Messaging Your Green Bona Fides

Cone Communications released a new survey on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 about consumer expectations and understanding of corporate green claims, and the results are both a wake-up call and an opportunity for companies messaging their green bona fides.

In the study, called the 2012 Cone Green Gap Trend Tracker, Cone found that consumers just aren’t willing to do their due diligence when it comes to the environmental impacts of a company’s products. Ergo, 73 percent of consumers want companies to provide more environmental information on products directly on the packaging. Another 71 percent wish companies would do a better job helping them understand the environment terms they use.

Some 36 percent believe that common environmental marketing terms like ‘green’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ mean that product has a positive effect on the environment. Another 18 percent believe that such terms mean that the products’ effect on the environment is neutral.

Read Cone’s press materials for more results.

To me, this reads like not only a wake-up call, but an opportunity. Consumers are telling companies, in effect, that they want to outsource their trust in the greenness of products. But right now they don’t feel like they can.

If that sounds like an exaggeration, remember that one of the main purposes of a brand is to make a kind of promise to your customers. When they see your name or logo customers your brand promises that you’ll deliver brand benefits A, B and C.

Let me repeat my first point for emphasis. Most consumers aren’t going to go to the library…or even the Internet… to decide whether your products are really and truly green. Instead, they want you to put it right on your packaging so they can just compare against others!

Two initial thoughts:

Nothing’s hotter right now than infographics. Pinterest is packed with ‘em. Infographics are graphical representations of data. That’s an infographic on the left about blenders from an outfit called coolinfographics.com.

So imagine corporate environmental messaging becoming more like an infographic on the packaging itself. Not all packaging lends itself to such summaries. It would be hard to get much else beside an infographic on a package of razors, for instance.

But boxes of cereal and bottles of laundry detergent oughta be doable. Moreover, you could certainly use QR codes and virtual reality to extend the capabilities of the smallest packaging.

The second thought is salient to the moment.

Right now there is first-mover advantage to messaging well your green commitment. Get known as the company that really lives green and can demonstrate it and that brand benefit can define your company or brand forever after.

‘Commander’s Intent’ and Cause Marketing

The military, like your cause, has a sense of mission. Sometimes their mission is very narrowly defined and time-limited. When a squad goes out on patrol at night their mission may be reconnoiter, or intercept. Sometimes the military's mission is very broad and open-ended, like ending another country’s ability to wage asymmetrical warfare.

Given that similarity, causes and sponsors might consider developing an approach to mission that the military uses called ‘commander’s intent.’

According to Wikipedia, it means:

“An intent describing military focused operations and it is a publicly stated description of the end-state as it relates to forces (entities, people) and terrain, the purpose of the operation, and key tasks to accomplish. It is developed by a small group, e.g. staff, and a commander.”

It’s not just the purpose and the aim of the action, it’s their implications. Perhaps most importantly, the commander’s intent gives subordinates the basis for their own initiative. As such, it must be understood two echelons down, says the same Wikipedia article.

We often think of military organizations being the quintessence of top-down leadership. But commander’s intent puts the lie to that notion.

(All references to the military refer to the American military. I don’t have the breadth of experience or knowledge to say for sure the degree to which any of this also applies to the militaries of other countries, although I suspect that like so many things in military doctrine, the Prussians probably had a hand in its development).

The U.S. Military hasn’t always had the concept of commander’s intent. But the idea developed because crazy stuff happens in war. Opponents act in unpredictable ways. So do your troops. Weather and terrain play a factor. So does inadequate training, egos, and poor military intelligence, and a thousand more factors. Warfare is a very fluid environment. All the variables combine into something called the ‘fog of war,’ a state of gross uncertainty.

I’m not going to try and over-analogize here. War bears little semblance to what most causes do.

However, causes that do cause marketing and their sponsors could benefit from the idea of commander’s intent because uncertainty is a fact of modern cause marketing, too.

Only instead of commander’s intent, let’s call it ‘campaign intent.’

The process of creating a campaign intent statement for a cause marketing effort would be very clarifying. Both the cause and the sponsor and perhaps other stakeholders should have a hand in creating the campaign intent.

And, as in the commander’s intent, it should be understood and disseminated up and down the chain of command. That requirement means the campaign intent should be brief, pithy even. Because the campaign intent is going to be the measuring stick against which people up and down the chain of command will evaluate their choices and decisions.

What might a campaign intent statement look like for something like General Mills Boxtops program?

“To give schools across the nation access to needed supplies and equipment while preserving pricing power for General Mills and its partners.”

What about your cause marketing effort. How should its campaign intent statement read? Please comment below.

Cause Marketing Research I'd Like to See

Scarcely a week goes by that someone doesn’t release a study or survey about cause marketing. And yet there’s still some research I’d like to see.

Since the New Year I’ve seen studies, findings or surveys related to cause marketing from the following:

• IEG projects cause marketing spending to grow in 2012 by 3.1 percent to $1.73 billion.

• Among other findings, the fourth Edelman Good Purpose Consumer Study found that the emerging markets of Mexico, Brazil, China and India were most willing to buy a brand that supports a cause.

• Landor Associates released its annual Global Corporate Reputation Index and highlighted the cause marketing work of Google and Ford.

• An outfit called Wide Angle surveyed its consumer panel and found them more willing to give $1 from a purchase rather than winning a meal at restaurant they’ve been wanting to try.

• Nielsen surveyed Vietnamese consumers and found that 80 percent prefer to do business with companies that seem to be giving back.

That’s a reasonably broad mix of cause marketing research in less than a quarter, and yet even in the aggregate that’s not very satisfying. It’s like popcorn at movies. You eat it and it’s filling, but it’s a poor substitute for a real meal.

What would I like to see?

• I’d like to see more real sales data from companies that cause market. I’d prefer to see actual company and brand names, but I understand that’s a sticky wicket. So even if the data was veiled I’d be OK with that.

• I’d like to see more data coming out of the social networks when they’re used as a means of campaign activation in cause marketing. We all know that Facebook and Google + and the others generate boatloads of data, but that data is closely guarded. We know why that is for companies. This is one of the ways Facebook makes its money. But couldn’t they break lose some of this data in cases of cause marketing?

• A few years back Cone and Duke put people in a C-store like setting and then gauged how people reacted to cause marketing appeals in a consumer behavior study. I’d love to see more of that. With eyeball tracking and the like.

• Professional scholars love to do meta-analysis wherein they look at numerous studies and draw their own conclusions. There’s a little of meta-analysis of cause marketing around, but it’s gotten a little grey around the temples. In the meantime, and a lot of other cause marketing studies have been undertaken in the years since.

• I’d like to see financial performance for companies that do cause marketing. For instance, has General Mills, which does a lot of cause marketing across dozens of its brands, outperformed Kellogg’s (which does less) over the last, say, 10 years controlling for other factors?

• Finally, I’d like to see some studies that address packaging and cause marketing. Specifically, I’m dying to know what works when it comes to packaging design and what doesn’t.

Pepsi Refresh Notwithstanding, Cause Marketing Still Sells the Goods

In a post about Starbuck CEO Howard Schultz at theatlantic.com, ‘Jack Flack’ (aka Paul Pendergrass) takes a swipe about the effectiveness of cause marketing that isn’t supported by the facts.

Flack’s post is about the fact that Schultz is at the top of the ‘spin’-cycle right now. The stock is at an all-time high, in Dec 2011 Schultz was named Fortune magazine’s Business Leader of the Year and the CEO has launched some audacious initiatives that aren’t directly about selling coffee.

In September 2011 Schultz pledged that he would stop making donations to incumbent politicians until they demonstrated a credible plan to address the Federal budget deficit. More than 100 other CEOs also pledged to withhold political donations from incumbents. Later in the year Starbucks unveiled its ‘Indivisible’ wristband effort, which generates loanable funds to small businesses nationwide. I’ve covered both issues here and here.

Schultz, says Flack, is a flavor of the month. I don’t disagree. Unless Schultz is about to have a long Steve Jobs moment, it’s doubtful that Schultz and Starbucks have any direction to go from here except down, at least for the near future.

My disagreement with Flack comes as he makes his case that Schultz is over-exposed and thereby vulnerable. Here’s what he writes:

“While the emphasis about politics and jobs may be intended to draw attention away from the fact that Starbucks will surely continue to show real steeliness in delivering the promised 15-20% profit growth currently keeping the company's P/E floating above 30, such distractions tend to ultimately back-fire.’

“Just ask PepsiCo shareholders, where a much publicized shift to "cause-marketing" helped trigger substantial share losses, which in turn have triggered growing speculation about CEO Indra Nooyi's job.”

Let’s parse that out bit by bit. First off, Pepsi did make a very big deal out of Pepsi Refresh, a cause marketing effort that generated donations to causes and relied on social media and PR for activation. Second, Pepsi did lay off people and its stock has taken a terrible haircut, and Refresh has been a ready scapegoat.

But Flack’s implicit suggestion that cause marketing thereby doesn’t work is not born out by the facts.

Certainly other forces are at work. Pepsi and Coke are both mature brands now. Almost no one left on the planet hasn’t heard of them or couldn’t easily get one if they had the money. Americans drink more Coke and Pepsi than any other nation, but it’s probably not realistic to expect that the rest of the world is ever going to drink as many soft drinks as Americans do.

Second, both brands have taken a beating over the last six years, although Pepsi more so than Coke. Sales of soft drinks have been declining since before the start of the Great Recession. Simply put, there’s more competition for soft drinks than ever. Even Snapple has been taking market share from Pepsi.

Pepsi Refresh was bold but it was also experimental. Pepsi posited that by activating the campaign via social media that it could forego some portion of its traditional advertising budget and save money. Remember when Pepsi pointedly didn’t advertise on the Super Bowl because that wasn’t true to the branding premise of Refresh?

There are numerous examples of cause marketing that sells the goods; TOMS Shoes always comes to mind.

But the better counter-example is from Coke, Pepsi’s fierce competitor. Coke also does tons of cause marketing, but it never quit advertising in hopes that PR and social media would take up the slack.

Flack fingers cause marketing for Pepsi’s flameout. But I think it’s more accurate to say that social media isn’t ready to carry all the weight of activating a cause marketing campaign for a heavyweight brand like Pepsi.

One Idea For Cause Marketing That Works for Small Business

Last Thursday, March 22, 2012 I took a call from a small businessperson I called Roberta who asked in effect, ‘how can my small company work with a cause to benefit us both?’ I posted about her call last Friday.

She had contacted two breast cancer charities about cause marketing; a local one I called Athena Charity and a national one I identified as Artemis Charity. (All the names have been changed). Athena put Roberta off and Artemis tried to lock her into an existing event for a cool $5,000. In my post on Friday, I compared Artemis Charity’s offerings to those from a local TV station, which are similarly high-priced and inflexible.

Neither option was well-suited to a small business like Roberta’s. Roberta has a generous impulse and she wants to help, but her ability to do so is severely limited by the size of her business. Moreover, Roberta was interested in cause marketing, in part, because she needed something more from the relationship besides good feelings.

Imagine instead a cause marketing effort that is low cost for both the cause and the small business, and yet delivers real value for both parties.

The cause carves out a piece of its Facebook page for a section called something like ‘Small Business Champions.’ For a modest fee, say a few hundred dollars to a few thousand depending on the traffic the site generates, the small business gets highlighted as one of the charities’ ‘Small Business Champions.’ The feature could be daily or weekly.

As a part of the package, the charity sends out a press release, which is basically the same as the feature. A link leads back to the business’s webpage or Facebook site. If there’s a transactional-style promotion, that too is highlighted. The feature remains on the page/site indefinitely. But like a blog post it gets displaced from top status over time, yet remains searchable. This could be a SEO strategy, too.

The small business doesn’t get to use the charity’s logos or claim to be a sponsor. And site/page is clear and transparent about what the feature is and isn’t. The charity might even say, ‘we have a lot of small businesses that come to us asking how they can help. But in the past we didn’t have a good answer for them. This helps us to engage with them in a way that works for both parties.’

I’m not a lawyer, but I think this passes the legal smell test. Facebook is free to the charities so the only costs are the press release distribution and manpower for its preparation. But if you stick to a template, you could probably use interns.

The final cost is for a customer service rep. But I think this person can be low-level, too, and run dozens if not hundreds of accounts. His or her job is to stay in touch with the featured businesses and gauge satisfaction. And, if there’s a transactional cause marketing element, they also double-check to see that the charity got paid. Finally, if the relationship is growing, the CSR needs to refer the small business to a higher-level person.

None of this works if the expenses get very high or if small businesses start demanding more than the CSR can or should deliver.

What I’m proposing here, in effect, is a farm team for charities. Like most farm teams, relatively few Small Business Champions would turn out to be future All Stars for the charity.

But, by the same token, the current system is very bad at identifying future leaders. All Artemis can currently do is find small businesses willing and able to pay $5,000 right now.

Small Business Cause Marketing That Actually Works for Small Businesses

Yesterday I took a call from a small business owner in Chicago… I’ll call her ‘Roberta’… who wanted to know how cause marketing really worked because it wasn’t working so far for her!

Roberta owns a picture framing business and what she meant was that she had made several inquiries at two breast cancer charities. One was smaller and local the other was larger and national. We’ll call the local one Athena Charity and the national one Artemis Charity. (All the names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy).

What Roberta had in mind for Athena Charity was some kind of promotion on the organization’s Facebook page. But the people at Athena said that might jeopardize their 501(c)(3) status.

Two things: 1). Roberta has no desire to endanger Athena’s 501(c)(3) status. 2). Either the Athena staffers didn’t know what they were talking about or they were just trying to put Roberta off. Because you really have to work at it to make cause marketing illegal.

Meanwhile, Artemis Charity wanted $5,000 for a table at an event. For a small business $5,000 is a major commitment that might not return the investment, so Roberta was chary.

My advice to Roberta was that if she thought Athena was the best match for her business that she ought to first start by building trust. Take a staffer or board member to lunch and kick some ideas around. Instead of whatever she had proposed to them, as a first step offer an in-kind donation of matted picture frames for their offices or major donors.

Roberta’s problem was that they didn’t know her yet and thereby didn’t trust her intentions.

For Athena Charity and Artemis Charity the problem is simpler; they think more like television stations than like Google.

Television advertising works. But you gotta be patient with it. In local television you probably need to buy three to six months of ads before it starts paying off. The challenge is that three months of ads airing frequently on TV would set you back a small fortune in all but the smallest markets, never mind the cost of creating the ads themselves. No wonder small businesses like Roberta’s seldom have TV in their marketing mix.

But TV isn’t out to gouge small business. TV is an expensive media to put on the air. The fixed costs are very high and the variable costs are no picnic either. Local TV has little choice but to charge premium rates.

Regardless, just as Roberta couldn’t afford local TV, she can’t really afford Artemis’s $5,000 table either.

But Roberta could afford Google Adwords. Adwords are cheap (although caution is urged), easy to master and require no special expertise to create.

What both Athena Charity and Artemis Charity need to do is create cause marketing that is more like Google Adwords and less like TV.

I’ll expand on this idea in Monday’s post.

Utah, A Capital of Cause Marketing

My old friend, author Joe Waters, outed me yesterday in his post at Selfishgiving.com. As he pointed out I live and work in Utah, one of the least populated states in the Union.

How small? We have three Congressional districts in the whole state. Metropolitan Boston, where Joe lives, has five by itself.

So how is it possible that Utah could be, as my headline puts it, a capital of cause marketing?

Before I answer that directly, let me first describe some cause marketers who started in Utah. Jay Vestal, now a VP at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and formerly at both the National Forest Foundation and the National Park Foundation lives and works in Utah.

Also in Utah is Jay Aldous, formerly of UNICEF. Jay’s now independent and his clients have included the Red Cross, Special Olympics, Habitat for Humanity and other blue chip nonprofits.

The two Jays did more to further cause marketing in the very earliest days than anyone else I can think of short of Carol Cone. To paraphrase Newton, if you’re in cause marketing today, you’re standing on the shoulders of these two giants.

Two of their protégés, Steven Miller and Clark Sweat, worked at or for places like St. Jude, KaBoom, the Jimmy Fund, and Make-A-Wish. Clark lives in Utah and Steven is in Washington, D.C.

The common thread between all four folks, none of whom have less than 20 years of cause marketing experience, is Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, founded and still headquartered in Salt Lake City. That’s where I was pleased to work with all of them.

Early on, CMNH adopted an all-cause marketing fundraising approach. The reason why can be summed up in six words: Necessity is the mother of invention. At its founding, CMNH had few other fundraising opportunities open to it so it adopted an “all cause marketing all the time” approach. The two Jays... and others... went out on the road and sold millions and millions of dollars-worth of cause marketing sponsorships long before there was anything like proof that it actually worked.

They also taught the rising generation about best practices. Jay Aldous still does. If you can catch him, do yourself a favor and go to one of Jay’s occasional cause marketing seminars.

Many fine cause marketers still work at CMNH. But the two Jays, along with Steven, and Clark, are the most prominent Utah cause marketers nationally.

And yours truly? I’ve got my blue chip clients as well. But to the degree that I’ve helped put Utah on the cause marketing map it’s because I’m a better blogger than the rest of them.

Cause Marketing That Still Cooks

Over the course of the last 11 years KitchenAid’s Cook for the Cure campaign has raised more than $8 million for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. But don’t pay attention to the dollars raised. No, look at the 11 years they’ve been together. In cause marketing years that’s like 22 years.

What’s an 11-year cause marketing relationship like?

You know those really cute images from the movie The Notebook? The movie posters depicted Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling bussing in the rain. But the more evocative parts of the movie, by far, are those of James Garner reading to his invalid wife, played by Gena Rowlands. Young love is cute. But old love is admirable.

With KitchenAid and Komen the kids have come and gone. They’ve had disagreements and tense moments. But both parties are long past that euphoric ‘in-love’ phase and are now in a more mature part of their relationship. The real part.

They’ve also gotten past that stage that some old couples fall into where they face each other across a restaurant table and seemingly have nothing to say. In marriages, as in other relationships, that happens when you or your partner have stopped growing and stopped being interesting. Or, to put it another way, stopped trying.

KitchenAid and Komen are still growing and trying. A recent press release announces that when you buy a special Villeroy & Boch plate and pass it on with goodies to neighbors, KitchenAid donates $5 to Cook for Cure. (Donations are contingent on the recipient registering the plate online.) The plate, seen above, features artwork by PBS chef Jacques Pepin.

A second promotion involves a week-long event. KitchenAid asks that people host a party and instead of bring goodies bring checks. They call it ‘1000 Cooks for the Cure’ and the suggested time frame is July 20 through July 29. The campaign is activated by the usual social media.

Now the KitchenAid/Komen relationship enjoys a few advantages that a marriage probably doesn’t; the faces change every few years. The people that started this partnership way back in the day are probably long gone from the day-to-day relationship. And every time someone new comes to the partnership the reset button gets pressed.

That can be bad and good. It brings new ideas, certainly. But the risk is that the new people think that bussing in the rain is what relationships are really about, when, in fact, that’s what new relationships are about.

So congratulations to KitchenAid and Komen making it to 11 years. Here’s to 30 more!

Cause Marketing To Teens With Time on Their Hands

If you have a generous heart and more spare time than money Raise5.com is a way for you to monetize your expertise on behalf of a favored charity, $5 at a time.

Here’s how it works: you post a small service or task you are willing to perform for $5. These are services provided online or over the phone. So no babysitting services or (yuck!) ‘massages.’ (The video at the left is their appeal for your vote in Virgin Unite's 'Screw Business as Usual,' promotion.)

‘Mike’ offers to teach you five phrases in Mandarin, for instance. ‘Autumn’ will pray on your behalf and sing a song. ‘Kaleigh’ will edit your blog post.

$4 of the total goes to the charity of choice for the service provider, Raise5.com peels off $1 for itself. In turn, the website says, $0.45 of that $1 goes to PayPal. The rest goes to operations and costs. I hope that doesn’t sound critical because I truly don’t begrudge them the $1.

It’s crowdsourcing but it ain’t exactly Amazon's Mechanical Turk, where each of the tasks above would probably earn the provider $0.50 at the most.

Raise5.com was founded by four young Torontonians at Startup Weekend Toronto who are “passionate about making the world a better place.”

The basic business model is similar to Fiverr.com, except that Raise5.com is about benefiting the causes rather than service provider. Since Raise5.com literally started in February of this year, Fiverr.com has a 2-year head start and is a good deal more polished.

Hassan Hassan, one of Raise5.com’s founders, told blogger Dan Verhaeghe that Raise5.com is explicitly going after the youth market, since kids are more likely to have time and talent than money to donate.

Since teens can be so challenging to market to, I’ll watch Raise5.com closely to see how it develops.

Joint-Issue Promotion in Cause Marketing

Usually I highlight transactional-style cause marketing in this space, but there are other possible relationships including ‘joint-issue promotion,’ a category suggested by Wymer and Sumu in their book Nonprofit and Business Sector Collaboration.

By that they mean a sponsor promoting various aspects of a cause outreach effort or mission. It’s especially common among health charities and pharmaceutical companies.

After all, Pfizer, which makes the best-selling drug Lipitor, may well have a vested interest in outreach efforts from American Heart Association meant to lower cholesterol.

At left are two examples of cause marketing based on joint-issue promotion.

Camelbak has a cool new water bottle that features a UV light in the cap. Fill the bottle with water, press the button and in a minute the UV light kills the bacteria, viruses and protozoa in the water.

It goes without saying, I suppose, that if you put muddy water in the bottle the UV light doesn’t do anything about eliminating any silt or dirt. So you may still need to filter water first. But what a potential boon this is to people traveling where water purity is in doubt.

The fellow featured in the ad is Sam Nutmann, who is identified as a humanitarian filmmaker. That’s not a specific charity, but it is a cause. A big part of helping people in the developing world is to raise awareness of their needs in the developed world. The viral hit Kony 2012 is a current case in point, notwithstanding the recent behavior of Jason Russell, the co-founder of the charity Invisible People.

Nutmann’s role in the ad is as an endorser, but with a strong hint of a cause meant to resonate with people who will use their Camelbak All Clear in more prosaic places than Ethiopia. (As a Boy Scout I got terrible case of gastroenteritis after drinking water from an approved source in the Grand Canyon!)

The BD ad is one in their series of ads featuring health causes from around the globe. The particular cause is called FIND (Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics). FIND has a special emphasis on tuberculosis, which, the ad tells us, kills about 1.4 million people a year.

Unlike malaria, tuberculosis still exists in the developed world. But in both the developed and the developing worlds TB is most likely to kill those whose immunity is compromised. For the developing world that means TB is most pronounced in people with HIV/AIDS.
The ad tells us that BD is working with FIND to provide equipment, reagents, training and support “on terms that will enable them to purchase and implement these on a sustainable basis.”

So, BD isn’t providing equipment or materials free here, they’re just not trying to extract some country’s last nickel.

This isn’t transactional cause marketing. This is cause marketing meant to help people learn about FIND while talking about BD’s products, services and goodwill.

Given that part of the purpose here is to raise FIND’s profile, I really wish BD would do just a little more than just publish FIND’s URL.

But imagine if BD paid someone like Sam Nutmann to produce a video about TB in the developing world and FIND’s role in finding new approaches to diagnose and treat the disease.

FIND isn’t the only cause that BD has partnered with so I can imagine at least one video per partner. BD would want to post them on their own site of course and give the video to the cause for its purposes. But naturally the videos ought to be posted on YouTube, which, after all, has the world’s second most-used search engine after Google.

I can imagine BD sponsoring a kind of touring film festival meant to raise awareness of the needs of the causes it highlights.

BD doesn’t have to do any of this, of course. But in cases of cause marketing like this where money doesn’t change to run only the ad and the URL seems like a half measure.

The Holy Trinity of Corporate Social Responsibility

Some things go better together in threes; a cheeseburger, fries and a Coke, for instance. Or, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Or, Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Or, Groucho, Chico and Harpo. Or, Newton’s Laws of Motion. Or, faith, hope and charity.

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that companies which face the consumer better do three things well: practice corporate social responsibility; have a strong green tint; and, engage in cause marketing.

Time was when companies could pick one of the three and be fine. But the corporate environment has changed.

Now companies like Starbucks have altered consumer expectations and demands of what corporate social responsibility means. Starbucks pays its employees fairly and offers benefits. It sells fair-trade coffee to benefit its farmer-suppliers. It works to lower its environmental footprint. And it does smart cause marketing.

Like no other large company, Starbucks practices the Holy Trinity of corporate social responsibility.

Starbucks, along with Coke, Amazon, Fedex, Apple, Target, Ford, Nike, Southwest and Nordstrom are the April 2012 cover of Entrepreneur magazine as the “10 most trusted brands” today.

And Entrepreneur’s list represents, for the most part, companies who actively engage in the holy trinity of corporate social responsibility.

Coke, Target, Ford, Fedex, and Nike practice all three to varying degrees.

Apple does cause marketing with (RED) and is getting greener. But the worker suicides at factories where Apple products are made are a human tragedy and a corporate black eye.

Neither Nordstrom nor Southwest are renowned for being green or engaging in cause marketing. But both have celebrated internal cultures, an important element of CSR

Amazon is, I think, the exception that proves the rule.

How Fast is Your Cause Marketing Muse?

We call it a flash of genius or sudden inspiration. But does inspiration come fast or slow?

Beethoven’s notebooks demonstrate that he spent months reworking single musical phrases and measures. We have hundreds of Picasso’s interim drawings of ‘Guernica’ and some 50 studies (that's one of them on the left). All of which demonstrate the development of his approach as he painted his anti-fascism masterwork now hanging in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Contrast that with a 50-something friend… very creative… who for more than 25 years has specialized in corporate events. He’s won every award available to people in his field and the appreciation and respect of dozens upon dozens of clients nationwide.

His muse, he says, really does prompt great ideas that come to him in minutes rather than days or months or years. Not all his immediate ideas are great, of course. But after 25 years, he knows the difference between the good ideas and the stinkers.

The challenge and the work for him isn’t in getting the ideas. It’s in committing them to paper and then, ultimately, delivering the finished goods.

For my perspective, my writing gets better the longer I spend polishing it. But do my central ideas ripen with time? Hmm.

The software developers at Facebook and Google take a never-finished approach to their work. Gmail was in beta for years, for instance. Facebook's hackers are always tinkering with the social network.

Likewise the ‘Agile’ methodology of software development is iterative. The emphasis is on getting a product, sometimes even a partially-developed one, in front of customers as soon as possible, then improving it over time based in part on their reactions and suggestions.

But there’s not a really good way for a painting to be iterative. (Although da Vinci fussed around with the Mona Lisa for some 3 years and spent another three years on the Last Supper. Both experiences, it should be noted, frustrated his patrons endlessly.) Picasso’s hundreds of sketches notwithstanding, at some point Guernica was actually finished.

Another kind of art IS iterative, namely animation. Woody had dozens of looks before Pixar landed on the one that we know from the Toy Story movies.

Twain reworked Huckleberry Finn so many times the end product could hardly be recognized from the beginning.

By contrast, because Dickens sold so much of his work in serialized form, he had deadlines that da Vinci could have scarcely imagined. And yet somehow Dickens, whose bicentennial we celebrate in 2012, routinely turned out the most splendid characters, plots, and dialogue this side of Shakespeare; himself a quick and ready writer.

Is it just genius then that spins out these marvels of human imagination? Probably not. Beethoven and Picasso would surely land on anyone’s list of the world’s greatest-ever geniuses.

Is it just writers who can turn out their art because of the deadline pressures of modern publishing? It’s doubtful. Dmitri Mendeleev always maintained that the periodical table of elements came to him one night in a dream.

Given the fleeting nature of dreams, it’s possible that Mendeleev dreamed up the modern periodic table of elements… which predicted three then still-undiscovered elements… in a half-hour or less!

What does all this mean to cause marketers?

However your muse works you have to be prepared to capture inspiration as it comes to you. Mendeleev had a notebook by his bed. Beethoven kept a notebook. da Vinci’s notebooks… now worth millions… inspired them both.

You can think like Agile software developers and seek to continually improve your campaign. The essential nature of TOMS Shoes’ buy one give one (BOGO) effort is basically unchanged. But the company has made numerous iterative changes over the last several years.

Finally, if your muse requires it, you have to be prepared to blow up everything and start over again almost from scratch, like Twain did in his pursuit of the Great American Novel.

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Heather D. from Columbus, Ohio 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 Heather, when you subscribe you'll get a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" a matrix which explains the elements of Cause Marketing and includes specific examples.

It's a great brainstorming tool that helps ensure your cause marketing campaigns have all the appropriate components.

Did I mention that all this cause marketing goodness is free?

Finally, rest assured that I will never sell your name or contact information.

So join today.


Warm regards,

Paul
Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Cause Marketing is at the Foundation of Modern Grocery Retailing

I write this post from my home office in my basement, which is heated, well-lit and comfortable. The floor beneath my feet is carpeted. Had the basement lacked any of these features, we probably wouldn’t have bought this house. Such amenities are assumed.

But as a college student I lived in one of those classic ‘pit’ kinds of apartments. The house was about 100 years old back then and the foundation was made of rock rather than concrete. The basement floor in that old house was compacted dirt.

Increasingly cause marketing is assumed as well for companies that face the consumer, notably grocers. This was made clear in several questions the SuperMarketGuru.com asked its 1800-member consumer panel about cause marketing.

‘Guru’ asked four cause marketing questions in addition to its other questions:

• Were consumers more likely to shop in a supermarket that supports causes?

• Would consumers be tolerant of price increases that allow for donations?

• Were consumers likely to travel further to shop in a store that supports causes?

• If private label goods generated charitable donations and prices for such goods rose, would consumers still buy as much?

To the first question one-third of those survey said ‘no’ they weren’t more likely to shop at a ‘cause store.’ Just 13 percent said yes and the rest said it depends on things like the store’s pricing and the cause in question or some combination of the two.

That sounds a lot like it dramatically undercuts Cone’s similar question which found that 85 percent of people would switch brands. But it really doesn’t. Cone’s question has always stipulated that pricing was equivalent and that the cause was one that the consumer personally cared about.

‘Guru’s’ second question was more interesting still. Some 56 percent said they’d be OK with price increases of 2 percent or less. That sounds like not much, but Kroger’s operating margin last quarter (Operating Income / Revenue) was 2.47 percent. Kroger is the first or second largest grocer in the United States depending on how you count WalMart.

By contrast, Coke’s operating margin last quarter was 5.61 percent.

In short, 2 percent is a lot in the grocery business.

The travel question also produces interesting results. Fifty-four percent said they wouldn’t travel any further to a ‘cause store.’ But of the remainder, 24 percent would go a mile or two extra, 16 percent would go up to five miles and almost 6 percent would go up to 10 miles further. In my city, a 10 mile radius would put me within the range of about 6 different grocers and perhaps 10 stores total. Being a cause store thereby would represent a meaningful competitive advantage.

Finally to the question about paying more for private label items that support a cause. The survey found that 62 percent would continue to buy private label items in the same amount even if prices rose to pay for the donation.

A lot of us old timers in cause marketing came up telling sponsors and prospective sponsors that cause marketing helped a company stand out from competitors. In some businesses it still does.

But grocers have been doing cause marketing for more than 25 years. No industry has more experience with the practice of cause marketing than the grocery business.

My analysis of these survey results is that after 25 years consumers expect grocers to be cause marketers.

Why aren’t consumers more likely to patronize a ‘cause store?’ Because the preferred grocer is almost certainly a ‘cause store,’ too.

Just as my wife and I expected a functional basement when we bought our home, consumers expect their grocer to do cause marketing.

Bleeding-Edge Cause Marketing

Help, a company that sells single-symptom remedies to things like headaches and cuts, has teamed up with DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center to deliver a wonderfully-integrated cause marketing campaign at the bleeding-edge of innovation.

When you buy a package of Help’s brand of adhesive bandages called ‘Help I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life’ you get their regular 16 bandages in two sizes. But you also get a kit to collect some of the blood that you’ve just spilt and register with the nonprofit’s bone marrow donor registry. Besides the bandages there are instructions, permissions, and the like.

Help’s remedies are available at most Target and Walgreens stores, and elsewhere.

Registering for such databases is a simple matter of giving a blood sample. But unless your consciousness has been raised to the need for bone marrow donors… probably due to personal experience… chances you haven’t made the effort to do so. Heaven knows I haven’t

But ‘Help I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life’ takes out the middleman. There’s no extra trip to the hospital or doctor’s office required. And the collection kit, disguised as a package of adhesive bandages, is idiot-proof.

The blood sample goes to DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center, a nonprofit founded in Germany, but now with operations in the United States, that adds your name and blood type to its bone marrow registry.

Help’s products stand out in several ways. The packaging, which is standardized across all of Help’s remedies, is made of post-industrial paper pulp and bio-plastics that degrade in compostable environments. The products themselves are single-ingredient meant to treat single conditions. Help I’ve Got a Headache, for instance, is just acetaminophen sans dyes or other components.

Meanwhile, the DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center came to the United States in 2004 where people with blood cancers are well represented by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. So the piece of the puzzle that DKMS carved out for itself is registering bone marrow donors. That focus is evident in one of DKMS’s URLs, which is getswabbed.org. Worldwide DKMS’s registry now has some 3 million registered bone marrow donors and has aided in some 29,000 bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cell transplants.

This is bleeding-edge cause marketing by two very focused entities, and another example of cause marketing not meant to raise money.

The Innie vs The Outie in Cause Marketing

Is cause marketing better on the inside or outside of packaging? That’s what I wondered when I saw this chocolate bar at Whole Foods.

In an aisle of chocolate bars that were $6, $7, $8 and even $9, I bought the Whole Foods candy bar based mostly on price; it was less than $3. It was organic, dark chocolate and had almonds, three hot buttons for me. When I unwrapped it I found the cause marketing message you see below

My first reaction was, “why wouldn’t they at least tease the donation to the Whole Foods Foundation on the outside of the wrapper?”

You'd assume that Whole Foods wants to maximize sales. And given the likelihood that their margins are higher on a $3 house brand than a super-premium bar like Amano or Vosges, you gotta believe they’d rather sell three of these candy bars than one $9 Vosges with bacon, right?

But the more I thought about it the plainer it became to me that Whole Foods really does know how to cause market.

In their book ‘Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive’ authors Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin (but not that Steve Martin), and Robert Cialdini talk about a cause marketing experiment they did meant to encourage hotel guests to reuse their bath towels.

They tried multiple messaging approaches. With regard to messaging that included a cause marketing element they found it was much more effective to tell guests that a donation to an environmental cause was made in honor of their recycling towels than to tie the donation directly to the number of towels guests reused.

I think that’s part of what Whole Foods is doing here.

The other part has to do with the calculus that people do when their standing in the chocolate aisle at Whole Foods. I’d certainly like to try a Vosges' bar with bacon at some point. But if I didn’t like it enough to finish it then I’m out $9. I’m too cheap to be that adventurous.

I suspect that many of the people who stand in that aisle parse it out similar ways.

The aisle is loaded with colorful packaging that would stand out anywhere else in the store. Amano's packaging, for instance, looks like fine art. There are several options that use cause marketing, notably the brand Endangered Species. Many make claims about being organic or Fair Trade sourced or both.

In short, in the chocolate aisle at Whole Foods the house brand is only going to stand out based on price. Including a message about giving 1 percent, or approximately $0.03, just isn’t going to cut it on that aisle.

But by tucking the message inside the candy wrapper, Whole Foods seems less like they’re trying to sell it and more like they’re making a nice donation to a worthy cause.

Very savvy.

Add the Word 'No' To Your Cause Marketing Toolkit

Every business day in this blog I chronicle the best and worst of cause marketing. As you seek inspiration for where to take your own cause marketing you must eschew the bad. But you must also learn how to refuse the good.

I was reminded of this by an anecdote about Steve Jobs in a book I’ve been reading called ‘The Idea Hunter,’ by Andy Boynton and Bill Fischer. They tell about how Jobs was speaking to a group of executives at Yahoo when the subject of saying no to bad ideas came up.

“That’s easy,” said Jobs. “The challenge is in saying no to good ideas.”

Jobs came back to this theme more than once and in one instance was quoted thusly:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

Anyone with a modicum of judgment knows the stinkers. But it’s the good ideas that require real expertise to deal with. That’s because if you let them the good ideas take resources away from the great ideas.

In fact, I heard this exact point made by my former boss and the founder of Children’s Miracle Network, Mick Shannon, a good 10 years before the Jobs quote.

Many charities reach a point where people start coming to them with ideas of every stripe. It’s a matter of scale; St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital gets called on more often than the local food bank. But even the food bank almost certainly hears from dozens of people a year who have an idea for them.

Mick Shannon is a difficult guy to characterize. He and Joe Lake founded Children’s Miracle Network with not much more than moxie and Shinola. He was renowned for his screaming matches with employees (and others) and he has a crazy lateral lisp. He would fly a redeye cross-country, but stand for the whole flight, chatting up the flight attendants. He was a tough guy with a volatile temper, although he was always good to me. But put him in a children’s hospital with sick kids and he’d melt like a all-day sucker left out in the Florida rain.

Mick ran Children’s Miracle Network for more than 20 years. Once he left his contradictions became even more pronounced.

But Mick was more right about saying no to good ideas than even Jobs was.

Here’s why; a cause has less leeway, less rope, less patience from its stakeholders for mistakes and miscues. The recent Komen debacle is good example of just how little leeway nonprofit leaders really have, notwithstanding the good they do.

Jobs was wrong about John Sculley, NeXT, the Newton, telling people to hold the iPhone in a certain way so that calls wouldn’t drop, sticking with AT&T for too long, staying estranged from his oldest daughter for so much of her youth, not owing up to the working conditions of workers in Apple factories, and many more.

And, yet, we nonetheless hail him as one of the greatest CEOs of all time.

But the CEO of a cause doesn’t often get that many chances at failure. In such an environment, saying no to the merely good is therefore doubly prudent.

So keep ‘no’ in mind as you put together the elements of your next cause marketing effort.

Cause Marketing National Breakfast Week and Other Observances

This week is 'National Breakfast Week,' sponsored in part, as we shall see, by Kellogg’s.

Why should we care? Because “1 in 5 children live in homes where breakfast is hard to come by.”

What should we do? “Share Your Breakfast” on Kellogg’s corporate site or their Facebook page by saying what you had for breakfast this morning. I had a yogurt and oatmeal, so I entered that into the appropriate box. I was then invited to share that via Facebook or an email that included the following message:

Help kids in need get off to their best starts. Share what you had for breakfast and Kellogg's will help provide a breakfast for a child in need.

What happens? Kellogg’s donates one school breakfast, up to one million meals, each time you 'Share Your Breakfast.' Basically, Kellogg’s writes a check for up to $200,000.

Kellogg’s cause partner is Action for Healthy Kids, a consortium of 70 or so organizations like the Whole Grains Council, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Department of Agriculture.

The offer turns on “National Breakfast Week March 4-10.”

In fact, the full title of the week is “National School Breakfast Week,” a promotional effort from the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA, which started school breakfasts in 1975, currently serves breakfasts to some 32 million children at public and private schools nationwide.

So if the one million meals are provided at school, why doesn’t the Kellogg’s promotion just adopt the name ‘National School Breakfast Week,’ the name by which it’s been known for a more than a decade? Well, ‘school’ breakfast just ain’t that sexy. Everyone knows that the USDA foots that bill. But hungry kids, well that’s different.

Which raises the issue of cause marketing wrapped around observances like ‘National School Breakfast Week.’ Obviously, Kellogg’s isn’t doing anything underhanded here, since one of Action for Healthy Kids member organizations is the US Department of Agriculture.

And National School Breakfast Week is just the news peg for the promotion. If it didn’t exist, Kellogg’s could have invented it by doing not much more than sending a press release to Chase’s Calendar of Events.

That’s because there’s no sanctioning authority for these observances (and thank goodness for that, by the way. Can you imagine anything more dreary than a Department of Observances?). So long as Kellogg’s isn’t violating any trademarks or copyrights, they’re in the clear.

You could do the same thing.

March 10, for instance, is ‘International Fanny Pack Day.’ March 9 is ‘Middle Name Pride Day’ and ‘Panic Day.’ March 8 is ‘National Proofreading Day’ and ‘Nametag Day.’ Today, March 7, is ‘National Be Heard Day’ and ‘Discover What You Name Means Day.’ (Oddly enough, my name…Paul… means small or humble, although I’m about the size of your average NFL lineman). I got all these directly from Chase’s Calendar of Events. And I just scratched the surface.

Study Links NFL Sponsorship and Purchasing Decisions. Does it apply to Cause Marketing?

A study from Kirk Wakefield, Ph.D. of Baylor University released Monday finds strong linkage between official NFL sponsors and purchase decisions, especially among fans.

Called “The Effect of Fan Passion and Official League Sponsorship on Brand Metrics: A Longitudinal Study of Official NFL Sponsors and ROO,” the study was co-authored by Anne Rivers of the New York City firm Brand Asset Consulting.

The study compared official NFL sponsors to non-official sponsors in banking, beer, credit cards, pizza and telecommunications over the three year period between 2008 and 2010. Then they measured public opinion of the official brand in each category against 2 competing brands in the same category that weren’t official sponsors. So in the pizza category Papa John’s, the official sponsor, was measured against two non-official sponsors; Pizza Hut and Domino’s.

Says Professor Wakefield, “Companies with official sponsorship of the NFL receive a significant lift among NFL fans compared to non-fans.”

The study also found that:

• “Passionate fans—those who watch or attend and prefer the NFL as an entertainment alternative—have more positive attitudes toward the official sponsors of the NFL than do less passionate fans."

• “Over time, the official sponsors of the NFL improve their brand positioning vis-à-vis competitors."

• “If the consumer is coming to “know” a brand more through its NFL relationship, they are picking up many of the NFL’s positive brand attributes. This works both ways (e.g., when leagues are in trouble)."

• “Esteem is the key pillar to identify a fan of a team or a league. Esteem rubs off on the sponsoring brand, thereby helping reduce churn through increased loyalty. Consumers are often willing to forgive transgressions or setbacks of an esteemed brand compared to one that is less esteemed.”

It’s when Wakefield and Rivers get to the theory of brand esteem where I think there is application to cause marketing. As the flowchart shows above, their theory is that for fans an official sponsor is more likely to move to the top of mind as they see the sponsor during games and via media inside and outside of the stadium. That sponsorship works on them and they gain knowledge about the brand. As they do so the brand is differentiated from competing brands. Fans feel brand loyalty and are more likely to purchase the official brand.

The theory’s not seamless in my opinion. I think it strains credulity that most fans, especially those watching the NFL on TV, are able to readily distinguish between Sprint, the official sponsor and AT&T and Verizon, both of which also advertise actively during NFL games but aren’t official sponsors. But as a working theory I like it.

I think you could make an argument that cause marketing works similarly. If I support St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at Auto Zone during a promotion, the chances are high that I will notice and esteem Auto Zone in a way that I don't O'Reilly's.

Another key finding that I expect also holds true for cause marketing is that as the official sponsorship continued over time, the effects of it improved for sponsors.

Cause Marketing From the Mouths of Kids

Last Friday I was a judge at my State’s DECA convention and a student suggested a way to track customer service that has real potential as a cause marketing overlay.

The case study that was given to the students I judged had to do with a chain of electronics superstores. In it the staff product knowledge was very high. Nonetheless, customer satisfaction was low because shoppers said they felt pressured to buy more than they needed or wanted.

DECA is a career and technical student organization for high school and college-aged young people. The organization hosts student competitions to help them improve their business acumen.

Almost all the kids I saw suggested more training for employees and so I pressed them a little. How would the company know if the training were paying off right now?

Almost all the kids I asked that question of suggested some kind of survey, but they were generally vague about how to conduct that it in a timely and effective fashion. Fair enough. I was asking high school kids to do college-level work.

One young woman, however, had an intriguing idea: poll customers at the end of the credit card transaction. The question would certainly need to be very straightforward: “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the customer service you received today?” And it could only be one question. Any more and the survey itself would negatively affect customer’s opinions of the service they had received during their visit.

Most people pay with credit or debit cards these days, especially for high-ticket items. So using the credit card terminal wouldn’t exclude many people. In addition, the programming likely wouldn’t be onerous and the results could be basically instantaneous.

But the transaction would nonetheless be over before they were asked the question. How to induce customers to spend the 15 or 20 seconds it would take to answer the one-question survey?

The student didn’t suggest this, but as a cause marketer the answer came readily to me. The company ought to offer a donation to a favored cause.

So after you sign the terminal or enter your pin for a debit card transaction you’d get a follow-up screen that says: “Answer one question and we’ll make a $0.50 cent donation to the Food Bank. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the customer service you received today?”

Or, you could ask the 'Ultimate Question.' "Based on today's visit, how likely are you to recommend (company) to your friends on a scale of 1-10?"

Now, companies that do a lot of transactions per day or who do much of their business in rushes would be reluctant to try this. Delays of 15-20 seconds per customer would dramatically lengthen checkout lines.

I have two responses.

Firs. It would be no big deal to randomize the survey, so that not everyone got the chance to answer it. Likewise, you could run the survey only during hours when transactions were relatively light.

Second. If one or more of your associates is having a bad day and customers are bearing the brunt of it, wouldn’t it be better to know that on the day it’s happening rather than weeks after the fact?

March Madness Cause Marketing

It’s conference tournament time in college basketball in the lead-up to March Madness, the best sporting event in America other than the Super Bowl. Soon the NCAA Tournament seedings will be announced and brackets will start rolling off of office printers nationwide.

In homage to the Madness, here’s a cause marketing promotion you could run next year in conjunction with the Tournament. It features local celebrities, a sweepstakes component, and numerous possible extensions.

Here’s how it could work: local celebrities are pitted against each other in something like a NCAA Tournament bracket. Then people vote on who they’d like to see advance based on the parings on Facebook or at the website. If there’s no seedings, it’s basically a straight popularity contest. The person who picks the most brackets correctly wins a cool prize; perhaps tickets to March Madness.

Local businesses are the sponsors of the brackets. In addition to selling the brackets, you’ll need to get permission in your market to use the names of 64 local celebrities. Alternatively, you could use corporate names.

If the brackets were filled with company names, you could ask for a donation to participate in the brackets. A donation of $250 from 64 companies, which is in-reach for even small businesses, would generate $16,000!

Or you could seed the companies based on their donation amount. Perhaps a $1,000 donation gets you a #1 seeding, while a $500 donation gets you a #8 seeding and so on.

In a lot of states, although not mine, you could ask for a fee to submit a bracket. It’s not so different from bingo. Get 500 participants at $10 a bracket sheet and that’s an extra $5,000. At $50 a bracket sheet that’s an extra $25,000 your charity tourney takes in.

There are too many other possible wrinkles to mention. But plainly this idea is Madness.

Cause Marketing for Volunteers

Money is portable, and useful…the preferred method for payment worldwide. The precise word for the advantages of money that I’m describing is ‘fungible;’ that is, freely exchangeable and replaceable. Not surprisingly, therefore, money is what most cause marketers strive to raise.

But savvy causes and their sponsors should also be thinking about using cause marketing to ‘raise’ volunteers, too.

But why? Volunteers aren’t fungible at all. You have to manage and train and inspire them. Volunteers require that systems be put in place to channel their efforts. They have to have places to park their car, places to work, and places to put their things when they’re working. They create insurance and legal liabilities. They may not volunteer for long, so continuity is a challenge. And, of course, they may be less competent and accountable than people you could hire to do the same job.

To make my case for cause marketing to generate volunteers, I’m going to use a contra-example which happens to be completely true.

I have a friend from a small town in Kansas who, once or twice a year, goes to the first place he ever worked… a small café… and washes dishes for free. He volunteers at a for-profit, in other words. Because he washes dishes voluntarily it’s a fair bet that he does so with more brio and joy than does the regular guy.

Volunteers are literally so impassioned about your cause that they’re willing to do for free what you have to pay others to do.

And that leads to the next point; volunteers are typically more engaged than plain donors.

My friend still lives in the small town where the café is, and he’s a frequent patron. And so, he’s far more likely to be giving the café his money rather than his time.

But does he ever talk about the food he gets there or even the friendly service?

No. Those are all assumed. The people who own the cafe are friends after all. Instead he talks about the service he provides… for free… washing dishes for and with his friends.

There’s a third point. The small town where my friend lives has other restaurants, including regional and national chains. I’m not saying he never eats at those other places, but I feel confident saying he’s much more likely to eat at ‘his’ café than somewhere else.

In short, because he volunteers at his local café, that business gets his time, his patronage and his long-term loyalty.

It’s much the same when people volunteer for causes. Not only do you get their time, but an Independent Sector study about 10 years ago found that volunteers gave at least two times as much as non-volunteers.

Time, more money and long-term loyalty. What more could a nonprofit cause marketer possibly hope for?