Get that Nasty Lance Armstrong Taste Out of Your Mouth

Howard Brodwin, founder of SportsandSocialChange.org, and I are both sports fans and we both collectively lamented that in forfeiting his Tour de France victories Lance Armstrong effectively admitted to doping during his career.

I wrote to Howard, “A lot of us like sports/athletics because even though we know the best athletes are still human, we admire them because of their super-human performances. When they dope, however, it kinda takes the air out of that idea. I'm disappointed and sad.”

Howard, wisely, responded, this way: “I know what might cheer you up, and it starts next Wednesday. http://www.paralympic.org.”

You kinda have to hunt down the TV coverage, but the Paralympics, which wraps up on Sept 9 in London, has been just splendid.

And, as Howard points out, individual Paralympians have been a terrific source for cause marketing gold.

Television spots from Coca-Cola, Citibank, and British Petroleum all feature inspiring Paralympians, and even Special Olympians. Check the SportsandSocialChange.org site for more links to the spots.

And do yourself a real favor and watch some Paralympics coverage. It will help you get some of that nasty Lance Armstrong taste out of your mouth. 

A Well-Crafted Cause Marketing Effort Using Merchandise

Within the next few weeks you can count on seeing a lot of pink merchandise; garden shears, NFL Player’s shoes, cupcakes and more. But before you go pink golfer Phil Mickelson and his sponsors want you to think blue first.

When you buy Mickelson’s blue cap for $29.95 from KPMG’s Phil Mickelson website, $7.50 will go to First Book, the children’s literacy charity, with a guaranteed donation of $50,000. The hat is the same one Mickelson is wearing on the PGA Tour this year. It features KPMG’s logo on the front and Calloway’s logo on the back, two of ‘Lefty’s’ major sponsors.

The ad at the left was in Fortune magazine early this year and comes from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database.

The $7.50 figure is in the fine print on the website. KPMG promotes the purchase of the hat as bringing First Book three books. To promote the campaign in the social media, when you Tweet a picture of the hat using the hashtag #PhilsBlueHat, you’re entered to win a VIP trip to Mickelson’s home base in San Diego to meet him.


Listen here as Phil explains it.


You can see where this could go. KPMG could issue limited-edition hats every year that it sponsors Mickelson, which seems likely to continue for at least a few more years. Although Mickelson has already had a 22-year career, he won’t be 50 until 2020, at which point he’s eligible for the Champions Tour.

Mickelson’s record includes 40 career wins, and 4 majors over his 22-year career.  That puts him ninth on the all-time PGA Tour Win List 

All in all, a well-thought-out cause marketing campaign based on selling merchandise.

There is one curiosity, however. The fine print also says this: “For one year, beginning March 15, 2012, KPMG will donate 100% of the net proceeds ($7.50) from each hat purchased to First Book.”

If you do the math, $29.95 minus $7.50 is $22.45. I have a really hard time believing that the cost of the hat and other expenses is really $22.45. Even if the hat was $11 that would be an expensive wholesale price for a ‘lid.’ There must be some money in there for a promoter or a licensing fee, or they dumped a lot of expenses into the cost of the hat.

Good Cause Marketing Lessons From Bad PR

Causemarketing.biz, this humble little site you’re reading right now, is the Interweb’s largest, most diverse and comprehensive blog on cause marketing.

Maybe the site's size and renown explains the volume of off-topic pitches I get from well-meaning PR people.

There’s a name for these people. When they send me helpful pitches that are pertinent to causemarketing.biz I call them PR angels. When they pitch me ideas that are off-topic, too long, too dumb, or addressed to “Dear Alden,” I just call them clueless.

Editors and reporters have started to out the clueless. Heck, even PR people are outing the clueless. It's never been more chic than right now to complain about PR idiots.

I’m not going to out any clueless PR people by name. Not today anyway. But to prove my point, here is a short list of subject lines that have appeared in my in-box in the last week:

• “Text Messaging: a Marketers Paradise for Increasing Brand Engagement.”

• “Sales and Marketing Team: The Real Drivers Behind iPad Implementation.”

• What comes after Kony 2012?

And a personal favorite from a few years back:

• “BOARDFEST SNOWBOARD RAIL JAM GOES COED FOR BLIZZARD AT THE BEACH.”  And yes, it shouted at me just like that in all-caps.

There are lessons in all this for all cause marketers, but especially for those from the nonprofit world.

1. Don’t Just ‘Doorbell-Ditch’ Your Cause Marketing Proposals. When I was an adolescent I was known to have doorbell-ditched from time to time. You know, where you ring the doorbell on a home and then run? The lesson is, don’t just email your proposal to someone you’ve had no contact with. Don’t spam prospects with your proposal. They have to be addressed to someone. And that person must agree to receive it before you send it off.
2. Consider Scale and Appropriateness. If your cause is a model railway museum in Fiddler’s Bend, Oklahoma you’re almost certainly barking up the wrong tree to propose a CRM campaign to American Express. That’s not to say that all successful cause marketing relationships are purely strategic. But very few of them are openly stupid.
3. Style Counts. In terms of the format of your proposal no type should be smaller than about 20 points. Don’t use Comic Sans or other wacky fonts or weirdly-colored type. And the deck can’t be more than 20 pages max unless you’re author/consultant Tom Peters. In which case you’re allowed 22 pages. If it’s on paper or Powerpoint; use the landscape format. Use pictures, and plenty of them. But make sure they’re dynamite and that they illustrate your cause and the campaign as well as possible. 
4. If the Answer is No Measure Carefully Any Response. Think very hard before you fire back something venomous if all you get in response is a form letter. Maybe only a juggernaut like St. Jude Children’s Research Medical Center could get away with such a response. For everyone else, remember that cause marketing is a marathon, not a 100-meter dash. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. You attract more with flies with honey than vinegar. (Insert the morale-building cliché of your choice here.)

What to Present in Your First Meeting With a Cause Marketing Prospect

Imagine that you’ve got at least the bones of a new cause marketing campaign in place and it’s now time to test it and see how the market will react. What do you ‘sell’ in those first few meetings with prospective sponsors?

There are two schools of thought.

In the first school, you never go to any meeting unprepared. That is, you put together a pretty buttoned-down sponsorship packet that outlines exactly what you’re asking of the prospective sponsor and what they get in return. In this view, what you're really selling is you and your competence at the cause marketing game.

In the other school, you prepare a bare-bones document that explains what you have in mind and why they’d want to participate, along with an educated guess of how much money you’re likely to ask for. Then, once you get in front of a decision-maker you ask what they’d want in return for their sponsorship dollars.

Which is best?

Well, it depends in part on you and what kind of person you are. If you can’t do anything without over-preparing than the first approach is right for you. And the risk of making all the advanced preparations is probably pretty low. After all, once you get in the meeting you can certainly tell the prospect that all possibilities… even those not in the proposal… are on the table.

On the other hand, there’s real value in knowing what a prospect really wants from a sponsorship. And it’s hard to know that without asking them. Then, once you’ve had that conversation, it’s easy to come back with a more tailored approach.

Here’s what I suggest. If your introduction to a prospective sponsor is pretty warm… say from a board member or personal friend…you can probably get away with the less formal approach. Make the meeting more of a conversation and less of a formal proposal.

By contrast, if your introduction to the prospect is cold, then spend the time and effort to nail down all the particulars. You’ll want to be professional, organized and primed. Emphasize that while you have a formal proposal, what you want most is hear their reactions, gauge their interest, and test your ideas in the market.

The Images You Choose in Cause Marketing Activations

The image you choose to illustrate a cause marketing campaign matters. A lot.

That’s because very few people in the United State from ages 25-45 really read anymore. But a cause marketing activation in print requires literacy. So the job of the illustration... along with the headline... is to draw people in for the explanation. The images are no less important in cause marketing activations online or on video.

In general terms cause marketing activation refers to how you promote the campaign.

Witness then the illustration in this effort from Massage Envy for their Healing Hands for Arthritis promotion coming up on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012. On that day, Massage Envy will give $10 from every massage and facial to the Arthritis Foundation. In addition, on Sept. 19 Murad will donate 10 percent of sales of its skincare products sold at Massage Envy locations.

Massage Envy is a franchise with more than 700 locations in 43 states. Its business model is like that of a health club. Memberships are $49 to $59 a month, depending on the location, and include one massage per month at no additional charge.

Pictures of hands are usually a visual trope. You know what I mean; the close-up shot of the handshake is a classic example. It’s meant to suggest partnership or friendship. But it’s been done to death. For causes another visual trope is the tiny little hand of a premie reaching for a much larger adult hand.

But the photo-illustration here in this ad from Redbook magazine is subtly different. The hand in the middle is arthritic, with the tell-tale signs of the disease at the joints. Surrounding the hand, it would seem, are the hands of a skilled masseuse. It’s nice.

The only trouble with the illustration is that if you’re just scanning the magazine, which is what a lot of readers of Redbook probably do, it would be easy to miss the subtle cues. That is, if you’re just scanning this shot, all that might register in your pre-frontal cortex is the expected clichés of hands holding hands.  

What should the agency do that prepared this ad for Massage Envy? Truthfully, were I the art director I might have picked a hand model whose arthritis was even more pronounced.

New Cause Marketing Study Suggests that Consumers Feel Empowered When They Choose the Cause

A press account in Nonprofit Quarterly reports that a new academic study finds that when cause marketing campaigns give consumers the opportunity to determine which cause receives support that consumers are more likely to buy and have a more positive attitude toward the company than when no choice is offered

The study, found in the current issue of the Journal of Marketing, was authored by Stefanie Rosen Robinson from North Carolina State University and Caglar Irmak and Frances Hipp of the University of South Carolina.

I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know the methodology. But Rick Cohen writes on the Nonprofit Quarterly website that,

“according to the study, three factors affect the content and potential success of consumer-driven cause-related marketing campaigns: collectivism, cause-brand fit, and goal proximity. The article abstract offers the following explanation:”

“’Noncollectivists’ value choice because it allows them to choose their own individual preferences. However, even “collectivists” will appreciate CM campaigns based on choice because they appreciate and value collaborative actions and are thus attracted to the notion of their choices matching others’ charitable choices.” 

“If the choice of benefiting charities is limited by the corporation’s brand, the consumer-driven CM campaign is actually less effective than allowing consumers to have a sense of more personal control. In cause marketing, giving consumers real choice and control works better.” 

“Consumers are more likely to feel positively about their moneys contributing to projects that are close to their intended goals (the ‘goal proximity’ factor). So, hypothetically, consumers will feel better about their moneys going to a project that is 80 percent toward reaching its goal than one that is only 20 percent there and still far away. Companies might be well advised to donate the first 80 percent on their own so that consumers can think of themselves as finishing off the last 20 percent.”

Study design counts in research like this. I’ve seen cause marketing campaigns that offer thousands of potential charities to choose from. But social science frequently finds too much choice to be paralyzing.

More on this paper and its implications after I’ve had the chance to read it.

Standing Out from Other Cause Marketing

Back in the day, one of the things I put in proposals to potential sponsors was that cause marketing helped you stand out from competitors. Nowadays, in certain competitive industries like consumer packaged goods (CPG) one way to emerge from the clutter is to NOT do cause marketing. That is to say, cause marketing has become such a pervasive way of doing business that consumers expect it. So if you don't do cause marketing in competitive sectors like CPG, it becomes very noticeable, and not in a good way.

So corporate marketers might rightly ask, as one did Tuesday night, “with so many of my competitors doing cause marketing, how can I make my brands emerge from the clutter?”

Three quick thoughts:

1. Do it right. There’s still much more bad cause marketing than good. Either it’s overly complicated, not very transparent, the match with the cause(s) is hard to fathom, the donation amount is wrong, the campaign is activated inadequately, the MacGuffin is missing, etc. The first thing to do is to really figure out the campaign and polish it to a shine.
2. Embed it into the product and the strategy. Cause marketing is a part of every can of Campbell’s soup, every box of Ziploc plastic storage bags, every Diet Coke. Cause marketing used to be a 4-week promotion for CPG companies like General Mills and Coca-Cola, now it’s their year-round strategy.
3. Make transparency and gratitude part of the appeal. As I told that corporate marketer Tuesday night, almost no one closes the loop of their cause marketing story. Very few cause marketing campaigns say how the money was used or what was accomplished with it. And scarcely anyone ever thanks participants and constituents. But doing so is a legitimate touchpoint and a welcome message. Even in the cases of cause marketing that runs year-round, people still want to know that good has been done and that you appreciate their support. In such cases reporting back and offering thanks becomes an annual inflection point for the campaign.

One-Issue Cause Marketing Promotions

Little Mac, an Asian elephant at the Santa Barbara Zoo, had dental problems and wasn’t able to chew her food properly. In fixing her teeth, the zoo’s dental bill quickly ballooned past an elephantine $100,000, which wasn’t easy for the zoo to swallow. That's her and her dentist at the left.

But if you have a cell phone and special place in your heart for pachyderms you can help the zoo meet its obligations.

Simply text ‘MAC’ to 20222 and $10 will be added to your cell phone bill. Proceeds will specifically benefit Little Mac’s dental care.

Little Mac’s tale of dental woe makes for a good story, but it raises the thorny issue of whether or not to use a cause marketing promotion for just a single issue.

On the one hand, you can see why the zoo was keen to use cell phone fundraising to cover an unexpected bill. Moreover, for donors, fixing the teeth of an animal that eats hundreds of pounds a day is immediate, concrete, and easy to understand.

But, on the other hand, one of the appeals of cause marketing for charities is that because it often comes in pennies at a time, you don’t have to play that game whereby you have to earmark donations where the donor designates. Most cause marketing dollars go to wherever a cause’s board and staff think the money is best spent.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, causes often chase dollars from donors even when what the donor is willing to fund doesn’t make sense for the charity’s mission. The result is that in nonprofit fundraising the tail sometimes wags the dog.

I’ve used this example before: If I let it be known that I had $10 million for a cause to go chase Bigfoot, I can promise you that I’d hear from more than just Bigfoot-chasing charities.

How do cause marketers strike a balance? I’d say that the Santa Barbara Zoo has found it.

Trigger a one-issue cause marketing promotion only when the need is pressing, one-time, and solvable.

Handsome Infographic Captures the Essence of Cause Marketing

This handsome infographic on cause marketing comes courtesy of Carousel30, a digital agency with offices in Alexandria, Virginia, Princeton, New Jersey, and Raleigh, North Carolina.

It highlights current opinion, both overseas and domestic, of the growth of the practice and the esteem with which cause marketing is held.

If I may be so bold, the next cause marketing infographic that Carousel30 ought to undertake is one that gives shape to how best to activate cause marketing campaigns, especially digitally.

My thanks to Breeanna Beckham, VP of marketing at Carousel30 for letting me post the infographic.

Asking For the Right Amount in Cause Marketing

Years ago when I was writing the Children’s Miracle Network Telethon I struggled with the question of how much to ask people to give. It was received wisdom that we should ask even for small donations; $5 or less, for instance . Or as we often put it, “anything you can give.”

Many years later, some of this seemed to be born out in the 2009 book “Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive,” by Goldstein, Martin, and Cialdini. The authors highlighted an experiment in which people were asked for as little as a penny in door-to-door fundraising and actually the average donation went up a hair. They conclude that asking for ‘even a penny,’ would help many fundraising appeals.

But it’s easy to imagine some subsets of fundraising groaning over that study; direct mail fundraisers, for instance.

While donations during the Telethon had long since ceased being the raison d'etre of the show when I wrote it, the money that came in during the show did represent about 12 to 14 percent of total intake. It was an important part of the total. Moreover, once the show began, it was the only variable you could still influence. But way back when I never came to a satisfying answer over the question of how much to ask.

Now a new study has some conclusions for cause marketers and nonprofit fundraisers. It finds that what peers give has a strong bearing on what you and I and others will give.

The working paper, called “Peer Effects in Charitable Giving: Evidence from the (Running) Field,” comes from the Centre for Market and Public Organisation Bristol Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Bristol in the UK.

The paper’s authors, Sarah Smith, Frank Windmeijer and Edmund Wright, looked at two datasets composed of online fundraising pages for individuals doing the 2010 London Marathon on behalf of causes. In the UK as well as North America and I suspect elsewhere many individuals seek pledges on behalf of charities when they attempt marathons, bike rides, and the like. In North America, charities will often offer fundraising help to individuals in the form of individual pledge websites optimized for fundraising. In the UK Justgiving and Virgin Money Giving fill that role.

The study design was elegant and simple, drawing on data from the UK’s two largest online fundraising sites, Justgiving and Virgin Money Giving. Both sites list the most recent donations made. The authors looked at a sample of 10,597 pages and found that large donations positively effected no fewer than 20 subsequent donations.

Indeed, a single pledge of £100 can increase subsequent donations by an average of £10.

It was a little like those ‘pay-it-forward’ chains you here about at McDonalds or Starbucks, whereby some generous soul pays for the person behind them in line and it continues for dozens of patrons.

But Smith, Windmeijer and Wright also found that a single low donation could have the same effect. A single small donation lowered donations by about £5.

"Looking at online fundraising,” says Sara Smith, “also gives us some insight into the psychology of giving. It isn’t as simple as donors competing to be the most generous – or avoiding being the meanest. Instead, it looks like they are trying to find what they think is the right level for them personally, compared with their peers."

Nonprofit Cause Marketers, Aspire to This

Einstein supposedly said that compound interest was the eight wonder of the world, or the gateway to the fifth dimension, or the sixth sense, or the seventh law of thermodynamics, or something like that. I say supposedly because Snopes.com is dubious.

Regardless, for causes the goal cause marketers ought to aspire to is the point at which you earn income even on nights and weekends.

That’s what’s happening in this effort from Nestle benefiting the Girl Scouts of the USA. This is almost certainly some sort of licensing agreement whereby Nestle pays the GSUSA a fee to use their logo on the package. The Girl Scouts sell several flavors of cookies that are, like this particular Nestle Crunch bar, peanut-flavored.

If you’re on the receiving end of a licensing fee, it can seem like a windfall. The GSUSA doesn’t have to line up manufactures to make the candy. Individual Scouts don’t have to sell them. The nonprofit has no distribution hassles. It may not even bother issuing a press release. After the marketers and lawyers have been through the licensing agreement, all the GSUSA has to do is deposit checks. It’s sweeter than a box of Samoas.

In short, the GSUSA is bringing in income with very little investment of time or treasure.

So for your cause, licensing fees ought to be goal.

But the GSUSA didn’t just waltz into Nestle headquarters and demand a deal.

In fact, the Girl Scouts have been selling cookies for 95 years, about 200 million boxes a year now at an average price of $3.50 per.

In short, Girl Scout cookies have a lot of brand equity. That doesn’t mean your cause has to wait 95 years to achieve a lucrative licensing arrangement. But it does mean that if licensing income is something your cause aspires to that you need to think hard about how to build the kind of brand equity requisite to eventually getting a deal like this.

Like Stephen R. Covey (RIP) famously said, “begin with the end in mind.”

A New Twist on Displaying Paper Icons

Paper icons can be a license to print money if all the elements come together right. But there’s always been the challenge of how to display them.

Paper icons, others call them ‘pinups,’ are small pieces of printed paper, oftentimes displaying the charity’s logo, sold for $1 or more, and benefiting a cause. Usually they’re displayed in-store, perhaps hung from fishing line, or taped to the store’s windows.

Twenty CiCi’s Pizza Buffet locations in Georgia have come up with a fun idea of how to display the paper icons for their charity of choice, Special Olympics Georgia.

Those Georgia CiCi’s locations began selling Special Olympics paper icons for $1 starting on July 16. On Monday, August 13, 2012 they had a kind of inflection point whereby they challenged their customers to buy enough paper icons on that day to cover a law enforcement vehicle.

Fun idea!

In addition, on Monday, August 13, CiCi’s donated 10 percent of sales to Special Olympics Georgia.

"At CiCi's we care about our communities and all the families that make them great," said Lauren Albright, CiCi's field marketing manager in a press release. "Special Olympics Georgia does so much for our neighbors and we're honored to engage our restaurant teams and guests to give back to such a worthy cause."

I like this approach on a lot of levels.

Month-long paper icon efforts tend to drag on near the end. A pizza joint probably doesn’t get that many repeat customers in a 30-day period. But the store staff sees it every day and they can certainly tire of it. This helps breathe renewed life to the campaign.

I assume that the local constabulary are supportive of Special Olympics Georgia, hence the goal of covering a police car with paper icons. But in that same vein you could do it with CiCi’s delivery vehicles (if any), a NASCAR race car, even a fire engine.

A paper icon-festooned police car is custom-made photo opp for both the regular media and the social media in ways that taping them on the window isn’t . For instance, CiCi’s could take pictures of the progress towards the goal throughout the day and post it on Pinster, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Setting a one-day goal like covering a police car is also smart because it’s so tangible. Everyone will understand it, especially if the car is parked on the premises.

Kudos to CiCi’s on this smart approach to cause marketing and paper icons.

Cause Marketing for 'One Lucky School'

Henkel’s, the German consumer packaged goods company whose brands in America include Right Guard and Purex, is back again with its Get Kids Fit campaign effort and “one lucky school will win $25,000 in fitness cash to improve youth fitness at their school.”

You read that right, the total payout is $25,000 and it all goes to one school. Here’s how it works:

There’s a self-nomination procedure. You submit an essay with the answer to this question: “How could $25,000 be used to improve fitness, inspire self-esteem, and build teamwork at your school?” If your school gets past the first round, Henkel asks you to submit a video. The top finalists are voted on by the public, meaning the $25,000 winner is the school that does the best job of getting out the vote.

In the past, I’ve defended sponsors who spent more on a promotion than they give to their benefiting cause. And, in most cases, I’d still defend it.

That’s because if my cause is, say, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, I’d be glad to get a check for $250,000 while I also co-branded with the sponsor who was spending another $750,000 activating the promotion. If I were a nonprofit executive, I’d take that deal any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

But Calcedeaver Elementary in Mount Vernon, Alabama, which received $10,000 from Henkel in 2011 can’t use good publicity. The pittance of publicity Calcedeaver Elementary got by winning in 2011 has no fungible value. None. (In 2011, Henkel’s donation amount was $30,000; $10,000 each to the winning elementary, middle and high school.)

Moreover, winning is a tall order. There are 132,656 public and private schools in the United States, enrolling 55 million kids. No wonder Henkel characterizes the winner as “one lucky school.”

All of this would be OK if the Get Kids Fit contest was turning up and publicizing ground-breaking school fitness efforts. But if Henkel is getting great school fitness ideas, the company is keeping them to themselves.

Get Kids Fit, is cause marketing that does not work as an effective promotion. Nor does it meet the company’s avowed goal of addressing “the urgent health and fitness crisis among our nation’s youth by helping kids get fit and active.”

Cause Marketing Follow-Up on General Mills' Win One Give One Promotion

General Mills is back with it’s Win One Give One promotion, “with,” as I wrote about the promotion back on May 18, 2011, “the item in question being a XO laptop computer.”

This post is part of an occasional series whereby I take a second look at notable cause marketing promotions. Here’s what I wrote back then:

“Inside specially-marked packages of 6 varieties of Fruit Rollups are certificates for a free XO computer. A total of 2001 XO computers will be given away in the sweepstakes. A matching number will be donated to children in Africa.

“From December 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011, General Mills will also donate one dollar to One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization behind the XO, for every Fruit Rollup coupon redeemed up to $4,000.

“Winonegiveone.com, the promotion’s website, offers a third way for laptops to be donated to Africa. The site, which is targeted to kids and moms has a kind of Angry Birds-type game that allows you to propel a heroic action figure to Africa via a rocket, a catapult or a slingshot. For every 400 heroes that land in Africa, General Mills donates additional laptops up to 442 total. When I landed one on the continent the counter said that 160630 heroes had been sent so far, 90 percent of the goal.

“Once in Africa you can explore a kind of digital diorama of Grahamstown, based on the actual city of 125,000 in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. There are more games, short videos, and easy-to-swallow didactic content. I learned, for instance, that South Africa has three capital cities and 11 official languages!”

For 2012, General Mills has simplified the promotion and the website. This time the diorama is of a village in Rwanda and the featured child is a boy named ‘Jean-Luc.’ Instead of all the complications with the game, the promotion is more straightforward: for every 100 UPCs from specially-marked packages of fruit snack and redeemed online, General Mills will donate one XO laptop to Africa.

As before, when you enter the code, you also enter to win your own XO laptop

There’s still a game you can play with your mouse; shooting soccer balls past Jean-Luc, who is portrayed as the keeper. It’s not as fun as the ‘heroes’ game from last year. But the whole idea of heroes parachuting in to save the kids of Grahamstown had the thin veneer of ‘bwana’ saving the locals; it was rather patronizing.

General Mills has also added a social media component… Facebook and Twitter… that I don’t remember last year.

Given that General Mills is on its second year, it would be great to get a little follow-up about how the laptops are helping the kids in South Africa and how many were actually donated.

Too few companies, even sophisticated cause marketers like General Mills do as much follow up as they should.

Trade Group Cause Marketing

Trade groups exist to provide service to their members; research and publications, marketing and branding, lobbying and training, tradeshows and meetings, and the like. And now, one other thing they can do is to enable members to cause market. At least, that’s what the Mushroom Council is doing with a Breast Cancer Awareness Month effort benefiting the cancer research hospital, City of Hope.

Wikipedia says there are 7,600 national trade groups in the United States. There are also trade associations at the regional, statewide, and local levels as well.

Here’s how the Mushroom Council’s efforts on behalf of City of Hope work:

“In total,” the Council has donated more than $800,000 to the City of Hope for “pilot clinical trials to support research on the potential cancer-fighting benefits of mushrooms.” Mushrooms are high in selenium and the City of Hope has identified a potential link between mushrooms and decreased cancer tumor growth in cells and animal tests.

The press release I read said that “the Council will provide $50,000 to City of Hope's research on breast cancer and mushrooms.” Based on my reading, I suspect that the total donation is from the Mushroom Council to the City of Hope is $800,000, not $850,000, although the exact amount isn’t clear.

The Mushroom Council encourages retailers to take these three steps to participate in the promotion:

1. From mid-September through mid-November stock pink mushroom ‘tills’ in premium shelf spaces in-stores. A ‘till’ is industry-speak for the plastic, foam, or paper trays that mushrooms are typically packaged in.
2. Activate or promote the program through all their usual outlets.
3. Ask the store’s dietician or wellness expert to participate in some unspecified way  

Mushrooms are grown in basically every state, but about 60 percent of the nation’s annual crop comes from the state of Pennsylvania. So the Mushroom Council has to satisfy both an elephant, plus a lot of smaller operators.

Does this satisfy as a cause marketing effort?

Well, it scales very well. It’s probably not any harder to get pink tills to stores than it is to get black ones. It’s also no cost to the stores, which probably increases participation rates.

I don’t get the third step; “talk to your in-store dietician or wellness expert to join the promotion. Identify additional opportunities for your store.” Mushrooms, like most fresh produce, have anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals. So that’s no special story. One exception is that mushrooms are basically the only item in the produce aisle that contains vitamin D. Mushrooms are also loaded with umami, the so-called fifth taste after sweet, salty, bitter and sour. Umami is the rich savory taste you get from meats, cheeses, and, well, mushrooms.

The bigger story will be if the City of Hope or other researchers really find anti-cancer properties in mushrooms. Until and unless that happens, the role for a store’s dietician and wellness expert in a promotion like this seems muted to me.

In addition to the pink tills, it seems to me that there is a role here for a sticker that explains the pink packaging and the Council’s donation to the City of Hope.

Finally, I think there’s also a way for the local mushroom growers to be involved. It’s easy to imagine them sending chefs to do cooking segments on local morning or midday news shows. I can imagine local events like ‘mushroom week’ or cooking contests or some kind of pink till collection whereby each till gets redeemed for a local donation to some breast cancer outreach charity.

Innovation in Cause Marketing

I’m reading Steven Johnson’s fine 2010 book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation and there’s a terrific lesson therein for cause marketers looking to bring fresh thinking to their cause marketing campaigns.

Johnson writes about the invention of neonatal incubators, which date from the late 1870s. On a walk through the Paris Zoo, Obstetrician Stephane Tarnier paid particular attention to the chicken incubators. Infant mortality rates, even in a sophisticated time like the Third Republic, were horrifyingly high. Tarnier wondered if an incubator for infants would help save lives.

Tarnier hired the Zoo’s poultry raiser to build an incubator for infants to test his hypothesis. Knowing that his fellow Frenchmen were in thrall of Descartes and sticklers for measurement and statistics, Tarnier kept careful records. The results of the baby incubator experiment were stunning.

Sans the incubator, 66 percent of low-weight babies in Tarnier's hospital died. With the infant incubators only 38 percent of low-weight babies died, basically halving the mortality rate. Baby incubators were soon mandated in all Paris hospitals. Not long thereafter they became a kind of curiosity and cause célèbre. For nearly 50 years, baby incubators were sideshow attractions. Coney Island in New York had a permanent baby incubator show until the early 1940s.

In time, oxygen supplementation and other improvements were made to the incubators such that between the years of 1950 and 1998, infant mortality declined by 75 percent in the United States. You can draw a direct line between the use of incubators and the increase of the average American lifespan.

Wouldn’t baby incubators, therefore, be a splendid addition to countries where infant mortality remains high?

Yes they would. But the problem isn’t the expense, although they can cost upwards of $40,000 each. The problem with baby incubators in the developing world is maintenance, parts, know-how, and power that doesn’t blink on and off erratically.   

Knowing this, Timothy Prestero of MIT and the design firm called Design that Matters scouted around for a way to build incubators for the developing world, mostly fruitlessly.

But in time, Prestero hooked up with a Boston doctor named Jonathan Rosen, who had noticed that even in the smallest village, locals seemed to be able to keep their Toyota 4-Runners running. Thus inspired, Prestero and his team built a baby incubator made of, no kidding, Toyota parts. Sealed headlamps provide the heat. Car fans provide the ventilation, and car horns provide the alarms. The incubator can run on a motorcycle battery. They call the device the NeoNurture. That's one on the left.

Constructing things from sources at hand is called bricolage, a French word that I learned from Johnson's book.

Here’s how the story comes back to cause marketing:

“Good ideas,” (read: ‘good cause marketing’) “are like the NeoNurture device. They are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus.”

There’s a lesson therein for cause marketers everywhere.

New Browser Plug-In Helps you Avoid Products Made With Child Labor

A new Internet browser plug-in will tell you if a product you’re looking at on an online retailer uses child labor in its production.

Called aVOID, it currently works with the Safari and Chrome browsers and will soon be available for Firefox. The plugin, whose creation was made possible by the German company Earthlink, works with many of the major online retailers in Germany, France, the U.K and the United States, including Asos, Yoox, Amazon, Target, Macys, Zalando, Google Shopping, Frontlineshop and Otto.

If your German is better than mine, you can also read here a list of companies and how they rank in terms of utilization of child labor in the manufacture of various product lines.

The plugin draws on a database provided by the cause Active Against Child Labour.

Back in November 2011, after reading the horrifying book “Half the Sky” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, I committed to help the plight of girls and women in the developing world with this blog and in other ways.

"Half the Sky" brilliantly drives home the point that in too much of the world girls and women are abused, trafficked, mutilated, enslaved, and even murdered for largely cultural reasons. Every bit of this is immoral and wrong. It must not be allowed to continue and none of us can sit idly by while it happens.

Children are sometimes trafficked to work in factories. It goes without saying, I hope, that even children in severely economically depressed areas should be in school, not working.

Knowing that your favorite jeans or shoes come from factories that use child labor is a good first step toward more ethical consumption.

Charitable Donors Chary About Donating Via Some Tech Means

A new survey from the U.K. finds donors still chary about donating via some technology-enabled means.

The survey finds that 51 percent of Britons have put some money in collection canisters, while 31 percent have made donations through donation boxes at the charitable institutions themselves.

But only two percent had participated in change round-up schemes whereby people add some change to round it up to the next highest pound, with the additional amount going to charity. In the U.K. they call these “round-pound” donations.

Fourteen percent said they’d donated via text message, a mechanism that has been around several years longer in the U.K. than in the United States. 

Meanwhile, less than 1 percent had donated via ATMs. Only 2 percent said they’d consider doing so in the future.

The research was conducted for the National Funding Scheme by Ipsos Mori.

Says the website, "the National Funding Scheme (NFS) allows UK and visiting tourists to easily make a donation through digital channels to any participating cultural institution in the UK."

Sally Panayiotou, head of charities research at Ipsos Mori, conjectured that Britons just aren’t ready to do round-pound donations because they’re accustomed to see collections boxes near the cash register.

Nor is "ATM giving... something people are used to,” she said. “They are conscious of wanting to get in and out quickly."

Transactional Cause Marketing Versus Lump Sum Charitable Donations

Been thinking a lot about the topic of transactional cause marketing versus publicized corporate charitable donations. Cone’s most recent Cause Evolution study found that people are only slightly more favorably inclined towards companies employing transactional cause marketing (53%) than to lump sum charitable donations (47%).

Transactional cause marketing is when the sponsor ties its donation to a purchase.

Cone’s survey comes on the heals of a small study highlighted in the 2008 book, “Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive,” by Goldstein, Martin, Cialdini.

In this instance, the authors test what amounts to a cause marketing approach to persuade guests in a hotel to reuse the towels in their room. They test a transactional cause marketing approach: “reuse their towels and the hotel will make a donation to an environmental cause.” But they found it no more effective than the card left in the room simply asking people to reuse their towels for the sake of the environment.

The authors then hypothesize that there’s a strong incentive to repay the favor of a donation that’s already occurred. So, they test the idea that the hotels offer the donation with no string attached by leaving a card in the room that says that a donation has already been made on behalf of its guests. The result? 45% more reused their towels than those who got the transactional cause marketing message.

I’m still processing this but I wonder what happens if the charitable donation is in-kind? Does the company’s halo shine just as brightly as if they donated cash? What if the in-kind donation comes in the form of shared ad space?

How well does that move the needle?

There’s an ad in the Alden Keene Cause marketing Database for vitamin D supplements from GNC and in support of the Melanoma Research Alliance. The Alliance funds research into melanoma, which kills right around 9,000 Americans every year. The late great Bob Marley died of melanoma at the tender age of 36. GNC sells supplements and nutritional products at mall stores.

The ad was in the November 2010 issue of Real Simple magazine. The copy is about supplementing your diet with vitamin D, a vitamin vital to good health. There’s plenty of vitamin D available to all of us. Our body synthesizes vitamin D when our skin is exposed to sunlight.

But nowadays, under the advice of dermatologists, many Americans tend to cover up in sunscreen before going outside, thereby inhibiting the body's ability to produce vitamin D. GNC sells vitamin D supplements, so they’ve got a dog in this fight.

While GNC has engaged in numerous corporate charitable donations and cause marketing campaigns, it doesn’t seem to be donating money to the Melanoma Research Alliance. Here’s how the MRA’s President Wendy K.D. Selig positioned their relationship in an open letter dated October 15, 2010.

"I am pleased to announce that MRA has joined with General Nutrition Center (GNC) in working to generate resources and increase awareness to fight melanoma. Jointly we will be delivering an important message to the public: you don’t need to put yourself at risk of deadly skin cancer to get an adequate supply of vitamin D. We are teaming up to educate the public about melanoma and ways to reduce risk, including avoiding dangerous ultraviolet (UV) rays (from the sun and from indoor tanning), and knowing and regularly examining your skin. Through online tools, print publications and other outreach efforts, we expect to reach millions of people with this important information."

It’s an important message, to be sure. But does sharing space in magazine ads with a cause stimulate the same kind of good will towards a sponsor that a good ole’ transactional cause marketing campaign does?

Next logical question is: how would you know if it did?

With transactional cause marketing, when all is said and done you can compare sales figures against a logical cohort and get a sense of correlation, maybe even causation, based on what’s different

But with pre-donations, who can say? Moreover, it’s pretty easy to reach hotel guests with a table-top card on the desk in the room. But if you’re Procter and Gamble reaching customers is a different story.

If you’re an active cause marketer, I think it’s worth trying this non-transactional cause marketing approach out with a discrete population. But I’d be reluctant to roll out this approach in a bigger way until more questions are answered.

Cause Marketing and Millennials

In April 2012 the Boston Consulting Group released its study called “The Millennial Consumer: Debunking Stereotypes” which found that for many in this generation causes and cause marketing is an important and animating force.

In the United States Millennials…aka Generation Y… now number 79 million. Compare that to the 76 million Boomers still alive. Millennials are defined as the generation between the ages of 16 and 34.

BCG subtitled the report ‘Debunking Stereotypes’ because Millennials are often portrayed as being shiftless, lazy and spoiled. The word cloud at the left from BCG's report gives you a sense of that.

But BCG instead finds a generation that… while it has a healthy self-regard… is nonetheless responsive to the needs of causes as they fulfill their missions and to the practice of cause marketing.

Here’s some key findings:

• Of the 34 percent of Millennials who make direct donations to causes, almost half donate using their mobile device. That’s three times the number of non-Millennials who will donate that way.

• “Millennials believe that working for causes is an integral part of life, and they drawn to big issues. Instead of making one-off donations in cash of in-kind, they’re more likely to integrate their causes into daily life by buying products that support sustainable farming or “fair trade” principles, or by joining large movements that aim to solve social or environmental problems.”

• Millennials are more likely than non-Millennials to engage their favored causes by persuading others to join them and actively participating in fundraising.

• Millennials are more likely to participate in transactional cause marketing by purchasing items associated with a cause, 37 percent versus 30 percent.

• Millennials expects causes and companies to collaborate and “will reward those that partner with the right causes.”

• Millennials are slightly more like than non-Millennials to volunteer their time 31 percent versus 25 percent).

BCG did the study because Millennials are like a sorta like the python that swallowed a small deer; they’re going to be with us for long while. And they’ll help define the United States for the next fifty years, much as the Boomers have for the last 60 years.

That Millennials like and appreciate good cause marketing bodes well for causes, companies (and cause marketers)!

Cause Marketing the Slightly Arcane

We all get cause marketing based on food and other consumables. But is cause marketing out of reach if the product you sell is a little on the esoteric side? What charity do you partner with and what is the shape of that partnership? How do you make sure your brand is really served by your sponsorship?

These and other questions came to me as I read a press release announcing Celestron’s sponsorship of the nonprofit Astronomers Without Borders (AWB).

Celestron is the world’s largest telescope maker, with a special emphasis on selling telescopes to serious amateur astronomers. Astronomers Without Borders seeks to promote “understanding and peaceful international relations, while also supporting outreach and education in astronomy.”

I don’t want to oversell the obscurity of telescopes. Astronomy and telescopes aren’t exactly invisible to the wider world. This isn’t Olympic badminton, after all.  

By the same token, amateur astronomy is not like the NBA or even the NHL in terms of public popularity.

Celestron’s sponsorship involves giving new telescopes to Astronomers Without Borders’ educational outreach efforts and other unspecified support. What might that look like? AWB is currently trying to fund a culturally-specific astronomy education project for schoolchildren in Afghanistan on indiegogo.com.

Celestron’s donated telescopes and other support will likely aid efforts like that.

In terms of the sponsorship with AWB and Celestron seem kind of new to this. AWB just plasters Celestron’s logo big and loud on its website, but with almost no context. Celestron’s internal search engine finds no mention of the AWB partnership. And the press release I read was full of vague generalities about what the sponsorship will do. They’d be well served by tightening that down a little.

But the wider lesson for the rest of us that sponsorship and cause marketing holds possibility and promise even for causes and sponsors that aren’t exactly household names.

(At left is an artist's conception of NASA's new Mars Science Laboratory, due to land on the red planet on Sunday, May 5, 2012).

Activating Cause Marketing on Packaging

On July 20, 2012 in a post on cause marketing activated on packaging I wrote this:

“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.”

That was rational reasoning and long experience talking. Now a new study I came across from POPAI, the global association for marketing at retail, confirms my rationale.

Called, the 2012 Shopper Engagement Study, the research finds that 76 percent of Americans make their decisions about what they’ll buy once they’re in the store. That’s up from 70 percent in 1995.

What to conclude from that tidbit? Here’s what POPAI writes in their topline report:

“When we look at the data from POPAI’s series of long running shopper research projects aimed at providing new information on how shoppers behave when they are in different types of stores deciding which categories and brands to buy we see that it all comes down to one thing – in-store marketing.”

POPAI segments shoppers into four basic profiles: Time Stressed, Explorer, Trip Planner and Bargain Hunter. The Time Stressed and the Explorer represent 55 percent of all shoppers and it’s these two profiles that are most likely to purchase on impulse. Both also have the highest average basket prices.

The Explorer wants to be inspired on their shopping trip and reads the weekly circulars. The Time Stressed has no time for that and seldom shops from a list.

It is these two groups that cause marketing on packaging ought to be aimed at.

For the Explorer try to get your cause marketing effort recognized in the weekly circular. For the Time Stressed be sure to provide a quick-reading summary of the benefits of the promotion on pack, no matter how much other copy there is.

Packaging is one of those things that you can test with customers and prospects. So you can try different headlines, graphics, pictures, bursts, etc. to see what moves people and what doesn’t. It’s not enough anymore just to put a charity logo on pack and expect the best.

Instead, test, test, test.

Cast Your Vote For Cause Marketing at Regal Cinemas

Americans have a big polarizing vote coming up soon and pundits have been weighing in with their opinions, informed and not. Much depends on what the nation’s voters pick; will they go for red or blue?

Frozen fruit drinks, that is.

Starting today at polling locations at 520 Regal Movie theaters in 37 states, when you buy a medium or large cherry frozen fruit drink, the company will make a $0.50 donation to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Buy a blue or any other color of frozen fruit drinks and Regal will donate $0.50 to Boys and Girls Club of America. The total donation to both causes is capped at $600,000. The promotion runs from Wednesday, August 1, 2012 to Friday, August 31, 2012. Weekly vote totals will be tracked on Regal’s Facebook site.

Regular readers know that I generally dislike these kinds of competitions that pit charity against charity. Most Americans like to think that what Peter Drucker used to call the 'Social Sector' is just one big happy family working to make the world a better place. And even if that’s not exactly true, it is the case that we’re all better off when respectable and effective charities like St. Jude and Boys and Girls Clubs are fulfilling their missions and have the resources to do so.

So pitting them against one another typically strikes me as self-defeating for the sponsor, even in the case of high-falutin’ campaigns like Pepsi Refresh or American Express Member’s Projects.

But I like this promotion, called the Regal Straw Vote, because it injects a healthy dose of levity into two things that are too often deadly earnest; politics and charity fundraising.

Bravo, Regal.