoes to a needy child in the developing world every time you buy a pair.

TOMS, famously, has never purchased any advertising, even though it enjoys fabulous word of mouth. Something I contributed to early on.

Every time I see someone wearing a pair of TOMS Shoes I ask them about it. Without exception they’ve all heard of the BOGO, although most tell me that isn’t why they bought them.

TOMS Shoes come in kids sizes and even the kids I’ve talked to about them report much the same thing. Except that, if anything, with kids the cause message seems even more resonant.

A local clothing retailer in my market has a lame radio ad out wherein all the friends a kid talks to got TOMS for Christmas but him, and boy does he feel left out!

You can even find a hot secondary market in TOMS Shoes on eBay and elsewhere.

This kind of cheap me-to cause marketing is inevitable, of course, and totally legal. Dannon yogurt, for instance, does a me-to effort benefiting a breast cancer charity, very similar to Yoplait’s long-established effort on behalf of Susan G. Komen.

Inevitable or not, it's still comes off as underhanded.

Cause Marketing from Kathy Ireland

Kathy Ireland is raising money for Jewelers For Children through the sales of her eponymous jewelry line at Fred Meyer Jewelers, and I want to help this ageless paramour from my youth.

If only I knew what Jewelers for Children was.

Ronald McDonald House Charities helps support Ronald McDonald Houses, which are homes away from homes for families who have children in hospitals. The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption helps enable adoptions. Target does a lot of work with St. Jude, which is a children’s research hospital in Memphis. J.C. Penney supports after-school programs at 4-H and Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Home Depot and Lowes help Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for people who need them.

But Jewelers for Children I had to look up.

It turns out to be a charity of the jewelry industry. Since its founding in 1999, it has donated more than $37 million to children’s charities, four of which… St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Make-A-Wish Foundation of America, and National CASA Association… have each received more than $6 million. By any reckoning, Jewelers for Children has raised and donated real money.

Definitionally, Jewelers for Children is a kind of federated fund not so different than United Way or the United Jewish Communities, only with an emphasis on children’s causes. That’s a smart approach. But by itself Jewelers for Children doesn’t say enough to really help Kathy Ireland move her jewelry.

Jewelers for Children has a tagline: ‘A Gift of Love for Children in Need.” That gives the charity’s board plenty of latitude when it comes to grant-making each year. But it doesn’t give you or I much reason to prefer Kathy Ireland’s line over that of another jeweler with similar offerings.

What Jewelers for Children needs is a tagline that helps narrow down what it means by ‘children.’ Are they ill children, distressed children, homeless children, children in the developing world, children who need to learn how to read, hungry children, etc.

Failing that, Fred Meyer and the lovely Miss Ireland need to include a whole sentence or two that describes the approach Jewelers for Children takes to helping our youngest citizens.

Using Bounceback Offers in Paper Icon Campaigns

A lot of retail establishments do paper icon campaigns, but relatively few seem to have embraced the bounceback offer. That’s why I was glad to see the bounceback coupon at the left from Denny’s.

Right now Denny’s, a chain with more than 1,500 restaurants across the United States, is selling and displaying paper icons benefiting Toys for Tots, the toy giveaway charity. When you buy the paper icon at the left, Denny’s gives you the bounceback coupon below for an order of Pancake Puppies, which are sort of like doughnut holes.

Pancake Puppies, which usually sell for $2, almost cry out for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate to accompany them, so Denny’s is betting that when I redeem the coupon that I’ll buy at least that and, more likely, think of the Pancake Puppies as a kind of appetizer for a larger meal.

For that reason, almost every retailer that sells paper icons should probably try and figure out some kind of bounceback offer appropriate to their business.

Back in the day at Children’s Miracle Network we used detachable coupons, but Denny’s approach has its advantages, namely in branding and expense. Denny’s approach is almost certainly less expensive and more flexible.

In the restaurant the paper icons were prominently displayed behind the host’s station. But they are hardly the only thing displayed in the restaurant. Right now Denny’s are plastered with their Christmas promotion for Arthur Christmas, an animated film about Santa’s workshop where it is the elves who run the show, not the Fat Man himself. Arthur Christmas is on the windows and the front door, on the placemats, in the menu and on the menu. That is, there are menu items named for Arthur.

Because that’s the case, the paper icon campaign sort of feels like a bolt-on to the existing movie promotion.

But the bounceback offer tells me that Denny’s took this paper icon campaign very seriously indeed.

If you do paper icon efforts, you should, too.

The American Red Cross Deserves Better Cause Marketing Creative Than This

At Causemarketing.biz I often review elements of cause marketing campaigns but I generally shy away from reviewing creative.

That's because I don’t have a hardcore agency creative background. So it’s hard to trot out those kind of credentials, as in, ‘Back when I was at Crispin + Porter, Alex Bogusky used to say it was OK to try something different so long as it didn’t look like a mistake.’*

With those confessions out of the way, the creative for the American Red Cross series looks like a mistake to me.

The ads are meant to drive you to redcross.org/gifts, where you can pledge donations in various amounts to support the Red Cross’s vital mission, or to get you to donate blood. (Let me say that regardless of my criticisms of the ads, the American Red Cross is an vitally important cause that deserves your support.)

The creative features a clay everyman with several other 3-D objects set against 2-D drawings in the foreground and/or background.

The copy of the first ad at the left tells me that the ad agency that developed it did their homework. It says:

“This Holiday Season don’t just give stuff. Give something that means something.”

How often I’ve had that very conversation with all kinds of different people. Unless you’re going to give me tickets this Christmas to the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics or a super-thin new Piaget Altiplano watch (if Santa’s reading, I’d be happy to get Altiplano tank watch in yellow gold, thank you very much), chances are I’ve already got something like what you have in mind that is perfectly serviceable.

Consequently, I don’t need more stuff. Most of the people I talk to on the subject say much the same.

But the art part of the creative leaves me cold. I don’t like the off-white color of the ads. I don’t like how bow-legged the clay figure is. I loathe how indistinct his features are and how his hair seems to be opening like a fish’s gill opens to oxygen in the water.

It's all just so dreary and drab that I think Alex Bogusky would say it looks like a mistake.*

The American Red Cross deserves better.



*To be clear: I’ve never worked for Crispin + Porter much less met its legendary former creative director, Alex Bogusky.

How You Self-Educate Will Determine Your Success as a Cause Marketer

How do you, my fellow cause marketers, keep learning?

How you answer the question of self-education determines things like: how successful your cause marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income and your lifespan. Researchers have even shown a correlation between happiness and education.

It’s almost axiomatic that more you know the more you want to know... and as Socrates pointed out, the more you realize how little you actually do know! If education isn't as often humbling as it is enlightening than you're probably not doing it right.

I hope this will be a conversation rather than a monologue or disquisition, so I invite you to comment on what you do to stay on top of your game as a cause marketer.

Business/General Interest

• I subscribe to and read a number of business magazines so as to understand current issues, trends, economics and the like, as well as several news magazines. I don’t have a business degree so I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of how business does and does not work. I also read newspapers and magazine, but mainly online. I especially admire the reporting in the Wall Street Journal and Wired.

• Inspiration can strike almost anywhere, so whenever I’m in a waiting room I make a special point of reading magazines I don’t subscribe to or normally read. Sometimes that means women’s magazines, trade publications, hobbyist and special interest magazines, etc. It’s almost a lead-pipe cinch that when I read these kinds of publications I learn something I didn’t know, gain some new insight, or synthesize what I’m reading with something I already know.

• When I find something that I believe has lasting value, I scan or save it onto an external hard drive. The same hard drive holds many thousands of examples of cause marketing campaigns.

• I read Seth Godin’s and Guy Kawasaki’s blogs and I’ll pop into Techcrunch, and Gawker from time to time. Not because I’m a geek, but because I’m not.

• I use an RSS reader and Google Alerts for certain keywords, including cause marketing.

Knowledge of the Wider World

• I’ve largely given up on reading fiction. But in its place I’ve become an inveterate history buff, with a special interest in the ancient world… the Sumerians, Egypt, Greece and Rome, early European history, etc. And, of course, American history, too.

• I’m a big fan of the coursework produced by The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar. Both offer taped courses, allowing one to learn on the go. If I’m driving alone, likely as not I’m listening to some of these recordings.

• Hundreds of universities in North America and Europe are putting out thousands of hours of lectures and podcasts online. Check iTunes and individual universities for specific subjects.

• I’m kind of a sucker for the social science popularizers; Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, David Shenk, and others. I'm fascinated by the topic of expertise studies. And, I'll read almost anything on Ben Franklin who was an autodidact almost without peer.

• I also keep a notebook with me at all times to help me track ideas and thoughts. Like the saying goes, the only way to have great ideas is to have a lot of ideas. My notebook helps me not only track them all… good and bad… but also weed out the stinkers.

Cause Marketing

• There are a handful of professional seminars and conferences that address the issues of cause marketing and offer training. In the United States David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum has supplanted IEG’s Sponsorship Conference, in part because the IEG treats cause marketing as a subset of sponsorship. In the UK, the granddaddy is Business in the Community's Annual Conference.

• There are a few books at Amazon on cause marketing, but the ultimate book on the practice is still to be written. On my bookshelf is Cause-Related Marketing by Sue Adkins, Marketing from the Heart, by Sue Linial, Brand Spirit, by Hamish Pringle, Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen, Cause Marketing for Nonprofits, and Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding, both by Jocelyn Daw. Also, Cause Marketing for Dummies by Joe Waters and Joanna McDonald.

• I actively read a handful of blogs on cause marketing from Katya Andresen, Joe Waters and Cone, Inc., plus others on nonprofit issues.

• While you can get online and offline graduate degrees and certificates in various aspects of nonprofit management, still missing is any kind of certificate or other advanced education in cause marketing. In my opinion this glaring deficit needs to be remedied.

Cause Marketers, Be Purposeful in Your Use of QR Codes

I’ve been pounding the table for cause marketers to use QR codes now for about a year now, but too often, a new report finds, we’re using them to direct traffic to our website or Facebook page.

Instead, customers expect the codes to take them to content that’s pertinent to the print piece they just scanned. Taking them to the front page of a website is a missed opportunity, says a report from Direct Marketing IQ.

Customers “don’t have time to waste,” the reports says. “They want to be served content, offers, surveys, etc. that matter to them.”

Certainly customers have proven their willingness to point their smart phones at the codes; scan rates in first quarter 2011 were 4500 percent higher than 1Q 2010.

Where should the QR codes take people instead?

• Augmented reality images on smart phones.

• Promotions and co-promotions.

• Contests and sweepstakes.

• Links to video presentations.

• Downloadable giveaways to certain donors.

• Targeted Facebook/Twitter interfaces.

• Special content on microsites.

• Coupons.

QR codes offer enormous opportunity to cause marketers. But we must be purposeful in how we use it.

Does the End of White Coke Cans Mean the End of Cause Marketing on Packaging? Um...No.

The cause marketing world is all a-Twitter with the news that Coke is retracting its first-ever mostly-white cans meant to call attention to the plight of ursas maritimus. (Collector alert!) Apparently, too many consumers took the special packaging of polar bears gamboling across the tundra for Diet Coke, which, in fact, comes in silver cans.

I don’t have the energy to assign blame, ask if Coke over-reacted, wonder about the institutional competence of Coke’s marketing team, or worry about what this means to the future of cause marketing’s place on packaging.

That’s because cause marketing’s place on packaging is long since ensured, as the ad at the left from Fast Company helps demonstrate.

Buy a specially-marked bottle of Belvedere vodka and LVMH, the brand’s owner, will donate 50% of profits to RED’s Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. LVMH is the acronym for the French luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, (whose CEO is Bernard Arnault, Europe’s richest person, FYI.)

The packaging uses RED’s trademark brackets, which frame Belweder, the Polish presidential palace. As a non-drinker, I can’t knowledgeably comment about Belvedere’s qualities, but this Christmas/New Year’s promotion strikes me as being well played. The label makes smart use of RED’s branding, Usher is a good choice as pitch man, there's a QR code in the ad, and Bono assures us that the Global Fund is making real headway in Africa, just like the quote attributed to Usher says.

Of course all bets are off if Diet Coke drinkers mistake it for a bottle of their favorite cola. ;).

To Take a Page from Kohl's Cause Marketing Success, Start With IKEA

Last week I confessed my man-crush on Kohl’s and their remarkable cause marketing efforts using stuffed animals, books, CDs and toys: Since the year 2000, Kohl’s has generated $180 million for kids’ causes.

But Kohl’s has more than 1100 stores in 49 states. Could Kohl’s approach scale down to a business with just 1-2 storefronts?

My answer is an equivocation. Kohl’s has done deals with whoever owns the rights to Dr. Suess, among many other name-brand children’s book authors. A small operator like Dante’s Pizza, a real three-store chain in Dothan, Alabama that I Googled, wouldn’t be able to pull off that kind of deal.

But the good news is that they probably wouldn’t have to do it exactly the way Kohl’s does.

At the left is a flyer from big-box retailer IKEA, which has around 50 stores in the United States. Buy one of their toys during the promotional period and IKEA’s foundation will donate $1 to education programs from Save the Children and UNICEF.

IKEA’s U.S. website says that in 2010 the same promotion generated more than $15 million for the two charities.

The toys aren’t themed to IKEA or co-branded with anything else. They’re just toys that are exceptionally well-priced. Just as Kohl’s prices their Kohl’s Cares for Kids items for its customer profile, so too does IKEA.

The secret for IKEA’s cause marketing promotion is the same as their overall business model, namely buying well.

So if Dante’s Pizza in Dothan wanted to try a cause marketing promotion like IKEA’s, they’d just need to find appealing toys that they could get inexpensively and then sell for a competitive price, say $5 or less.

Where's the Social Media in this Youth Targeted Cause Marketing Effort?

The direct sales business… think Amway, Avon, and Shaklee… has a demographics problem, namely attracting the next generation of sales reps. Avon has addressed the challenge by launching Mark, which targets 18-30 year olds with bright, fun, less expensive products than Avon’s mainstream line and sold by youthful reps using a heavy dose of social media.

Mark has proven to be a good extension for Avon. A January 2010 story in the New York Times on Mark put annual sales at $70 million and numbered sales reps at around 40,000 in North America.

Like Avon, Mark has a cause attached to it. But, as I’ve demonstrated before in this space, in the United States breast cancer, Avon’s signature cause, is pretty rare for women under age 30. So Mark chose domestic violence instead. Its own charity, called m.powerment, donates to causes working to end domestic violence.

In the iteration at the left, when you buy the necklace worn by Twilight star Ashley Greene, proceeds benefit m.powerment and its partner causes. Again, this is all straight from the Avon playbook. Avon has done this dozens, if not hundreds of times.

The Times article makes it clear that Mark is all about reaching younger women in a way that’s familiar to them.

“Mark Girls in North America, mainly 18- to 24-year-old women who are changing the nature of direct sales by using the brand’s personalized e-boutiques, iPhone app and new Facebook e-shop, one of the beauty industry’s first forays into Facebook e-commerce.

“We’ve taken the same DNA of direct selling that has always been a part of Avon’s history and applied it to the digital world for our Mark reps to reach their customers,” said Claudia Poccia, president of Mark at Avon, which introduced the brand in 2003. “Now, we’re offering our Mark reps the opportunity to sell products not just door to door, but on Facebook, wall to wall.”

So given the youth of the audience and Mark’s sales approach, I wonder where the social media element is to this cause marketing campaign?

Co-Sponsorship and Cause Marketing

All cause marketing is a form of co-branding. But one kind of co-branding is far less common in cause marketing than in sports sponsorship, namely the kind of co-sponsorship you see at the left in this page from a Shopko sales flyer.

The sports folks have long been very good at mashing up sponsors.

The Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, for example, could be sponsored by Ford. The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl could be presented by Dasani water.

Stateside local sports arenas… especially for pro sports… are almost certainly named for a sponsor; Wrigley Field, Rich Stadium, Coors Field, MetLife Stadium, etc. Inside each of these facilities are hundreds of square feet of advertising for non-competing brands.

So while you might see ads for five or six car dealers, Coors’ naming rights allows them to exclude Budweiser at Coors Field in Denver. Likewise, there’s no Coors sold at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

[Kate B. in Louisville tells me that the State of Missouri has a "law that establishments serving liquor (bars, baseball stadiums, etc.) cannot sign an exclusive liquor contract (although they can have exclusive contracts with soda companies). I received a business degree from St. Louis University (which has received lots of funding from Anheuser Busch), where I learned about that law. Busch Stadium gets around it by having 1 very small stand that serves Schlafly beer (a smaller St. Louis brewery)].

Some charities have done this kind of co-sponsored cause marketing with certain media properties. But I can’t recall too many charities that have pulled off this kind of co-sponsorship with one of their main charitable efforts.

And notice how smart the match is between Iams, the premium pet food brand and Febreze, the household odor eliminator.

The Helen Woodward Animal Center would be in line for special praise for having pulled off this feat of co-sponsorship except that both Iams and Febreze are manufactured by Procter & Gamble. Nonetheless bully for them for having sewed up two brands from one company, itself a major achievement.

But ignore the fact that both brands come from the same company and concentrate instead how you could apply co-sponsorship to your cause or your sponsorship of a cause.

Add a BOGO to This Cause Marketing Promotion

Yesterday Tempur-Pedic, which sells mattresses, ended a month-long promotion in support of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. When you took a test-rest on one of their mattresses at participating retailers, and then activated online a validation code, a $10 donation was made to the cause, up to a $100,000 maximum.

Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest. In 2010 43,000 people in the United States were diagnosed with the disease and 37,000 died (although not necessary in the year they were diagnosed). Six percent of all cancer deaths are attributable to pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is responsible for the death of actor Patrick Swayze in September 2009.

But a second element of the promotion remains in place. When you buy a limited-edition Tempur white teddy bear, seen at the left, proceeds go to the cause. The bear is stuffed with the same proprietary foam used in the Tempur-Pedic mattresses.

Cool idea but it’s something of a risk for Tempur-Pedic.

Tempur-Pedic is sold based on a chain of ideas: NASA scientists developed the basic idea > Swedish scientists improved on it > Danish quality manufacturing and know-how make the mattresses the best around.

But they aren’t inexpensive. The Tempur-Pedic mattresses alone start at around $1,100 and go up to just less than three times as much.

Given that, Tempur-Pedic risks cheapening its brand if it charges too little for the bear. Tempur-Pedic’s asking price therefore is $59. But again, $59 ain’t cheap for a something you could pick up at a garage sale for $0.50. So Tempur-Pedic takes some of the sting out of the price by offering two bears for the $59 price.

Not a bad ploy. But I think they could have added greater value by making it a BOGO: buy one, give one. Instead of delivering two bears to whoever ordered them, Tempur-Pedic could send one to hospitals that have a children’s cancer ward.

Boom! It's a triple-win.