The Presumption of Altruism

Out now is the thirtieth anniversary issue of the Forbes 400, a listing of the wealthiest 400 Americans. While the 29 previous editions have regaled us with stories of vast wealth, how it was earned (or inherited) and how it was spent (or lost), the 2012 issue is mainly about how it is given away to charity.

But even before I got my copy, over the last few years it’s become apparent to me that the zeitgeist of day is that billionaires must now give away a substantial portion of their wealth to causes.

It hasn’t always been thus.

The last time that America’s wealthiest cared so much about giving away their money was the last time that Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were in the same room together. Carnegie almost single-handedly put a library in ever community of any size across North America and the English Commonwealth. Rockefeller gave America Colonial Williamsburg, the Grand Tetons National Park, the University of Chicago, and cures for yellow fever and hookworm.

Notwithstanding Carnegie and Rockefeller’s largesse, it took almost 80 years for what I’m calling the ‘presumption of altruism’ to develop among America’s richest. 

You can draw a line from Carnegie and Rockefeller straight to someone like Charles Feeney who co-founded the Duty Free Shoppers Group and used it to fund the multi-billion dollar foundation, The Atlantic Philanthropies.

From Feeney draw the line to Warren Buffet and Bill Gates who have since 2009 cajoled, shamed, or persuaded nearly 100 of their fellow billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, wherein they promise to give away no less than half their wealth within their own lifetimes.

Put directly, to be a billionaire today carries not only great wealth, but the expectation that you will do more with it than create generations of trust fundies.

And increasingly the presumption of altruism is more than a North American phenomena. In 2008 when a powerful earthquake devastated Sichuan, China, the world responded. But not as much as did China’s many homegrown millionaires and billionaires.

Likewise, the 2012 Forbes list notes the charitable works of Manoj Bhargava, the entrepreneur behind 5 Hour Energy. Bhargava was born in India and immigrated to the United States at age 14. But now the richest Indian in America is also a philanthropist who looks homeward to India when it comes to ‘giving back.’

How deep does this presumption of altruism go? You can see it in this tableau from a recent American Girl Doll magazine. Two of the dolls, Julie and Ivy are shown holding a charity carwash as an effort to ‘save the eagles.’

This is all very different than the world of my youth. And thank goodness for it.

BOGO Toothbrushes

If you sell consumables… food, drink, shoes, jeans, etc… to the public you’d be wise to think about cause marketing.

Here’s why; most of us will only buy a handful of washing machines or refrigerators… what economists call 'durables'… in our lives. By contrast, we’re constantly replacing the non-durables or ‘soft goods.’

But all that consumption, necessary as much of it is, can feel like it’s too much. But cause marketing can take away some of the sting out of consuming non-durables. And one increasingly duplicated cause marketing approach is BOGO, or Buy One, Give One.

Smile Squared, which sells bamboo handle toothbrushes, offers the latest BOGO I’ve seen.

Smile Squared, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, was prompted when husband and wife Eric and Geri Cope were working in a dental clinic in Guatemala in 2010. The Cope’s, who have three adopted children including Benny who hails from Guatemala, were struck by how few children there had toothbrushes. Those that did, might share their toothbrush with other family members.

“That small basic necessity on our part was truly, with these kids, a luxury,” Eric told a reporter.

Periodontal disease is highly correlated with heart disease and diabetes. As I often say in this space, correlation is not causation. (My own non-medical opinion is that in time we’ll find that bacteria causes a lot more disease than we currently attribute to it). Causation or not, the risk factor between heart disease and gum disease is yet another reason to floss and brush your teeth regularly.

But for many kids in the developing world, good dental hygiene… and with it the attendant health benefits… is the exception.

Smile Squared toothbrushes are donated through the International Justice Mission, Save Their Smiles, and Hands of Hope. So far the Smile Squared toothbrushes have landed with kids in Central America, Mexico, Haiti, Kenya, Cambodia, India and the Philippines.

The toothbrushes are sold online and in small grocery and drugstores. If you own a chain of stores, I suspect the Copes would love to chat with you.

The toothbrushes retail for $6. On the Smile Squared website you can also choose to donate 2 toothbrushes for $6.

The Ancillary Opportunities Section of Your Cause Marketing Proposal

At the end of your cause-marketing proposal to prospective sponsors there should be a section called something like “Ancillary Opportunities.”

It’s the place where you add the other stuff that came out of brainstorming sessions which you can execute and which complements the principal part of the promotion.

Ancillary means ‘subordinate’ or ‘of secondary importance.’ But don’t think that just because ancillary opportunities are subordinate or secondary that you can leave this section out of the proposal.

For one thing, you may have spent a lot of time researching the target sponsor and still missed their hot button. Your proposal is meant to start the conversation, not finish it. So it’s possible, even common, for things to come out during your pitch that will open up new avenues of thought for you and prospect alike.

Remember, Hotmail was the second idea that Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith presented to Silicon Valley venture capitalists Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The ‘Ancillary Opportunity’ section is also a place to showcase your creativity and generate trust in your capabilities.

And like the book title says, “You Don’t Get what You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate.” In other words, you’re unlikely to secure the campaign element that you don’t raise in the proposal or otherwise address.

Cause Marketing Thongs to Benefit Microfinance

The title of this post is a clause I never expected to put together. An enterprising entrepreneur named Renata M. Black is selling women’s thongs to benefit microenterprises in the United States, Brazil and India.

Empowered By You panties are seamless thong-style panties available at a handful of online and bricks and mortar outlets. Sales of the panties benefit the Seven Bar Foundation, whose mission is to support female microenterprise. 

The ad… from the October 2012 issue of More magazine… is kind of a hot mess. Although it’s so sexy, you might not ever notice.

Plainly the model is breaking through the glass ceiling to where the men are. But how is it that she’s “Empowered” by said ceiling, I can’t get guess.

A paragraph at www.empoweredbyyou.com explains the visual like this:

“In the spirit of liberating the superhero in all of us, it is only a natural fit that every Empowered By You panty empowers women with their first break to make it. Instead of a ‘cape’ she is given a ‘break.’ A confident woman in the Empowered By You panty enables an underprivileged woman to spearhead her own business and rise out of poverty via microfinance.”

Apparently copy editors these days are as unfashionable as granny panties.

I got a 404 error when I tried to open up www.Aha.com/empoweredbyyou.

The Empoweredbyyou.com is functional, except the tab labeled ‘The Cause.’ You can read about the cause on the Seven Bar Foundation website, which substantially mirrors the Empowered By You website.

Both are long on goals, vision and sex-appeal, but short on substance, order, and, most of all, coherence. They both seem like they might be an unfiltered ‘brain dump’ from Renata straight to the website designer.

A word search on aha.com turns up a sell-page for Empowered By You panties. Aha.com is one of those curated websites for the fashion-forward. The sell-page says the thongs are seamless Brazilian cut and available in several colors and sizes for $20. It also says that $1 from each sale goes to provide microloans to women.

The Empoweredbyyou.com website says the goal is donate $1 million to microfinance by 2015.

Renata Black plainly understands how to use sex-appeal, so she may well meet her goal.

But I think she could get there a whole faster if she or someone at her company and foundation would sit a little bit closer to a professional editor while creating content and ads.

New Deal of the Day Company Distinguishes Itself With Cause Marketing

Do what I did after learning about Cause Rocket. Take the palm of your right hand and put it 2 inches (about 5 centimeters) above and to the northeast of your right eyebrow. Then with a gentle push, pop yourself right there on the head.

At the same time utter the word. “d’oh!”

That’s what I did and said when I saw Cause Rocket, a Silicon Valley startup that has a deal-of-the-day business model like Groupon or Living Social or Google Offers, only without the margin-killing discounting or the brand-destroying offers of its better-established competitors.

But, importantly, with the addition of cause marketing.

We all know the stories and business models of these deal-of-the-day websites. Groupon was founded as The Point, a kind of social initiatives website which pivoted to become the Alpha deal-of-the-day website.

Groupon has a huge sales force which fans out across the country (and now the globe), approaching mainly smaller merchants and service providers in local markets to offer them a kind of Faustian Bargain. Groupon will advertise to its subscriber base a killer price for, say, $60 worth of meat for $30. (This was an actual deal when Groupon first started in my market that I availed myself of).

Groupon and the butcher likely split the $30 evenly, leaving both parties with $15 each. The deal isn’t activated until predetermined number of people put down their credit card number. LivingSocial, Google Offers and the myriad other competitors offer small variations on the Groupon business model. For instance, Google Offers doesn’t have a local sales force the way Groupon does.

You don’t have to think too hard about the challenges these kinds of deals pose for local businesses. My butcher got a tremendous boost in terms of traffic. He was betting that once people were in his shop that they’d buy stuff outside the terms of the deal or become repeat customers, because every Groupon redemption actually cost him money.

That is, because of his cost structure and the way the deal was structured the Groupon promotion was a classic loss-leader.

Now Groupon and LivingSocial will say in response that I'm talking about this in the wrong way. Every business has customer acquisition costs and $15 per customer is probably not bad for butcher shops.

But it’s only a good business move if in fact the promotion turns a Groupon buyer into an ongoing customer. Otherwise, $15 is just the tip of the customer acquisition cost iceberg.

Here’s how Cause Rocket is different.

Suppose you are a masseuse and your normal service is $50 an hour. At Cause Rocket you set up a page and determine your offer. Let’s say that you decide on 40 percent going to the literacy cause First Book. Forty percent of $50 is $20. There's no upfront fees for doing any of this, which is a huge advantage for small merchants and service providers who've been burned by advertising in local newspapers or radio and TV.

When someone signs up for your offer, Cause Rocket takes $50 from the customer’s credit card and deposits $20 to the charity’s account. Cause Rocket takes 3.75% for its fee and 3.75% for credit car processing with the rest going to the merchant. In this example that would be $2.25 for Cause Rocket and the credit card fees and $27.75 for the masseuse.

Cause Rocket doesn’t have a sales staff and so it’s relying on charities to serve basically in an affiliate role to recruit new merchants.

If there’s a weakness in Cause Rocket it’s here. The charities that are pretty good at cause marketing is a relatively small list, perhaps five hundred. Even so, I’ve long expect that there’s a Pareto effect at work among these cause marketers; probably the top 20 percent of those 500 cause marketing charities account for 80 percent of the dollar value of all cause marketing. And those 100 charities are much better at working with big companies than small ones, where Groupon and LivingSocial and, presumably, Cause Rocket will live.

The only notable exception that comes to mind are those hub and spoke charities, like the American Cancer Society or the American Diabetes Association, that have a headquarters and then some number of regional or even local offices. Those kinds of charities tend to do a lot of event production and spend a lot of time in front small businesses. Cause Rocket would be perfect for those kind of charities.

All that said, Cause Rocket is one of the coolest cause marketing concepts I’ve come across.

7 Steps To Improve Your Cause Marketing Career in the Next 30 minutes

With just a few more than 90 days before the end of the year, here are seven easy steps you could take in the next 30 minutes to improve your cause marketing career before year end.

• Make an Appointment before Thanksgiving with Your Opposite Number at Your Partner Charity or Sponsor. Finish reading this list then call your partner at the cause or sponsor you work with and plan a casual meeting. The explicit purpose of the meeting, whether you admit to or not, is to help improve your personal relationship with this person, even if the relationship is already good. Remember what Covey said about trust: when trust is high, everything goes faster, costs less, and more pleasant. You almost can’t work too much on maintaining and building trust. Remember: how well you work with your colleague helps determines your success, their success and the success of your campaign. If you two don’t work well together your career could suffer and you’ll be less likely to achieve key goals.

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

• Review the Best of Lists. Everyone has a best of list. Mine newest one will appear in this space on or near Jan 1, 2013. My ' Best Cause of 2011' is here and my 'Worst Cause marketing of 2011' is here. Read them for ideas, for new thinking, and to get a sense not only what went right, but what went wrong and why.

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

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

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

• Make One or More Charitable Donations Before the End of the Year. This last one is kind of a cheat because you won’t be able to do all of it in the next 30 minutes. But you can open up your browser and make a $50 donation to a fine cause in the next 30 minutes. Now, don’t tell me you gave at the office. That’s lame. Cause marketers should be active charitable donors. Give to your own cause, for sure. Chefs eat their own cooking, after all. But find other admirable charities and donate to them as well. Part of this is just a matter of good karma, of staying on the right side of the ‘Circle of Life.’ But there’s compensations to your professional life as well. Once you’re a donor they’ll start communicating with you. This will give a chance to learn first hand how other admirable charities position their cause in a noisy marketplace. It will give a sense for what they do well, and what they don't. And, of course, you almost won’t be able to stop from comparing what they do to what you do at your cause or the charity you sponsor.

Do Corporate Social Responsibility Practices Raise Employee Productivity?

A professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and a researcher at the University of Paris-Dauphine have found that companies which follow international environmental standards have employee productivity that is 16 percent higher than companies which don’t.

The study, called, 'Environmental Standards and Labor Productivity'  tested three hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: The adoption of environmental standards is associated with greater labor productivity.

Hypothesis 2: Training mediates the relationship between the adoption of environmental standards and greater labor productivity.

Hypothesis 3: Interpersonal contacts mediate the relationship between the adoption of environmental standards and greater labor productivity.

The authors, Magali A. Delmas of UCLA and Sanja Pekovic of the University Paris-Dauphine, looked at a 2006 employee-employer survey of 5200 private French firms with 20 or more employees, and compared the answers against a database of companies that had received ISO 14001 certifications. They threw in another database to help determine employee productivity.

ISO 14001, says Wikipedia, “is a family of standards related to environmental management that exists to help organizations (a) minimize how their operations (processes, etc.) negatively affect the environment… (b) comply with applicable laws, regulations, and other environmentally oriented requirements, and (c) continually improve the above.” The standards are set by the ISO, but the audits and certification are performed by third-parties.

Delmas and Pekovic controlled for age, gender, wages, education, and a number of other variables.

When all the models were completed and the math was done, Delmas and Pekovic found that the green firms are positively associated with markedly higher labor productivity than non-green firms. Likewise, the study demonstrated that when companies which adopted environmental standards of the sort measured in ISO 14001, were associated with greater employee training and interpersonal contacts.

Those of you with a logical frame of mind are probably think, ‘Sure, this is fine, but does it prove that adopting ISO 14001 standards will make a company more productive?’ The answer is no.

It could certainly be that better managed companies are more environmentally aware and more likely to manage for employee productivity. That is, it’s too soon to say which way the causation arrows are pointing.

That said, even though causation hasn’t been shown, part of being a manager is dealing with incomplete and imperfect information.

In fact, this may represent a kind of Pascal’s wager.

Blaise Pascal was a 17th century French mathematician and rationalist, who reasoned that there was more to be gained from living as though God existed than living as if he didn’t. That's Pascal at the left.

If companies adopted ISO 14001 standards hoping for increased employee productivity, but got none, the world as a whole is still better off.

Bounceback Cause Marketing

Cause marketing sponsors might have several reasons for engaging in cause marketing  including boosting sales, building brand, and bolstering PR, among others. One of those goals might also be to give customers a good reason to come back after supporting a cause. Informally, it’s called a bounceback and you’ll see it commonly in retail settings for food and other consumables.

At the left is a current cause marketing campaign from Arby’s on behalf of a fundraiser called Happy Not Hungry that benefits childhood hunger fighting efforts from the Arby’s Foundation.

Make a donation to Happy Not Hungry during the month of September and you’ll get a coupon for a free item from Arby’s value menu, when you also purchase something else.

Although the flyer doesn’t mention it, the money passes through the Arby’s Foundation to No Kid Hungry campaign from the anti-hunger cause Share Our Strength.

There’s two elements to get right in a bounceback offer.

The first is that it has to both move people to donate as well as give them a compelling reason to come back.

The second is much more bottom-line. After you get people in your store, you gotta get them spending money.

A free coupon with no further purchase requirements might satisfy the first requirement, but not the second. It’s a fact of life that if people don’t have to spend money they won’t. So a free coupon with no purchase requirements guarantees that many people won’t crack open their wallets.

In this case the purchase requirement doesn’t carry a minimum dollar amount, so presumably you could buy small cup of coffee or a turnover and fill the terms of the coupon.

Naturally Arby’s is hoping that once you’re in the store you’ll get a hankering for some curly fries as well. After all, your main menu item is free.

Normally these kinds of bounceback efforts have a paper element; the coupon in this case. But they needn’t be. Arby’s could certainly offer the coupon as a text, an email, or even as a debit card.

Arby’s could also extend the cause marketing part of the promotion to the bounceback as well. For instance, spend at least 10 additional dollars on your bounceback trip and Arby’s will match your $1 donation to the Arby’s Foundation.

Or, perhaps Arby’s could reward your bounceback in a non-monetary way. A Foursquare badge. An attaboy on Facebook or Twitter. Your name or picture added to Happy Not Hungry’s Pinterest page or an Internet donor wall. A cool ring tone for your phone. Your name in lights on Arby’s electronic menu boards, etc.

Using Cause Marketing to Help Expand a Regional Brand

Cheerwine, an extra-bubbly cherry-flavored soft drink bottled in Salisbury, North Carolina, is distributed to a relatively small portion of the United States, but is working towards national distribution in time for its 100th anniversary in 2017.

So how to prepare markets outside of the Southeast for a national roll-out in five years?

Part of Cheerwine’s answer is a cause marketing campaign called Avett Brother’s Cheerwine Legendary Giveback Concert, which takes place on Oct. 19, 2012 in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s a benefit concert for Operation Homefront, a charity for the families of military families, Big Brothers and Big Sisters and the University of Virginia Children’s Hospital in Charlottesville.

The Avett Brothers is an indie rock band with a cool bluegrass-country-pop-punk-honky-tonk sound.

The amount of money a benefit concert can raise is necessarily limited by the size of the venue, how much can be charged for tickets, sponsorships, and merchandising, and what the production expenses are.

But part of Cheerwine’s goal is to get the word out. So the company has expanded the promotion by asking people to pledge volunteer time to causes in local markets. When make a pledge via Facebook or on Cheerwine’s website, the company will send out a special code to watch the show online.

In addition, ten fans from the town that pledges the most volunteer service will get a special viewing event the night of the concert. The details are a little sketchy, but you gotta assume that means food and plenty of Cheerwine.

I like this promotion and am interested in trying the product. But I wonder why there’s only one of these parties. Why not offer a special viewing party to the individual that pledges the most time? Why not break out several categories by region? Cheerwine enjoys cult status on several college campuses, so why not several college categories?

Ten more of these special viewing parties, with the accompanying Cheerwine, would help spread the brand and the news of the benefit concert.

Picking Your Cause Marketing Partner

So how should a corporate sponsor go about sniffing out a cause marketing partner?

There are several… oftentimes opposing… schools of thought on the subject.

One is that you should pick causes that have some sort of link to your business. For instance, a food business should pick a food charity.

Why? So that your customers prospects don’t have to spend too much cognitive energy figuring out what the link is between the two organizations. Because customers just won’t do it. If it doesn’t make sense, they’re not going to pull out their phones to Google the question ‘Why does Acme Axel Manufacturing Company sponsor bone cancer research?’ Instead, it will seem like 'cause-nitive dissonance' and they’ll just ignore it.

The opposing view holds that customers see such links as cynical. In this view, a Consumer Packaged Goods that makes canned spaghetti sauce and links up with a network food bank network during the Christmas season is plainly just playing on their customer's emotions.

Certainly there are plenty of sponsors who really don’t care that much about the cause. They find a charity that can fill their requirements for a one-time promotion and move along to another cause after that.

In my view, there’s nothing terribly wrong with that so long as both parties know going into the relationship that it’s a hook-up and not a partnership.

But the ideal would be to only link with causes for which the sponsor has some kind of special passion, affection, or zeal. Because their customers could sense the genuineness and authenticity of the company’s commitment.

These thoughts occurred to me after reading a press release about a UK waste management company called Waste King that recently gave 30 percent of one day’s profit to the UK charity Medical Detection Dogs. That's one of their dogs on the left.

Medical Detection Dogs are dogs that are trained to sense and alert their owners to medical conditions like low-blood sugar, diabetes, narcolepsy, seizures and, perhaps, even cancer.

The cause of Medical Detection Dogs strikes me as being very marketable. Indeed, Leslie Nicol, who plays Mrs. Patmore on the hit TV series Downton Abbey, has just signed on as one of the charity’s ambassadors. But it nonetheless seems like a rather random choice for a waste management company.

In other words, Waste King’s donation could be an example of any of the above. It could be a cynical link-up driven by the appeal of the cause and the celebrity. It could that one or more people and Waste King had a genuine commitment to Medical Detection Dogs based on personal experience. Or it could be just a head-scratcher of a cause marketing campaign that crop up from time to time.

A small hint is provided by a quote in the press release.

“We believe that the charity is not only doing valuable practical work in helping people with existing conditions to keep those conditions from being life threatening but it’s also involved in important research work," says Glen Curie, managing director of Waste King. “This research could result in saving the NHS a great deal of time and money because of the early detection of medical conditions.”

“We’ve wanted to do something to help Medical Detection Dogs for some time – and we’re pleased that we’ve now found a practical and effective way to do so,” he added.

Here’s the take-home lesson: If your company has an odd choice for a charity partner and if there are specific reasons for your commitment, you should take pains to explain where that commitment comes from in the press release, on your website and in any other media where you activate your sponsorship.

3 Ways Research and Cause Marketing Can Work Together

Bloggers's note: Today's post comes from guest blogger Erin Palmer, a writer and editor for University Alliance. She writes about nonprofit and public sector topics, Master of Public Administration online degree programs, analytics, metrics and other tools.

In its 2012-13 Occupational Outlook Handbook, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that organizations and institutions across both public and private sectors “will … increasingly use market research to ensure that program resources are being used effectively.” And for good reason: without good data, there is no good marketing. Cause marketing, in particular, relies on sound information, strategy, and data analytics. Here are three ways effective research can help you create better cause marketing campaigns.

1. Research provides vital data about your efforts and impact. Specifically, market data about political and other external influences, macro- and socioeconomic trends, and industry or cause-related contingencies can not only help you determine the efficacy of your current marketing strategies, but also refine and adapt those strategies to any changes in industry climate.

Data about consumer behavior, such as the keywords visitors use to find your website, can also prove invaluable. Non-consumer or non-interested behavior is equally important in cause-related marketing, as non-consumers can potentiate a greater and more durable social impact.

2. Analytics can shape your social media strategy. The same data about consumer behavior that informs your cause-related marketing strategy, as a whole, can be applied to the blueprint by which you achieve the specific goals of your social media strategy.

For instance, by using Google Analytics to track your website’s visitor performance (e.g., number and frequency of visitors, number and frequency of individual donations) over a set period of time, you can decide how many new consumers you need to attract via social media in order to increase revenue.

Analytics also provide insight into how effectively your social media pages direct consumers back to your home site (and therefore, again, increase your revenue and impact).

Further, differentiating between the various types of traffic to each page—some visitors find your profile independently, some are already connected, some find you via secondary or even tertiary connections—will help you monitor ongoing social media efforts and adapt as necessary.

3. Participating in research can benefit charity. Pause to Support a Cause, one of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council’s campaigns, self-describes as “a corporate social responsibility campaign” that aims to “create a global community of non-profit champions … and members willing to take part in online surveys as a way to channel funds to their designated causes, charities, foundations, and non-profit organizations of choice.”

All consumers 18 and over are eligible to register for the research panel. Once the consumer is registered, he or she selects up to two charities to support. Corporations and market researchers allocate charitable funding in exchange for the consumer’s participation in the surveys and/or promotions he or she chooses. In turn, consumers can track exactly how much money their individual contributions have earned for the charities they support.

CMO predicts that the campaign will attract new and varied consumer demographics and increase exposure and funding for all its nonprofit partners and the associated causes. In all likelihood, yours is among them.

Effective cause marketing carries the potential of benefiting all parties involved, including the ability to increase awareness of the cause while improving the customer base of the for-profit. It can also place
both parties into a more positive consumer light. By doing solid industry research and closely studying the analytics of your current audience, you’ll be able to put your message in front of a more closely targeted
audience, resulting in better conversions and improved PR.

Cause Marketing Bail Bond Services?

  In its very earliest days, Apple Computer donated a lot of computer equipment and software to American schools. I can’t remember Steve Jobs or anyone else from Apple talking about why they did it. But I’ve long suspected that Apple wanted to be not only the computer of choice for schools, but schoolchildren. Because schoolchildren grow up to have mortgages and disposable income, and they want to buy electronics and computers from a familiar name.

In the case of one of my nephews, now an engineer, that’s exactly how it played out. He’s the family geek and an Apple aficionado and loyalist. As a result of his advocacy, so too is the rest of his family.

And so I wonder about this in-kind cause marketing effort from Bail Hotline Bail Bonds.

Tomorrow, on Friday, Sept. 14, 2012, employees from the company will stand outside elementary schools in San Bernardino and three other California cities and give away 1,000 backpacks to students as they get out of school.

This will be the third year that Bail Hotline Bail Bonds has done the backpack giveaway. The video above is from the 2011 giveaway, which included a hot dog roast. Bail Hotline Bail Bonds has more than 20 offices across the Golden State.

So is Bail Hotline Bail Bonds pulling an Apple here? Are they giving away free backpacks to future customers and their families?

If that's the thinking then this is in exceptionally poor taste.

The only thing that keeps me from blowing raspberries here is that the backpacks do not seem to have Bail Hotline Bail Bonds logo and 800-phone number on them. It could certainly be the case that Bail Hotline Bail Bonds' motivations and intentions are pure.

I hope that's the case.

Quick Testing Your Cause Marketing Campaign Ideas

In April 2012, Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock. The company had been shipping its product for less than 18 months when they accepted the offer. Even if, like me, you think that Instagram’s price was frothier than a berry smoothie at McDonald’s, you have to admit that the tech sector is building companies differently than everyone else, and this may hold some lessons for cause marketers.

So, what’s different? Well, one of the tech sector’s most notable playbooks “The Startup Owner’s Manual,” suggests one approach that more cause marketers could adopt; super-fast prototyping and, short, simple and objective pass/fail tests of cause marketing concepts and ideas.

When the authors, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, say super-fast prototyping them mean it. They advocate throwing up a website as quickly as possible. Whether you intend to sell an ephemeral service like Instagram or a physical product, Bank and Dorf recommend you prototype a version they call the Minimum Viable Product. And, again, they mean minimum. The lowest fidelity version you can get away with.

Eric Ries, the author of another Silicon Valley business bible called ‘The Lean Startup,’ suggests in some cases you do no more than just put together a sales sheet and see how prospects react.

Blank teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford, Berkeley, and Columbia business schools. He’s founded or co-founded 8 companies and served on numerous boards. Dorf teaches at Columbia and founded or co-founded 6 companies. 

Dorf and Blank’s point is to get the reactions of potential customers as quickly as possible. Naturally, one of the temptations… both conscious and unconscious…is to fudge the test so that it delivers the results you prefer. But not only is that intellectually dishonest, it’s self-defeating.

Moreover, you’re not looking only at pass/fail of a concept, you’re listening for unprompted feedback like, ‘if only this widget did x, then I’d buy it.’ Tons of tech companies starting out as something else before realizing that the business model lay in another direction.

YouTube was at first a video dating site. PayPal was a way for Palm Pilot owners to exchange money without banks. Groupon started as a way to mobilize causes. Yammer competed with Twitter in the consumer space before pivoting into a enterprise social networking site. Even Instagram had its start as a social network that was part Foursquare and part Mafia Wars. The list goes on.

Where’s the application for cause marketers?

Internet companies are like cause marketing campaigns in the sense that you really are selling fluff, air, and good feelings. Doesn’t that describe both Instagram and (RED)?

Cause marketers often feel like they have to build the whole campaign before rolling it out to the public. But just as it’s better to know if a business concept has legs before you put pants on it, it’s better to know if a cause marketing campaign is likely to work before you unveil it to all your stakeholders.

Cause Marketing and Co-Branding

Remember when your geometry teacher told you that 'all squares were rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares'? Well, get ready for a similar mind-bender from cause marketing; all cause marketing is co-branding, but not all co-branding is cause marketing.

Dictionary.com defines co-branding as a "marketing effort or partnership between companies to join forces and use the best technology or content of each and lending both of their brands to the final product."

That sounds a little highfalutin. So let's just say that co-branding describes when brands combine efforts in ways such that they create mutual benefit.



There are several kinds of co-branding, including cause marketing itself.

• Promotional/Sponsorship. This is the category cause marketing falls under. Another example is Fedex’s league-wide sponsorship of the National Football League.
• Ingredient. A recipe in a free-standing insert that includes Hershey chocolate bar and Kraft Marshmallows or Nabisco’s Honey Maid graham crackers.
• Innovation Based. Polar Electro’s heart rate monitors integrated into apparel from Adidas.
• Value-Chain, which is meant to bring new experiences to the consumer, not just another flavor. There are three varieties of value-chain co-branding
• Product Service. Sea World and Southwest Airlines.
• Supplier-Retailer. Starbucks wifi service from AT&T.
• Alliance. They obvious example are the tie-ups between two or more airline carriers.

Co-branding is common and familiar enough that you probably have some other examples in mind.

Less common is co-branding between more than two brands. That's because the more brands you add the more inertia there is to overcome. Co-branding with more than two brands is like a trade between three or more professional sports teams whereby six or eight or ten players change teams. Those deals frequently make the news because everyone understands that they're so hard to put together in a way that satisfies all the parties.

The above promotion found in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database is an example of a four-way co-brand; there’s Tag Heuer, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Tag Heuer dealer called Joseph-Anthony. I saw this cause marketing activation in an issue of Forbes magazine.

The cause marketing part of this co-branding is that Tag Heuer delivers an unstated donation to the Natural Resources Defense Council, a cause which given his green bona fides was almost certainly Leonardo DiCaprio’s choice.

In exchange, Tag Heuer gets to use DiCaprio’s mug in the ad. Joseph-Anthony likely gets to pay for part of the ad.

The result of this four-way co-brand is probably satisfaction all around.

Joseph-Anthony is happy because there’s no way a small jeweler could have pulled this together in and of itself. DiCaprio’s pleased because he gets a fee for both himself and a favored charity. And, I assume, the Tag Heuer watch of his choice. The Natural Resources Defense Council is glad to be associated with a higher-end corporate brand with no apparent environmental blemishes, while also getting paid. And Tag Heuer satisfies both a dealer and one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.

Cause Marketing During Ramadan

In 2012 in the United Arab Emirates, Unilever and the UAE chapter of the Red Crescent Society teamed up for a cause marketing effort that took place during Ramadan, a month-long fast that observant Muslims across the globe annually observe in the ninth month of the Islamic Calendar.

In 2012 Ramadan began on July 20 on the Gregorian calendar. During the 29 to 30 days of Ramadan, Muslims fast…that is, refrain from eating or drinking… each day from dawn to dusk. When the day’s fast ends at dusk, Muslims then partake of food and drink, oftentimes as a communal feast as in the picture above. Needless to say, Ramadan is easier when it takes place in the winter rather than the summer months.

In this campaign, Unilever’s Comfort Creations brand of fabric softeners set up a series of drop-off points for used clothing, which the Red Crescent Society then provided to the needy. The drop-off points were located in three malls in Dubai. In 2012, the campaign was extended to a mall in Kuwait. It’s hard to overstate the popularity of indoor malls in the Middle East. Having grown up in the desert kingdom of Arizona, I can relate.

Called, ‘Share a Touch of Love’ the campaign resulted in more than 45,000 donated items in less than a month’s time.

According to the press report I saw in The National, a UAE newspaper, “all charitable activities in Dubai have to be conducted in partnership with the associations or foundations approved by the Department of Islamic Affairs and Charitable Activities under the Dubai Government, Unilever returned to Red Crescent for the third year.”

Wikipedia says that charity is an important part of Ramadan. Muslims tithe a portion of their wealth throughout the year, which they call the Zakat. In Islam the Zakat is “obligatory as one of the pillars of Islam; a fixed percentage required to be given by those with savings. Sadaqa is voluntary charity in given above and beyond what is required from the obligation of zakat. In Islam all good deeds are more handsomely rewarded in Ramadan than in any other month of the year. Consequently, many will choose this time to give a larger portion, if not all, of the zakat for which they are obligated to give. In addition, many will also use this time to give a larger portion of sadaqa in order to maximize the reward that will await them on the Day of Judgment.”

From what I read, I couldn’t get a sense about whether the Muslims who donated the clothing during Ramadan considered their donation Zakat or Sadaqa.

But I can see why Unilever would want to run this cause marketing campaign during Ramadan.

The Growing Asian American Market, a Likely Target for Cause Marketing

It’s peach season where I live and so with peach juice running down my face my mind naturally turns to China and Asia and the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States. What do peaches and Asians have to do with each other? The prunus persica is Asian, a native to China that has long been a welcome addition to the American cornucopia.

Likewise, Asian Americans are emerging as a ripe target for cause marketing.

Asian Americans are among the best educated and the highest earners. At more than $500 billion, their annual buying power represents about 1/32nd of the entire U.S. economy. There are some 18.2 million Asian Americans in the United States, about 5.8 percent of the population. By 2050, they’re projected to grow to 40.6 million or 9 percent of the population.

Eighty percent of Asian Americans live in households with Internet access, the highest among race and ethnic groups. Chinese is the second most common language spoke in America after Spanish. The medium income of Asian Indians is $90,429. Twenty percent of Asian Americans over the age of 25 have graduate degrees, twice the rate for all Americans as a whole. Currently just ten states account for 75 percent of Asian American buying power, led by California, New York and Texas. 

But, naturally, Asian Americans aren’t a monolithic group. That’s evident from their country of origin (about 75 percent of Asian Americans were born abroad):

• 3.6 million Chinese
• 3.2 million Filipino
• 2.8 million Asian Indian
• 1.7 million Vietnamese
• 1.6 million Korean
• 1.3 million Japanese

So while ‘Asian American’ is a handy label, notwithstanding the Harold and Kumar movies, it’s not one that most Asian Americans would likely self-identify with.

So how are cause marketers to approach this polyglot market?

By the third generation, most Asian Americans are just Americans. The second generation is most likely to be bilingual. And the first generation is most likely to speak mainly their native language. Although, it’s fair to say that most first-generation Filipinos and Asian Indians come to the United States speaking English and their native tongue.

Because literacy and education rates are so high, text-heavy cause marketing activations can work, so long as you pick the right language.

It terms of illustrating your cause marketing, it’s probably a mistake to just fill it with visuals of various shades of indeterminate brown people. It’s all but impossible to make those kinds of contrived pictures to feel authentic. Better to illustrate the campaign with lifestyle images.

Asian Americans are a peach of a target market for cause marketers. But you better do your homework first.

(This post was drawn from the August 2012 issue of Deliver magazine, which was also the source of all the statistics quoted herein).

Regal Entertainment Reports the Results of its Cause Marketing Campaign Called 'Straw Vote'

Yesterday Regal Entertainment announced the final tally of its August Straw Vote; Boys and Girls Clubs of America garnered $97,721 and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospitals collected $65,692. Regal also split another $320,000 between the two causes.

In the promotion, which I highlighted on August 1, Regal donated $0.50 for each medium or large frozen fruit drink sold during the month. The purchase of cherry drinks supported St. Jude. The purchase of all other flavors supported Boys and Girls Club.

At the outset Regal capped the total donation to both causes at $600,000. But when all was said and done, Regal had donated $483,413 to the two causes. That suggests that Regal thought the promotion had more legs than it actually did.

Because 2013 is not an election year in the United States, it’s unlikely that Regal will repeat it next year, at least in this format. But that would be a pity, in my view.

Some things just take a while to catch on.

Actor Alan Rickman didn’t get his first movie role until he was 46. Author Joseph Conrad didn’t even speak English until adulthood. And until he published ‘Heart of Darkness’ at age 37 he was basically was a sailor, a drifter and small-time criminal. Harland Sanders didn’t open his first Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was 65. Tom Brady, the New England Patriot quarterback and a fifth round draft pick, has said that if he would have been drafted any higher, he almost certainly wouldn’t have had the time to develop or meet the expectations that come with being a high draft pick.

In other words, some things take time to achieve their full potential. Regal's straw vote may be one of those things.

The Cause Marketing Post in Which I Invoke Both God and Andrew Carnegie

There’s a famous longitudinal study which found that children from homes where one or both parents were college educated would, by age four, have heard 32 million more words than would their peers from families who were on welfare. The quality and tone of the words in the homes with professional parents was also higher and more positive in nature.

A more recent study in the United Kingdom turned up very similar results.

Another influential paper called ‘Matthew Effects in Reading,’ found that early success in reading built on itself, while children that didn’t learn to read early were more likely to have trouble acquiring new skills later in life.  

The author, Keith Stanovich, called it the ‘Matthew Effect,’ after Matthew 25:29 in the New Testament: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

Reading and literacy track closely with long-term success in life. That is, the Matthew Effect describes a positive feedback loop as well.

Another study finds that middle-class families have an average of 13 books per child, while in low-income neighborhoods the ratio is just one age-appropriate book per 300 children!

Cause marketing can’t do much about the number or the quality of words said in a home. But it can do something about age-appropriate books available to poor kids.

This awareness-raising cause marketing message from Homewood Suites, which increasingly targets the family leisure travel segment, and represents a natural tie for its Lewis the Duck children’s book series. Homewood Suites’ logo features a duck. To date, Homewood Suites has donated more than 5 million books to needy kids and built and maintained 60 lending libraries in poor neighborhoods. Homewood’s nonprofit partner is BooksforKids.org.

Building libraries, expanding literacy and giving books to children is God’s work, if I may be so bold. America’s first real philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie, funded some 2500 libraries between 1883 and 1929 in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. My own father-in-law grew up in a small town reading in a Carnegie Library.

In the United States, most of the Carnegie Libraries became, in time, public libraries supported with public funds. It’s fair to say that the traditional high rates of literacy in America and the Commonwealth countries is due in part to the Carnegie Libraries.

Three Cheers, then, for Homewood Suites for taking up the mantle of this important work. Because when it comes to literacy and reading the Matthew Effect needs to live on.

Cause Marketers: Protect Your Intellectual Property!

One of the things that Children’s Miracle Network learned early on in its production of its eponymous Telethon was that it had to tell specific stories of the individuals who benefited from its efforts: sick children. CMN, which was a path-breaking cause marketer, specifically decided that the narrative arc of those stories had to be about children who were sick but got better thanks to the specialized care available only at children’s hospitals in North America.

And so there would be no stories about children who died and none suggesting that if only people had been more generous with their donations that a child might still be alive. CMN decided that such approaches were exploitive of children.

By the time I joined the organization less than 10 years after its founding, the tone of these stories was well laid down. As was the name by which we referred to them; 'Miracle Stories.'

The term ‘Miracle Story’ described not only the videos that would appear on the Telethon, but it also conveyed a sense of hope and included part of the organization’s official name. It was a great bit of internal branding. 

But since the internal audience that might use the term included sponsors, hospitals, TV stations, and numerous video production companies, the number of people in North America who could use the expression knowledgeably numbered in the thousands.

Back then CMN was growing so quickly that it seldom bothered with niceties like intellectual property. Oh, the logos were trademarked and in the United States copyright protection occurs when something is published. But terms like ‘Miracle Stories’ never got IP protection.

That, frankly, was an oversight. Because cause marketing and sponsorship are in large measure about licensing the logo and other intellectual property, it makes sense that charities extend their IP protection quite broadly, to include even descriptive terms like ‘Miracle Stories.’

Had they done so, there’d be a letter on the desk of Procter & Gamble’s corporate counsel telling them to either cease and desist their use of the term ‘Miracle Story’ or pay Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals a tidy fee.

Do You Have Too Many Facebook Friends to Be Generous to Causes?

You, you’ve got thousands of followers on Twitter, hundreds of Facebook friends and an enviable Klout score as a result. And, according to some early research from Professor Kimberley Scharf at the University of Warwick in the UK, you’re probably a selfish SOB when it comes to donating to charities!

Scharf’s thinking is highlighted in her theoretical research paper, “Private Provision of Public Goods and Information Diffusion in Social Groups.” Scharf is an economist at the University of Warwick’s Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy.

“Information transmission about giving opportunities is undermined by free-riding incentives,” Scharf said in a press account. “I count on other neighbours to convey information and so save on the effort of doing it myself,” she said. “As well as relying on others to pass on information, it may also be true that people are even relying on others to donate.”

In economics a free-rider is someone who receives benefits from an activity, but doesn’t have to pay for it. Someone who sneaks into a movie theater or concert venue without paying is a free-rider. So, too, is the person who takes an apple off someone else's tree.

Scharf's paper “describes a social proximity-based mechanism of information transmission in groups of individuals who consume a pure public good. In the mechanism we study, information about quality for alternative modes of provision of a public good can spread from one individual to the next just as it does for private goods.”

“However, unlike in the case of private goods, better informed individuals face positive incentives to incur private costs in order to transmit information to their less informed neighbours, because this can bring about an increase in collective provision, the benefits of which they partake in.”

“In this setting, the sharing of information has the characteristics of a local public good that is confined within individual social neighbourhoods, even when voluntary contributions fund the provision of a pure public good that spans all neighbourhoods."

“Thus, incentives to engage in costly fundraising are stronger when social neighbourhoods are smaller; consequently, large societies composed of comparatively small social neighbourhoods can sustain comparatively higher levels of private provision of collective goods,” Scharf writes in the paper’s introduction.

What are the implications of Scharf’s theory for cause marketers and fundraisers?

One of them might be to think hard about courting those people who are the connectors of the broadest sort. It could be that they’re too connected with everyone else to really connect with your cause in a meaningful way. For me this really rings true in big cities where you might be able to get people to one of your events, but you might not be able to get them to actually care about your cause.

Scharf's introduction suggests a second implication; moving from broadcasting to narrowcasting. When the ‘neighborhood’ as she calls the social network is small, there’s greater onus on you to be the helping hand. If my next-door neighbor asks for a favor, I’ve far more likely to grant it than I am to the neighbor who lives only a block away and far more likely to grant that favor than I am to the neighbor who lives a mile away.