A Turnkey Cause Marketing Promotion for Restaurants

If you’re a restaurant, even in the quick-service category, it’s hard to imagine a transactional cause marketing campaign you could launch more easily or quickly than a dessert promotion. When a customer buys a slice of cake, pie, a baked Alaska (see at left), or some other dessert, you make a donation of some amount to your cause partner; $1 is a nice round number.

In most cases you wouldn’t want to promote a salad or a main course. At a sit-down restaurant most customers come into your establishment to order an entrée and in many cases you probably give them a salad with the entrée. If the goal is to increase you average ticket price, cause marketing the entrée probably isn't the ticket.

But with an appetizer, drink or dessert promotion you could quite possibly raise the average ticket price by several dollars.

Drinks have very high margins, of course, and consequently they are often featured in cause marketing promotions. Most of the cause marketing around mixed drinks that I’ve seen involve a custom cocktail that somehow befits the cause.

All that’s required is the lead time to figure out what that special drink is and to stock up on the necessary inventory. Drinks could, however, be a bad mix for certain causes. And while there’s a handful of causes you probably couldn’t do a dessert promotion with… anti-obesity causes come to mind…I reckon there’s more safe ground with dessert than with drink promotions.

Moreover, desserts are potentially more universal than drinks since even youngsters and teetotalers (like moi) could order one. The number of active drinkers isn't as high as you might think. A U.S. Department of Justice survey found that 46 percent of adults 21 and over had not consumed any alcohol in the prior 30 days. Another 26 percent reported drinking less than once a week.

For some of the same reasons appetizers can be a good choice for cause marketing, too.

The key in such a cause marketing promotion is… well… the promotion. How are you going to activate it? That is, tell customers and prospective customers about it.

Telling customers is easy. Brief your service staff on the promotion. You make even offer some kind of incentive for them to push the promoted dessert item, sales contests, for instance. You could put it in the menu, on table tents, on internal posters, etc.

If you already advertise, you should add a picture of the item and a few sentences of description about the cause and the promotion. If you don’t advertise, you should certainly send out some press releases, post it to your website/Facebook (and other social media), Tweet out the daily results, maybe even do some kind of thematically appropriate publicity stunt.

Honestly, this is the closest thing to a turn-key cause marketing promotion as I can think of for a restaurant.

Business to Business Cause Marketing from AmpliVox

Most cause marketing faces the consumer. You can imagine why. The lady who buys, say, printer paper where you work almost certainly is under the obligation to find the best price she can. A pink ribbon on a box of paper almost certainly is unmoving to corporate purchasing types if it also carries a premium price or if it doesn’t meet spec.

But business to business cause marketing does take place, even if it’s not common. This is my 890th post, and in nearly six years I’ve mentioned business to business cause marketing less than a dozen times.  

Add one more.

AmpliVox, an Illinois company which makes and sells portable sound systems and lecterns, does a form of non-transactional cause marketing to benefit the fights against both breast cancer and prostate cancer.

Not surprisingly perhaps, this came about when the human element was reintroduced to the B2B equation; AmpliVox’s owner, Don Roth, was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008. Listen for Roth’s part of the story when you watch the video on the left.

Shortly after his diagnosis Roth and his team developed two new versions of its polyurethane Pinnacle lectern, one in pink for breast cancer awareness and one in blue for prostate cancer awareness. AmpliVox donates the appropriately-colored podiums… which have handles and casters for easy moving… to every prostate or breast cancer group or event. AmpliVox covers all costs including shipping. The donation is for the lectern only. Any added microphones, amps, speakers or graphics would be an additional cost to the organization.

Roth says why AmpliVox did this, but is there also a business case to be made for this donation? I think there is.

First of all, we can safely assume that AmpliVox has driven out all the costs it can from making and shipping its pink and blue podiums. But even if it’s cheap for AmpliVox to produce, it isn’t no cost.

The main reason, it seems to me is that it gives AmpliVox a way to distinguish itself from competitors. And, it gives the company and its employees an ongoing story to tell... I learned about AmpliVox’s pink podiums at the bottom of a press release in the “About AmpliVox” paragraph at the bottom of the release. The release was about an unrelated product.

If these seem like small advantages remember that Big Ass Fans, the company that makes super-sized ceiling fans mainly for industrial use, was doing just fine, but no better than that under its original name, HVLS Fan Company. The name change brought Big Ass Fans out of obscurity. (With its evocative name and donkey mascot, Big Ass Fans is now also an active merchandiser of its brand. Profits from its ‘gear’ store benefit Habitat for Humanity, local food banks in Lexington, Kentucky, veteran’s organizations and the Longhopes Donkey Shelter).

Providing pink and blue podiums gratis could certainly do the same for AmpliVox.

Cause Marketing and 'Nature Deficit Disorder'

Just last night my youngest asked me what my favorite thing to do was when I was her age. I grew up on the edge of the Sonoran Desert and outside our home near a crossroads was a large mound of brush several hundred feet across that was home to all manner of desert animals, reptiles and insects. Many is the hour I spent watching creatures crawl in to and out of that mound. To this day I remember vividly a grisly encounter between a rattlesnake and a roadrunner, where, as in the Warner Brothers’ cartoon, the roadrunner emerged unscathed.

In short, I didn't suffer from what author Richard Louv has called ‘Nature Deficit Disorder.’

But in his 2005 book ‘Last Child in the Woods,’ Louv describes the possible effects:

• Limited respect for natural surroundings

• Attention deficit disorders, depressions, mood disorders, and poor grades.

• Childhood obesity.

So far, no medical manual recognizes Nature Deficit Disorder, but the outdoor products company The North Face does and is actively promoting around it with a cause marketing campaign called Role Models.

Role Models asks adults to take a pledge to expose kids to the out-of-doors. This is cause marketing, but it’s largely non-transactional. The North Face wants you to do something, not donate money with your purchase. Here’s how it works:

On The North Face’s Facebook page, you pledge to take a kid out into nature. As of this writing there were 809 pledges. For instance,

• Teach Camping 101 to Ingrid

• Kayak with Juan

• Trail Run with Brooke, etc.

The Facebook app has 20 default activities and 19 locations… ‘on a trail,’ ‘at a lake,’ ‘at a national park,’ etc. Make two mouse clicks, sign the pledge with your Facebook ID, and all you have to do is fulfill it.

Each time a Role Model makes a pledge or shares a photo/story, The North Face will donate $1 to the Children and Nature Network, an organization co-founded by Louv with a mission to reconnect kids with nature.

Participants in Role Models are entered to win free North Face gear.

The North Face has a stake in getting kids out-of-doors, of course. While the brand screams urban chic, it does so because it remains an authentic outdoor goods purveyor. If it loses cred on the mountain it also loses it on the street.

That said, while I like Role Models just fine, pledge campaigns always strike me as the least a sponsor could do. Pledge campaigns are like donuts; tasty and attractive, but filled with empty calories. That's because making a pledge online is super easy, but fulfilling it... i.e. changing behavior....is much harder.

In my view, pledge campaigns could benefit from a substantial dose of proven cognitive psychology. For instance, The North Face could emphasize that many people will help kids explore the outdoors this year, thereby drawing on the principle of social pressure.

Likewise, The North Face could ask several questions that help people think about exactly what they’ll be doing when they fulfill their pledge. For instance; ‘what do you think you’ll be doing before you pick up the kid to go to the out of doors?’ And, ‘where do you think you’ll be coming from when you pick the kid up?’

Research suggests that thinking through the specifics of an activity well before you start increases the likelihood that you’ll go through with it. So, too, would carefully-worded reminders on Facebook that would serve to help your subconscious think that you’re being monitored. 

These are straightforward additions in Facebook that would increase the likelihood that the pledges get fulfilled.

Cool Cause Marketing Campaigns from Two Commonwealth Countries

Two cool new cause marketing concepts from two different Commonwealth countries.

From New Zealand Donate your Desktop invites people to download a little software to their desktop computer. Included in the download is permission to push a different ad to your desktop’s background every day. Proceeds from the ad sales benefit the charity of your choice.

“Think of it as renting out your desktop background as an advertising space,” says Donate Your Desktop’s website, “with the proceeds going to charity.”

The ads tend to be ‘Bing’-like with big and bold visuals.

This is ‘push’ media made palatable by the addition of the cause marketing element. Wikipedia defines push media as, “… a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server. It is contrasted with pull, where the request for the transmission of information is initiated by the receiver or client.”

Ten years ago push media was the ‘once and future king’ of the Internet, but it was always a little creepy and never took off. For Donate Your Desktop cause marketing helps mitigate the negatives of push media.

So far Donate Your Desktop is for New Zealanders only, although I suspect there’s an opening here using a similar cause marketing approach to push ads to mobile devices like iPads and Kindles.

The Canadian beer giant Molson offers a promotion that allows patrons to get access to special concerts, while planting trees and cleaning up parks. Called Red Leaf Project, Molson is distributing more than 1 million beer coasters made of seed paper that, given the right conditions, will grow a tree.

The coasters are distributed at bars and with each crate of Molson Canadian sold. On each coaster is a pin code. Enter the code at the Molson website and you’re entered for a chance to win tickets to an outdoor concert near your postal code.

As an inducement, Molson is offering to carve out part of a $400,000 pot of money towards the restoration of parks near your postal code. People who participate in the park restorations/cleanups also get a shot at tickets to regional concerts. At the left is Molson’s 2012 TV ad for the campaign.

In 2011 the Red Leaf Project resulted in the planting of 110,00 trees and collection of 2000 bags of litter. (The count of bags of litter collected gives you sense about how clean Canada is).

Cause Marketing That’s Bucking the Downturn

1. The economies in the United States and the United Kingdom and wide swaths of Continental Europe remain stuck in the doldrums. But that doesn’t mean causes have to roll over and take it. That’s the message of a successful cause marketing relationship between UK discount fashion retailer TK Maxx and its charity partner Cancer Research.

Cancer Research generated £3.1 million pounds in its biennial ‘Give Up Clothes for Good’ campaign in April, up more than £500,000 than its last effort in 2010.

That’s impressive given the funk that so much of the worldwide economy is in. Give Up Clothes for Good asks shoppers at TK Maxx to donate clothing items in store. But if people are holding onto their clothes longer and replacing what they have less frequently, then that’s likely to negatively affect Cancer Research.

The charity resells donated clothes in thrift shops.

But three things helped ‘Give Up Clothes for Good’ to succeed, even in a sour economy.

• TK Maxx and Cancer Research illustrated Give Up Clothes promotions with particularly arresting photographs. Photographer Jason Bell shot pictures of celebrity supporters… singer Charlotte Church is at the left… in an eye-catching way

• TK Maxx stores are easy to get in an out of. TK Maxx stores are typically located in shopping centers and, as our cousins across the pond put it, ‘out-of-town retail parks.’

• TK Maxx stores feature dedicated bins for ‘Give Up Clothes for Good’ donations. The promotion only takes place for one month every other year, so it would certainly be tempting to do this on the cheap. But dedicated bins lend an air of legitimacy, authenticity and stability, and they’re easy to find and make donations to.

A Tip of the Hat to Pioneers Everywhere

Today my adopted state of Utah celebrates Pioneer Day. It’s a founder’s day celebration that commemorates when a hardy band of 151 settlers from the distant east first landed in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, not even a year behind the star-crossed Donner Party, which had traversed basically the same route.

Pioneer Day is a state holiday that we celebrate like a second ‘Fourth of July’ with pancake breakfasts, parades, BBQs, and fireworks after dark.

From July 24, 1847, when the vanguard party arrived, until the time when the rails were linked by the transcontinental railroad at Promotory Point Utah in 1869, about 70,000 people made the trek to Intermountain West. They rode in wagons, pushed handcarts and walked, driven largely by religious faith and fervor.

And while the the settlement of the American West was accomplished by tens of thousands who made their way along the Oregon or Sante Fe Trails, only the Utah Pioneers built fords and ferries and roads, and planted grain for the Pioneers behind them. A few hundred served a stint in the US Army as volunteers; a handful of whom were at Sutter’s Mill, California when gold was discovered in 1848.

But unlike Nevada, California and Colorado, the settlement of Utah wasn’t motivated by gold or silver like the California Gold Rush or Leadville in Colorado or the Comstock in Nevada. And unlike my home state of Arizona, the settlement of Utah was marked more often by mutual cooperation than rugged individualism; the Utah Pioneers were careful planners.

But there were notable and tragic failures, too. In 1856 two companies of handcarts with about 1,000 people total left too late in the season from Iowa. An early snowstorm struck the companies on the high plains of Wyoming and almost 20 percent of the group died from starvation or exposure.

Wallace Stegner, the fine historian and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, wrote this about the ill-fated Martin and Willie Handcart companies:

“Perhaps their suffering seems less dramatic because the handcart pioneers bore it meekly, praising God, instead of fighting for life with the ferocity of animals and eating their dead to keep their own life beating, as both the Fremont and Donner parties did. . . . But if courage and endurance make a story, if humankindness and helpfulness and brotherly love in the midst of raw horror are worth recording, this half-forgotten episode of the Mormon migration is one of the great tales of the West and of America.”

The Valley they were coming to was a forbidding place. Mountain men and Catholic priests who'd seen it told the Pioneers that the Valley couldn’t be settled. Certainly the Donner Party saw nothing that made them want to stay. Local legend holds that when the Pioneers arrived there were no trees in the Valley itself, although I doubt that.

The Salt Lake Valley is about the same longitude as New York City, but about 4500 feet higher in elevation. The high altitude and the northerly longitude means that the growing season is short. I've been here when we had snow in October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May and June.

Because the Salt Lake Valley is on the eastern end of the rain shadow cast by the High Sierras, Salt Lake City gets less than 10 inches of rain a year. Only the prodigious snowmelt trapped by the mountains to the east of the Salt Lake Valley makes the place habitable. One of the things I've long admired about the Utah pioneers is that they found all the water flowing in the Valley and out of the many canyons about six weeks after they'd arrived. This in a Valley of 500 square miles.

As a transplant to Utah, I have come admire the hardy and resilient Pioneers. The picture at the left is part of a cut they made in sandstone using hand tools to get wagons down to Glen Canyon 1,000 feet below. Lake Powell, which you can see in the background was still 100 years in the future. Like Isaac Newton memorably said of others, we “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

So please join me in toasting Pioneers… of Utah, of cause marketing, and everywhere else where being first was once an invitation to get shot. Because even in 2012 the world still needs pioneers willing to stick their necks out.

Janet Jackson Cause Marketing Her Weight Loss

Janet Jackson, ‘Miss Jackson if you’re nasty,’ has sold more than 100 million records. Now the youngest of the famed musical clan is using cause marketing to help sell Nutrisystem plans and foods.

During 2012, every pound Americans lose on the Nutrisystem plan will be matched by $1 of Nutrisystem food that go will hunger relief agencies up to $10 million in food. Jackson and Nutrisystem cofounded the cause Nutribank.org.

As of this date, Nutribank.org online presence is no more than a single holding page and details are sparse. But a recent issue of Prevention magazine reports that between the cause and Jackson’s wide appeal, “within two months of signing on as a spokeswoman, first-time orders were up by their highest percentage in four years.”

Jackson certainly has enduring appeal. At age 46, she’s been in the public eye since an appearance on ‘The Jacksons’ variety show in 1976 and, later, on the TV shows ‘Good Times,’ and ‘Fame.’

In those 37 years her life and career has had both ups and downs. Her terrific album ‘Rhythm Nation’ produced seven top-5 hits, a record.

But she lost her beloved brother Michael in 2009, and her career survived a notorious wardrobe malfunction on live TV during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show.

What’s Nutribank.org about? Here’s what the website says:

“The idea is simple: NutriBank is a repository for two things - nutritious food and monetary resources. It's also a platform we'll use to drive awareness not just about hunger, but about how to engage in a solution… Please check back in as we add more information about the projects NutriBank is supporting and as we provide progress reports on our food and financial donations.”

It’s a noble sentiment. But Jackson signed with Nutrisystem in Dec 2011, 8 months ago.

The site is signed by Jackson and Joe Redling, the CEO of Nutrisystem. Both are listed as co-founders.

It’s time for Jackson and Redling to start delivering on the promises of Nutribank, whatever they are. 

Telling Your Cause Marketing Story On Pack

In 2010 Kroger sold 24 packs of their house-brand water in ½ liter bottles benefiting their breast cancer effort, Giving Hope a Hand. The top was pink and the side panels featured stories of Kroger employees who’d successfully fought breast cancer.

Now Brawny, the Georgia-Pacific brand of paper towels, has taken a page from Kroger and produced a limited-edition 8-roll pack co-branded with The Wounded Warrior Project that tells the charity’s story.

The campaign also generates a donation for Wounded Warrior via an expanded Facebook ‘like’ effort. Sign a ‘thanks’ wall, like the Facebook page, or text ‘thanks’ to 272969 and Georgia-Pacific will back a $1 donation per action.

The packaging also features QR codes that lead to a donation site for Wounded Warriors project.

I haven’t seen Wounded Warriors messaging for the packaging yet so I can’t comment. But I hope they’re telling stories of injured service members and vets who were once in bad way, but are now better thanks to the help provided by the Wounded Warrior Project.

Regular readers know how much I like activating cause marketing on packaging. That’s because once someone is in the store, the last opportunity you have to reach them with a cause marketing appeal is when they see it on the packaging. And an 8-pack of Brawny paper towels is a good-sized canvas with which to work.

A Sold Cause Marketing Campaign from Mimi's Cafe

Right now at Mimi’s restaurants, when you buy a ‘Miracle Balloon’ pin for $5 benefiting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, you get a paper icon to be displayed in the restaurant and three bounceback coupons worth as much as $30.

I once wrote that Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals had forgotten more about cause marketing than almost any other charity knew about the practice. I meant that as a back-handed compliment. From my vantage-point it seemed to me that many of the things that CMNH had once known in its bones about what did and didn’t work in cause marketing seemed to be lost to CMNH’s institutional memory.

But this promotion tells me that Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has regained its footing. This is a very solid paper icon campaign.  

Mimi’s Café is a casual dining restaurant chain with more than 100 stores in 22 states, with a heavy concentration of the total units in California. Mimi’s Café is a division of Bob Evans Farms.

What’s to like about the campaign?

Let’s start with the coupon paper icon. While many charities have paper icon campaigns very few feature bounceback coupons. But they serve both the charity and the sponsors. They provide extra inducement for customers to buy a paper icon, which is good for the charity. And they bring customer’s back to Mimi’s. And soon. The coupons expire in August 2012.

I like the two-track aspect to the campaign. Pay a $1 and toy get the coupons. Buy the pin for $5 and you also get the coupons.

The table tent also shows CMNH’s sophistication. Day was when you’d just repeat the same messaging on both sides. Instead, CMNH realizes that people, while waiting for their server or meal, read stuff. Buy making the messaging you increase the chances that people will read more about the cause.

Conspicuous by its absence is a QR code, something that Chili’s does in its paper icon campaign benefiting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Such a code could have directed customers to video ‘Miracle Stories’ or appeals from CMNH’s roster of celebrities. They could have tried some kind of sweepstakes component that brings lucky winners to CMNH’s annual Telethon. They could have used a QR code to bring people to a special site hosted by Dr. Oz, one of the hosts of their Telethon, who could offer children’s health tips.

How was it sold? Well, in fact, I asked about it. The newbie server didn’t know much, but her more senior trainer did and answered my questions easily.

Good for Mimi’s for training her right and good for CMNH.

Cause Marketing on the Navajo Reservation

If you’re like me, you loathe it when gas stations sell air for your vehicle’s tires. Air is free, right?

But I saw a pay air pump on the Navajo Indian Reservation that used cause marketing to take some of the sting out of buying compressed air.

Gap, Arizona is a tiny burg on US-89 on the western edge of the expansive Navajo Nation (the reservation is slightly larger than the state of West Virginia).

US-89 is almost the mother road for National Parks in the American West. It is the main access artery for the Grand Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, the Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park.

The population density of the Navajo Nation is very low, and the unemployment and poverty rates are high; 42 percent and 43 percent respectively. For comparison’s sake, the unemployment rate on the adjacent Hopi reservation is 55 percent. But the Navajo have a rich and amazing artistic heritage. Years ago I worked in an office where my desk faced a cool RC Gorman painting. Would that I could have bought it.

The Hopi have spiritual and religious traditions that have fascinated scholars for decades. The Hopi have continuously occupied some of their sacred mesas since 1,100 AD. And anyone who can make a rewarding and fulfilling life on the high and austere desert mesas of Northeast Arizona has my complete respect.  

Here’s how the promotion works: when you buy one-dollar’s worth of air, Air Serv will donate an undisclosed amount to Feed My Starving Children. Nothing on the pump or on FMSC’s website told me that some of the children were on the Navajo Nation, but I found it impossible not to make that leap in thinking. FMSC does indeed send some food Stateside and the Navajo Nation, with its very young and poor population, is seemingly a likely recipient.

Air Serv, which owns and services the equipment, uses their relationship with FMSC as a way to differentiate itself from competitors. It’s like those vending machines that promise to give a portion of the proceeds to a cause. Air Serv’s total commitment to FMSC is $100,000 a year for five years. Not bad.

The promotion works because FMSC’s name says what it does. And it worked in Gap, Arizona for me because I needed air for my tires and because I couldn’t NOT think of Navajo kids as possible recipients.

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More Instant-On Cause Marketing from Colorado's Front Range

When I posted about Qdoba’s instant-on cause marketing effort to benefit the Colorado wildfire crisis, the estimable cause marketer Steve Drake asked where was the rest of these kind of promotions were to be found, especially in the state of Colorado.

In fact, a number of Colorado food and dining establishments have offered cause marketing, flat donations of money and food, in addition to prayers. Here’s a rundown:

A Colorado Panera franchisee, Local Breads of the World, made a $20,000 donation to the Care and Share Food Bank

In Golden the Boston Market served food to evacuees and volunteers at the infamous Waldo Canyon Fire.

The Einstein Brothers Bagel location in Lakewood linked its Facebook page to the American Red Cross website and urged patrons to help and thank firefighters.

LaMar’s Donuts and Coffee in Centennial donated 4,000 donuts to firefighters and volunteers working near Ft. Collins.

Noodles and Company in Broomfield used its Facebook page to ask fans to offer a prayer or a rain dance.

Quiznos in Denver linked its Facebook page to the American Red Cross and asked fans to make donations.

In Colorado Springs Borriello Brothers Real New York Pizza has been feeding evacuees, firefighters, volunteers and others and asked patrons to ‘Donate Your Discount,’ a cool idea.

Cause Marketing Fruit Trees

Communities Take Root is an effort from Dreyer’s Fruit Bars brand, started in 2010, that plants fruit tree orchards in deserving neighborhoods across the country.

Dreyer’s, owned by Swiss food giant Nestle, partners with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation to fulfill the backend of the promotion. There’s a nomination procedure at www.communitiestakeroot.com. Nominated communities then seek votes online at the same website. Top vote getters receive a fruit orchard planted by locals with the Tree Planting Foundation’s help and advice.

The promotion is activated via PR and on Dreyer’s packaging (see at left). The YouTube video that explains the promotion has a scant 383 views, two of them mine, since it was posted back on Feb. 21, 2011. 

I have just enough Jeffersonian Ideal of a Democratic agrarianism in me to admire and appreciate when the American economy was based mainly on agriculture that one of the first things settlers would do was plant a fruit tree orchard. Even today, there are wide swaths of Phoenix, Arizona, my hometown, where you can walk up to orange or grapefruit tree planted in the lawn strip between the sidewalk and the street and grab some citrus. So I love the idea of this promotion.

In the video, Dreyer’s promises long-term support. And why wouldn’t they? Fruit trees just aren’t that expensive. In fact, even communities that don’t win a full orchard nonetheless get three starter fruit trees with instructions on how to plant them.

But to me this promotion seems to have missed some tricks, reflected in part by the 383 viewings the explanatory video has on YouTube.

First off, I wondered why Dreyer’s went to the expense to build a separate website. This kind of promotion is tailor-made for Facebook Oh, I know that Facebook isn’t without its challenges and difficulties. But they’re more than made up for that by the ease with which Facebook allows participating communities to spread the word.

Secondly, I found the website more vague than it needed to be on the issue of whether the contest was still active. In fact, Communities Take Root approves communities in tranches and 2012 has more than one tranche of winners. But on the home page there are two side-by-side buttons that respectively read ‘Vote Now’ and ‘See the Winners.’

Having waves of winners is the right approach. But since most such contests are winner-take-all, the buttons confused me at first.

Open Source Cause Marketing

At left is a thermometer that displays the ambient room temperature on its maker’s computer screen. It was built by a friend using an Arduino circuit board. Arduino is an open source hardware control unit. He could plug in a humidity sensor and do a little more programming and his display would show the humidity in the room. He could add an altimeter, or a GPS sensor to display latitude and longitude. He could set up a website to put on view the temperature of the room where he works. He could add an accelerometer to signal earthquake activity (or theft of the device). He could have the unit send him text if the temperature in the room rose above 80 degrees. Etc., etc.

By now business people, even those outside of IT, are sort of inured to the idea of ‘open source’ anything. But open source cause marketers still offers cause marketers countless opportunities.

Two examples of open source cause marketing leap to mind.

General Mills’ Box Tops for Education campaign is an open source cause marketing campaign. I realized this several years back when I walked into Sam’s Club and was handed a handbill that detailed a small promotion for earning bonus Box Tops.

On the backside were listed 33 items available in Sam’s Club that participate in Boxtops for Education. But here’s the kicker, they weren’t all General Mills products. As I’ve noted before, General Mills opened up Box Tops to non-competing brands in 2006.

In effect, General Mills has opened up its “source code” to non-competing brands, including Scott paper towels, Huggies baby wipes, Hefty disposable plates, plus at various times retailers including J.C. Penney, Land’s End, and, to a degree, Sam’s Club.

Why does General Mills do this?

• In software coding you do it for several reasons none the least of which is that many hands make light work.

• Certainly the change has boosted the campaign. It took Box Tops from its founding in 1996 to 2004 to reach its first $100 million in donations to America’s schools. By 2007, they crossed the $200 million mark. Now in 2012 total giving is north of $475 million.

• Relatedly, after all its brands were in the program, General Mills had only two ways to grow the campaign: organically or by bringing in other outside brands.

• General Mills probably gets some sort of fee from the other participants for administering the campaign.

• Plus, there’s broader competitive reasons. Retailers including Target, Wal-Mart, Kroger and others all sell house brands that compete with General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Ziploc and others. Oftentimes those house brands represent a retailer’s richest profit margins. Consumers are buying more and more of these of these house brands. Box Tops for Education represents a way for manufacturers to stem that tide.

A second prominent open source cause marketing effort is the pink ribbon campaign, which signifies breast cancer awareness.

In the United States no one ‘owns’ the pink ribbon, although Susan G. Komen for the Cure has trademarked the terms ‘pink ribbon regatta,’ ‘pink ribbon golf tourney,’ and ‘pink ribbon celebration.’ And the National Breast Cancer Foundation trademarked ‘pink ribbon challenge.' Komen also owns a stylized version of the ribbon that is associated with the charity’s walk and race events.

But pink ribbons by themselves are not trademarked Stateside and, at this point, probably couldn’t be. Pink ribbons therefore are, in effect, an ‘open-source charity icon.' Any of the breast cancer charities can use pink ribbons anyway they want. So can for-profit entities.

Of course this leads to abuses that tick off people But despite the potential for abuse, it is because no one owns the pink ribbon that it’s as valuable as it is.

That’s the paradox and promise of open source cause marketing.

Cause Marketing for Pets with Cancer

Dogs and cats contract cancer at about the same rate as humans, but while an estimated 577,000 Americans will die of cancer in 2012, some 14 million cats and dogs will die from or (in many cases) with the disease. The treatment options for pets is narrower than with people and many pet parents euthanize their pets rather than treat them.

To raise awareness of the options and to generate money for pet cancer research Petco, the pet supply chain, and the Blue Buffalo Foundation, the charity affiliate of the pet food company of the same name, celebrated its third annual Pet Cancer Awareness Month in May 2012 demolishing its fundraising goal of $1 million. The effort generated $1.5 million.

Nice!

The money in 2012 will go to 10-year research study with 2,500 dogs to “determine the genetic, nutritional and environmental risk factors for cancer and other diseases that affect dogs.”

Here’s how the promotion worked: Petco and Blue Buffalo invited people to make a donation to the cause either online or in any of its 1,000 + stores. Petco also sold a blue-colored version of the ubiquitous silicone wristband. As an incentive, Blue Buffalo offered several dollars-off coupons from this FSI on the left that dropped, I believe, in April 2012.

That’s a pretty old-school consumer packaged goods cause marketing promotion, versions of which have been around for more than 25 years.

While there’s no arguing with success, considering that the Internet was basically built for cute cat videos, I wonder why they didn’t include something like ‘Hovercat,’ the made-for viral-video that features ABC news reporter Dan Harris and meant to raise awareness for the ASPCA.

Cause Marketing Lessons From the Rodeo

On July 4, 2012 my family and I attended a small town rodeo and the clown who performed had a great joke with a lesson in it for all cause marketers.

Rodeos in the United States don’t enjoy much TV airtime and so they survive on live events, oftentimes in markets so small that Nielsen and Arbitron wouldn’t recognize them.

Oh, the national championship events in Omaha and Oklahoma City can be seen on high-number cable stations, and occasionally the ‘rodeo game’ as the announcer kept referring to it will sometimes go to a few of the New York City exurbs as a novelty for the city-folks. Still the only way for most people in the densely-populated Eastern Seaboard states to see a rodeo is to travel a good distance.

That’s a pity, too. A well-produced rodeo is a slice of the rural American West in its most piquant form.  If the NFL is steak and potatoes, and NASCAR is BBQ and fried pickles, ProRodeo is a hearty chili with cornbread.

PRC rodeos, even at the level I watched last night, are tightly-formatted and entertaining affairs. There’s Bareback Riding, Steer Wrestling, Team Roping (Heelers and Headers) Saddle Bronc Riding, Tie-Down Roping, Steer Roping and Bull Riding.

(At the left is Cody Teel, from Kountze, Texas, who is currently atop of the money-earning standings for bull riding. He’s astride ‘Due North.’)

And there’s the clown who plays the role of the classic jester, or clever fool, along with an announcer who explains the action and plays straight man to the clown.

Midway through the show the clown starts extolling the charms and beauties of the rodeo queen and her court.

Then he says, setting up the joke: 

“Ladies, I have three words for you that will change your lives forever!”

The announcer bites and says… speaking for everyone… “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

“Lower your standards,” says the clown.

The crowd roared.

It’s a great punchline. Fifty more words and it could be the lyrics to a country song from Lady Antebellum! But the lesson for all of us in cause marketing is in the clown’s setup, not his punchline.

If you want to change your cause marketing life forever... and not in a good way... then feel free to lower your standards and shortchange things like transparency and openness. Pick partners that aren’t really interested in a true partnership. Make the promotion hard to understand or to participate in. Don’t give potential supporters a compelling reason to participate and don’t thank them when it’s all said and done. And frontload all the communication into the start of the promotion.

But don’t do any of that unless you’re a cause marketing clown.

Smart Cause Marketing from a Leading MMA Company

Torque MMA, a supplier of apparel and mats to the mixed martial arts community, has developed a three-part cause marketing promotion that may be exactly what the doctor ordered for cause marketers everywhere.

In the past, I’ve been critical of cause marketing efforts that front-load all their promotional efforts. In May 2012 I wrote about a cause marketing promotion benefiting The Prostate Cancer Charity from UK retailer Marks & Spencer and which sold underwear endorsed by prominent UK sportsmen. Later, as the cause cooled and the merchandise grew stale, Marks & Spencer begin to discount the underwear in stores and online.

Here’s what I wrote:

In a case like this where there’s a celebrity component, here’s a thought; hold back some of the promotion for later. Promotions… cause marketing and otherwise… tend to be front-loaded and rightfully so. You have to develop the momentum to see you through the promotion and the best way to do that is to go as big as you can right from the get-go.

But the celebrity aspect of this promotion affords Marks & Spencer and The Prostate Cancer Charity an extra arrow in the promotional quiver. Imagine offering up some bragging right to the celebrity whose underwear line sells out first. A press release. A billboard campaign. Facebook bragging rights. Whatever. Then get creative with any of the celebrities whose competitive pride won’t let them finish sixth.

Imagine, for instance, if right before Marks & Spencer was prepared to start discounting, the ‘Fun Bus’ Jason Leonard, started autographing the boxes of his line of Kelly green-colored underwear. Maybe he signs 200 boxes. I’ve watched American baseball players sign 200 baseballs plus another 200 baseball cards in one sitting. So signing 200 underwear boxes wouldn’t be terribly onerous. But instead of offering them first-come, first-served they go randomly to anybody who has paid the full £15.

Or maybe Jamie Redknapp, who along with his wife Louise represent a kind of beer-budget version of David and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, could be part of some kind sweepstakes for a personal appearance. Again, this element of the promotion would only be triggered when Marks & Spencer’s usual metrics told them to start discounting.

Torque MMA’s promotion is in concert with Orange County Chopper, of cable-TV fame, and the cause Operation Gratitude, which sends ‘care’ packages to American military servicemen and women stationed overseas. Here’s how it works.

In 2012 Operation Gratitude will ship its 800,000th care package overseas. On June 15, 2012 and American general was at the Operation Gratitude assembly line in Van Nuys, California for the 800,000th package. Inside that package they put a letter and a set of keys to a custom chopper being created by Orange County Chopper. Since Torque is funding the chopper, I suspect some of their branding will be included on it. (At left is a motorcycle that OCC did for Intel).

That package will go overseas in time for Christmas 2012. At which point some lucky serviceman or woman will open up their Operation Gratitude package and out will fall a set of keys that fit a custom Orange County Chopper.

The promotion, therefore, gives Torque at least three separate and legitimate opportunities to tell its story:

• At the launch when the keys are put into the package

• On the American Choppers series which airs on the Discovery Channel

• When the serviceman or women is awarded their chopper

Smart. Smart. Smart.

Instant-On Cause Marketing Benefiting the Colorado Wildfire Fight

Qdoba Mexican Grill, a Colorado-based fast-casual Mexican food chain restaurant, is doing one of those instant-on cause marketing efforts benefiting the firefighting effort in the wildfire-ravaged state of Colorado.

Next Tuesday, July 10, 2012 all 72 Qdoba restaurants in Colorado will ask customers for a minimum $1 donation to the Red Cross fund called Colorado Wildfires 2012. Everyone who donates a $1 minimum will get Qdoba’s chips and three-cheese appetizer free. Qdoba will match the first $50,000 raised dollar for dollar. The total goal, therefore, is $100,000.

Qdoba has about 700 locations spread across the United States. 

The money will go to the American Red Cross, which in cases of natural disaster like this provides shelter and other support to the people affected by the fires. During the course of Colorado’s wildfires tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes for at least a day.

Kudos (Qudos?) to Qdoba for this instant-on cause marketing effort.

The Appeal of Franchises for Cause Marketers

Cause marketing is almost always directed at consumers. So in North America one place you can be all but certain to find cause marketing is at retail franchise outlet.

 The ten largest franchise systems, ranked according to worldwide sales volume as ranked by Franchise Times follow. Where known I’ve added the cause with which each franchise system is most publicly affiliated.

1. McDonald’s… Ronald McDonald House Charities
2. 7-Eleven… Muscular Dystrophy Association
3. KFC … KFC Colonel’s Scholars, et al
4. Burger King… various
5. Subway Restaurants… American Heart Association
6. Ace Hardware… Children’s Miracle Network
7. Circle K Stores… United Cerebral Palsy
8. Pizza Hut…Book It, et al
9. Wendy’s… Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption
10. Marriott Hotels, Resorts & Suites… Children’s Miracle Network.

It’s not surprising that consumer-oriented franchises would tend to have a cause marketing focus. Academic research consistently finds that corporate social responsibility makes good business sense for businesses that target the consumer market. Cause marketing has also been found to help preserve pricing power and to positively affect how consumers perceive product performance.

But doing cause marketing campaigns with franchises ain’t always easy.

One reason is that local franchisees have autonomy. If a McDonald's franchisee in Albuquerque, New Mexico wants to support the nearby Ronald McDonald House, he probably doesn't have to. Although he’d certainly get plenty of pressure to do so from the local McDonald's owner's group. I've been told that one of the main reasons why the once narrowly-focused Ronald McDonald House became the broader-focused Ronald McDonald House Charities is because owners and owner's groups wanted to be able to support their own 'pet' causes.

Go down the Franchise Times list and you'll find plenty of franchise systems that don't have a cause affiliation. It's a prospect list for charities, in other words.

For charities you need to ask yourself the following before you start making phone calls:

• Does my cause have the breadth of appeal that can attract a franchise and its franchisees?

• Is there a 'fit'?

• Are the target franchise systems close enough to consumers to be able to ask for money/support?

• Can I get the support of powerful individual franchisees?

• Can I physically support the efforts of franchises that may be spread out across the continent?

• Can I put into place a mechanism for collecting money?

• Do I have the wherewithal to promote the relationship in the media, social and otherwise?

• How will I recognize and reward the achievements of individual franchisees?

• If there are materials to distribute, does the franchisor have an effective way to deliver them?

• When selling your charity to the franchise system, does the franchisor have an efficient way for me to get in front of the individual franchisees?

For franchisees and franchise systems, the questions you have to ask of would-be charity partners are almost a mirror image:

• Does the charity's mission have broad appeal?

• Will your customers know who anything about the charity?

• Is what your customers know about the cause good?

• Do they have any unexplained scandals in their past?

• Does the charity have unique appeal?

• Does the charity have the support of influential franchisees or systems?

• Will your customers and franchisees understand the 'fit'?

• Does the charity fulfill its mission well?

• Are they efficient with their resources?

• Is the relationship or any of the elements promotable in the various forms of media?

• Can they help you with promotions?

• Do you have budget to help them produce and distribute campaign materials?

• Do they have boots on the ground in the markets most important to you?

• How will they acknowledge and reward the franchisee's efforts?

Retail franchises are ripe for cause campaigns because consumers expect them. But make sure you have good answers to the questions above before heading into cause marketing relationships.

Bota Box Mashes Up Cause Marketing and Rebates

Some $8 billion a year is returned to American households each year in the form of rebates, estimates Parago, a rebate promotion provider in Lewisville, Texas. That dwarfs the $1.7 billion that IEG predicts companies will spend on cause marketing efforts in 2012.

Surely there’s a way to mash-up these two different approaches to incentive promotions in a way that makes best advantage of both.

In fact, Bota Box, which sells California wines in a box is doing exactly that to benefit the Arbor Day Foundation. In time for National Picnic Month this month, Bota Box will either donate to the Arbor Day Foundation or offer customers a rebate when they meet the terms of the rebate.

Here’s how it works: When you send in the cash register receipts for three Bota boxes and the official mail-in rebate form, the company will make a $12 donation to the National Arbor Day Foundation. Or, you can take the rebate yourself.

The corresponding rebate amounts for 2 Bota Boxes is $7 and $3 for one Bota Box.

No word on any total donation limits to the Arbor Day Foundation, although each household is limited to one rebate, whatever the amount. Also, the rebate is open only those 21 years of age or older.

Bota Box has also done 'like' campaigns on Facebook for the Arbor Day Foundation and participated in tree-planting efforts. Bota Box debuted this mashup of cause marketing and rebates in 2011.

Since this kind of promotion requires the explicit permission of regulators in various states, I suspect that Bota Box will try this promotion several more times to take advantage of the costs sunk in getting regulatory approvals.

If you strap on your thinking cap you can imagine many other uses for this mashup; car companies could ape the success of Subaru’s Share the Love cause marketing, by sending rebate money to causes. Whirlpool could ask people to donate their rebate checks to Habitat for Humanity. Mobile service providers could ask customers to send rebate checks to charity. 

Parago, who provides the total market estimate of rebates, calculates that the average household garners $150 a year in rebates. That’s found money that many consumers might be willing to share.


Thanks to faithful reader Kate B. for spotting this.