My New Favorite Cause Marketing Fundraiser

One of the first rules of blogging is to never start a post with an apology. But rules were made to be broken, especially when it involves tattoos.

I apologize for not posting on Food Tattoos for Hunger, which took place at tattoo shops mainly in the United States but also elsewhere on Sunday, Nov. 18, 2012. Food Tattoos for Hunger was a collective of shops and parlors offering food Flash tattoos in order to raise money for various hunger charities and food banks. ‘Flash’ tattoos… that is tattoos designed originally using Adobe Flash…go on quicker than when using more traditional methods.

At left are some designs submitted for the event from artist Joe King.

The way it worked is that artists would volunteer their time and materials in a marathon tattoo day. Back in the day, hairdressers did something very similar with ‘cut-a-thons.’

The goal of Food Tattoos for Hunger was to attract 100 shops and generate an average of $1,500 for a total of $150,000. I called Food Tattoos for Hunger a collective, but even that seems too formal a handle. The organizers… Off the Map Tattoo in East Hampton, Mass… put out the word via social and traditional media and suggested the general parameters for how to run the promotion.

I suspect they picked a Sunday because there’s less tattoo business then, although I’m sure it isn’t true for every shop.

I couldn’t find any word on whether or not they achieved their goal, but I dig how grassroots this cause marketing fundraiser is. The principals at Off the Map saw a problem and figured out how they could address it using their own skills and passion. Then they called on their peers to join in and help.

Other personal service providers… nail salons, personal trainers, yoga studios, etc… could do something similar.

A Three-Way Cause Marketing Tie-up Between Hasbro, Duracell and Toys for Tots

The point of co-branding… of which cause marketing is one type… is for brands to combine their advantages in such a way that they create worthwhile synergies.

In an article from several years back, Accenture, the big consultancy, named six varieties of co-branding:

Promotional/Sponsorship. This is the category cause marketing falls under. Also Papa John’s sponsorship of the National Football League.

Ingredient. Betty Crocker brownie mix made with Hershey chocolate, or any of the Jack Daniels' dishes at TGI Fridays.

Innovation Based. The Apple-Nike tie-up.

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:

1. Product-Service. Sea World and Southwest Airlines.
2. Supplier-Retailer. Starbucks wifi service from AT&T.
3. Alliance. Think FTD, or those alliances between multiple airline carriers.

In short, co-branding is common and familiar.

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 always make the news because everyone understands that they're so hard to put together in a way that satisfies all parties.

So this cause marketing promotion caught my eye. It was in that huge bundle of ads you get in the Thanksgiving newspaper. Every donation of an electronic toy that Hasbro makes to Toys for Tots will be powered by Duracell batteries.

Hasbro did a three-way co-brand in the Christmas season of 2009 as well. When you bought a Hasbro toy or game from the featured page in the Target flyer, Hasbro made a donation of 5 percent of the purchase price to the Salvation Army.

What are the rewards for these kinds of tie-ups? Well, in a word or two, this co-branding effort has access to 1/3 more promotional resources than a two-way tie-up would have. Hasbro and Toys for Toys land in a Duracell flyer with coupons. Duracell and Hasbro get featured in Toys for Tots promotional efforts. And Hasbro gets a little open-door access to promotional powerhouse P&G, which owns Duracell.

It’s a win-win-win.

Today's Dose of Anti-Cyncism

Get ready to have your heart warmed.

Last year, when he was six, Jamie Ashbourne of Jensen Beach, Fla., wanted to give some toys to less-fortunate kids at Christmas-time. But he found the whole process of donating unwrapped toys to kids he’d never meet somewhat joyless. That's the little fellow at the left.

So he set about buying… I assume bankrolled by mom and day…and wrapping enough toys to fill a sleigh. But by the time he was finished, it was just days before Christmas and most toy drives were over. But in the last hour the Gertrude Walden Child Car Center in Stuart, Fla. welcomed him, and Jamie got to play Santa after all.

Now age seven, Jamie will be back at the Walden Center on Dec. 19. But Jamie has also turned his eye to the kids affected by Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, although it’s too soon to see how that will play out.

Jamie’s website, elffactory.org, is set up to accept donations and well wishes. And, I suppose, if you can do anything to help enable Jamie to make a donation to the youngest victims of Sandy, his parents would love to hear from you.

Current Canadian Opinion on Cause Marketing

A public opinion survey published Nov. 1, 2012 by Ottawa-based Abacus Data finds Canadians very supportive of the basic practices and premises of cause marketing.

The Internet survey of 1208 Canadians found the following:

• 82 percent say they would switch brands to support causes they care about.

• The same number of people say that companies should donate to causes.

• Canadians would be more likely to donate at checkout if the company would match their donation (67 percent), if offered a bounceback discount on their next purchase (61 percent), and if allowed to choose the cause their purchase supports from a list of charities (51 percent).

• Most Canadians want to know more about the specific impact of their contributions.

• 82 percent say that a company’s commitment to social and environmental issues helps them to decide where to buy or shop. 65 percent say such considerations inform how they invest.

• As a whole, Canadians are willing to travel an extra 18 minutes to buy a product that supports a cause they care about. Millennials are willing to travel 21 minutes for the same. Canadian Boomers said they were willing to travel only an extra 15.5 minutes to buy a product that supports a cause they care about.

• Health, poverty and education rank as the top three causes that Canadians care most about.

I’d caution American cause marketers from drawing exact parallels from their North American cousins. But these numbers do line up pretty closely with similar studies Stateside.

(The picture above is from the one-of-kind International Peace Gardens, a two-country nonprofit charity that promotes amity between Canada and the United States. The rock-lined creek represents the border line between Canada and the United States and the borders of the Province of Manitoba and the State of North Dakota respectively.)

Cause Marketing That was Born This Way

Short post today… I’m still muzzy from the Thanksgiving feast. But I'm not too groggy to deliver a cause marketing post that is directly related to today, Black Friday 2012.

During the Black Friday sales event at Macy’s today through Sunday, the retailer will donate $10 for every bottle of Lady Gaga ‘Fame’ fragrance sold. Also, for everyone that takes a photo in a Macy’s store and posts it to Twitter with the hashtag #macysBTWF, the company will donate another $5. The money goes to Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation. The total donation is capped at $250,000.

To me the challenge for this effort is in how to activate the campaign. I got a press release from Macy’s PR staff. But even Macy’s doesn’t have the social media reach that Lady Gaga herself does.

Gaga currently has 31.4 million followers on Twitter. In addition to her website she has a social media website devoted to her fan base called LittleMonsters.com. The site, which takes its name from Gaga’s name for her fans, is part Pinterest and part Facebook. That's a clutch of Little Monsters on the left baring their claws in the Gaga manner.

Born This Way Foundation has tweeted out the promotion, as have a number of Little Monsters. But can Gaga do so herself from her own account? Or would that be a sellout?

And can Macy’s do anything more to activate the promotion than Lady Gaga can do all by herself?

During its heyday, everyone wanted to be a NASCAR sponsor because their fans were said to be uniquely brand loyal to the sponsors. Sometimes the NFL makes similar claims.

Second question, are the Little Monsters too iconoclastic for Macy’s? Or, are they just NASCAR fans with better hair and makeup?

I know how Macy's is betting on that last question.

My Annual Homage to the American Holiday Called Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, a holiday when we watch parades and American football before eating an enormous feast of turkey, ‘stuffing,’ mashed potatoes and gravy, and then chase it down with great slabs of pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream.

Recently I read how the original feast was perhaps 600 calories. Nowadays... the dietary nannies tell us... the Thanksgiving meal might tip the scale at 5 to 10 times as many calories.

That news almost makes me want to cut back. Almost.

Americans love this holiday. So do Canadians, who celebrate it on the second Monday in October.

We North Americans have done our level best to try and export the holiday, but with very limited success.

Historian Thomas Fleming tells how our British cousins opened up Westminster Abbey on November 26, 1942 during World War Two for a special Thanksgiving Day service for American servicemen and women, the first-time ever the cathedral had been used in that way.

Alas, while the 'Special Relationship' between the U.S. and the UK continues, Thanksgiving remains limited to the colonies.

Part of it, of course, is the holiday's backstory.

I grew up with an elaborate and cherished myth that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated when the Native Americans invited the Puritan Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock over for potluck around harvest time.

Every year historians, journalists and other skeptics chip away at the myth.

One of the latest revelations involves a Spanish explorer named Pedro Menendez de Aviles who dined on bean soup with Native Americans in Florida some 56 years before the more famous meal at Plymouth Rock.

In time no doubt we’ll learn that Leif Ericson in fact broke bread with Native Americans in Labrador around 1000 AD and that the Basques shared their catch of salted cod with the Natives of Newfoundland well before the Columbian Exchange.

Nonetheless, Americans are largely undaunted by the myth-busting.

Here’s why: the holiday as we now celebrate it is just so beautiful. And I mean that sincerely. Notwithstanding the sitcom version of Thanksgiving in which everyone is uncomfortable, irritable, or pissy, I can honestly say that I've never experienced the holiday in that way. Ever. And I'll bet I spent a good 15 Thanksgivings as a stray that friends or second cousins felt obliged to ask over for the holiday.

Here's how Thanksgiving typically goes: families and friends gather. An enormous meal is prepared. We talk about what it is that we have to be grateful for at the dinner table. We feast. Many of us offer prayers of gratitude. We loosen our belts and take a nap. Then we go home with leftovers in cheap plastic containers.

For my part, I’m grateful to you my readers. Thanks for putting up with my rants. Thanks for disregarding my too frequent errors of spelling, grammar and logic. Thanks for leaving comments. Thanks for suggesting topics and sending examples of cause marketing from where you're from. Thanks to my non-American readers for tolerating during those moments... (like now?)... when I become too exuberant in my Americanism. And, thanks for practicing cause marketing wherever you are!

And, happy birthday Kate!

Five Tips for Recruiting Nonprofit Sponsors

Yesterday I talked about the power and ease of working with other nonprofits who serve as sponsors. I mentioned that when I worked at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals (CMNH) my four nonprofit sponsors were collectively worth more than $5 million a year to CMNH. That was more than 10 years ago and I’d be surprised if the current number for those four sponsors wasn't some multiple of $5 million.

So how do you recruit valuable nonprofit sponsors? Here’s five tips:

1. Network, network, network. The initial contact with the American Legion came through Riley Hospital for Children, the CMNH member hospital in Indianapolis. Someone knew someone at the Legion headquarters there, and my predecessor sweet-talked, cajoled and weaseled his way towards the decision-makers, many of whom had had personal experience with Riley.
2. A ‘no’ doesn’t always mean no; sometimes it just means not now. What I mean is that persistence is vital if you want to recruit new sponsors. So, too, is good-timing. Log-a-Load for Kids, long a campaign of the Forest Resources Association, at first was so grassroots it was almost formless. Before it could be a sponsor, Log-a-Load needed a little more organization. When the Forest Resources Association took the campaign under its wing, it was then positioned to be a CMNH sponsor. Before then it was too soon.
3. Seek first to understand. Stephen R. Covey had it right. Before you can be understood, you must first seek to understand. You have to understand your would-be partner’s business and their points of pain. This applies not only to the company as a whole, but to influential people in the company. Foresters, a fraternal benefit society, had undergone a terrible scandal that shook the organization to the core and required a wrenching reorganization. One thing we came to understand about Foresters was that they very much needed and wanted publicity that painted the company in more positive light and boosted internal morale. Once we understood that we could develop a campaign that fit Forester’s needs and the needs of CMNH.
4. Be prepared to play every angle. In recruiting a sponsor, CMNH would try anything that was ethical and legal. We’d play on emotions by showing videos of kids who were desperately sick but got better at a CMNH hospital. In communications with prospective sponsors our board members would play on their college, family, personal, or religious loyalties. If we thought they’d react to certain celebrities, we’d have them phone or write a letter. We’d invite them to tour their local children’s hospital or join us for the old Children’s Miracle Network Telethon. We’d visit them when we were in town and go to lunch or dinner. And, of course, we spent time talking about how children’s hospitals touched the lives of just about everyone via their family or friends. 
5. Polish your presentations until they shine. CMNH had an executive who spent several years as an executive at the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Since the Olympics are sponsor-driven I asked him once what CMNH could learn from it. His response at the time was, ‘not much.’ In particular, he said that the presentation decks from CMNH surpassed those coming from the organizing committee. There was a reason for that. CMNH had a very specific cause marketing schema, or basic approach to cause marketing that could be applied in countless settings. Consequently, CMN’s presentation deck and most of its best presenters had been burnished to a high shine. You should write your presentations carefully then polish, polish and polish them some more.

Cause Marketing With Other Nonprofits

We’ve seen many times that not all cause marketing takes between a company and a cause. But after more than 950 posts it only just now occurs to me that I’ve never given much more than a passing mention to a kind of cause marketing that takes place between a nonprofit cause and another nonprofit.

There’s a certain irony to this because I spent the second part of my career at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals (CMNH) running accounts for four large nonprofit groups that worked to help North America’s children’s hospitals; the service groups Kiwanis and Key Club International, the veteran’s groups the American Legion and the American Legion Auxiliary, Log-a-Load for Kids, a subset of the trade group called the Forest Resources Association, and the fraternal benefit society called Foresters.

I was reminded of these sorts of relationships by a press release issued by the Illinois State Bar Association, which recently announced a goal to provide 1 million meals to needy Illinoisans. They’ll do this by hitting up bar association members and their law firms for donations of food and money. Food and money will be distributed to food banks across Illinois. 

In this two-part post, I’ll provide a little background on the nonprofit sponsors I worked with at CMNH. Tomorrow, the post will cover the nuts and bolts of working with other nonprofits in cause marketing.

Between them, my accounts were worth in excess of $5 million to CMNH, and a big chunk of underwriting dollars. And to be frank, while all of CMNH’s sponsors weren’t always a pleasure to work with, all of my nonprofit accounts were. I still count many friends from among those sponsors all these years later. We were all nonprofits and so we spoke the same language. Kiwanis and the American Legion are both in Indianapolis, which saved both money and time. And, I made a point of introducing everyone to everyone else, and was rewarded when they would pass ideas between each other without my mediation.

Each of these nonprofits had their own advantages. But they all shared one thing in common; they each had thousands of members. At the time, the American Legion and Auxiliary had 5 million members!  

Kiwanis was one of CMNH’s first sponsors brought on almost 30 years ago. Kiwanis International, and its larger cousin Rotary International, have literally made the world a better place. Kiwanis, in conjunction with UNICEF, has eliminated mental retardation due to iodine deficiency. Starting in 2010, Kiwanis teamed again with UNICEF to fight neonatal and maternal tetanus, which kills 100,000 babies a year. Kiwanis’ motto is ‘Serving the Children of the World,’ and so they were and are a splendid sponsor for CMNH.

At the time, the American Legion was my newest account, having been brought on less than a year before I took it over. Again, the fit made sense for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals because of the Legion’s dedication to youth issues. The Legion has long sponsored Boys State and Girls State, a summer leadership and citizenship program for high school students. And there are countless Major League Baseball players who first got noticed by scouts while playing in American Legion Baseball when they were 15 or 16 or 17. A former commander of the American Legion wrote the first draft of the GI Bill, which was sponsored by U.S. Senator Ernest McFarland. The Legion’s State and national conventions were pure and unapologetic Americana.

Log-a-Load for Kids was kind of a crazy hybrid when I had the account. State units of the American Pulpwood Association, now called the Forest Resources Association, especially in the Southern United States, would hold fundraisers on behalf children’s hospitals. CMNH helped nationalize and rationalize those efforts. I loved going to Log-a-Load for Kids events because they were really grassroots… pheasant hunts, bass tournaments, raffles, and the like… and because the people involved were so genuine and real.

As a fraternal benefit society and a nonprofit, Foresters was required by law to give some of its income to 501(c)(3) charities. At the time, Foresters wanted to sponsor high profile events that would generate a lot of positive publicity. And so we put together a campaign that put them and dozens of formerly-hospitalized kids in the White House to meet the President and to the Canadian Parliament to meet the Prime Minister. We figured out plenty of other ways for Foresters to spend its money with CMNH, too.

Put Your Social Network to Work for a Worthy Cause

You’ve got a big following on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google +… maybe even thousands of people. Isn’t it time your social network slipped into its spandex and buttoned on its superhero cape and did a little good in the world?

That’s the premise of HopeMob, originally funded on Kickstarter, and about to enter its second year of business.

Here’s how you and your social network can do good using HopeMob. Suppose, in honor of the UN’s recent International Day of the Girl, you decide to start a fundraiser to provide school uniforms for an all-girls school in Accra, Ghana. School uniforms bring many benefits, but if a family can’t afford the price of the uniforms, that would preclude their daughter from going.

But you know that the education of girls helps inoculate them against child marriage, and is highly correlated with advancements in society and economic growth. Educated women have a lower infant mortality rate, higher skills, self-confidence, and the information to be better mothers, workers, and citizens. In the developing world a lot hangs on something as simple as a school uniform.

HopeMob helps you mobilize the support of your social network on behalf of causes you care about, called ‘Stories.’ Reach a certain threshold of support… measured in Story Points… and HopeMob promotes your Story to its first page, Reddit-like. There’s always 4 Stories in a preferred position, the Featured Story, plus three ‘Locked Stories.’ Those four maintain their position until they reach their funding goal. Another 16 Stories are on the first page based on points. However, the position of those 16 Stories is subject to change.

Once in the featured category, those 20 Stories attract the gaze of the broader world. Your Tweeps may get you on the first page. But it is the larger network that will fund all those school uniforms.
The rest of the Stories are in a catchall category called Success Stories.


You can buy 100 points for $10. You can earn points for donating to Stories, for inviting friends, for connecting via Facebook and Twitter, for completing your profile, etc.

It’s a pretty cool crowdfunding ecosystem that was developed by the cofounders who were doing similar fundraising efforts on Twitter.

When I was at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals one of our talking points was that most of the money we raised came in a dollar or two at a time. CMNH’s fundraising was classic example of fortune at the bottom of the pyramid thinking. But it was made possible only because CMNH had access, through its sponsors, to millions of retail customers.


Companies like HopeMob, with their use of social media, do much the same without the hassle and expense of recruiting sponsors.

Join the CauseMarketing.biz Newsgroup, Get a Cool Tool You Can Use on Your Next Cause Marketing Campaign

Kind Readers:

Amriti S. from Hyderbad, India is the latest to join the Cause Marketing Google Newsgroup.

It’s super easy to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

When you subscribe each new post comes directly to your email, usually every business day.

And like Amriti, when you subscribe you'll get a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" a matrix which explains the basic elements of Cause Marketing and includes specific examples.

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

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

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

So join today.


Warm regards,

Paul
Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Cause Marketing Jewelry that is the Bomb

Some 37 years after the end of the Cambodian civil war, landmines left by the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese and unexploded ordnance from the Americans still shroud the landscape. Wikipedia says that it will take a decade more to remove the majority of it. Like a monster with long arms, the mines and unexploded ordnance (called UXO) of long-past wars regularly reaches forward in time to kill and maim Cambodians today.

If placing landmines or dropping ordnance is easy, clearing minefields is laborious, expensive, and dangerous.

Taking a role in this complicated dynamic is Saught, a social enterprise based Singapore that buys the metal left behind by landmines and UXO and helps to support the training of Cambodians artisans to create jewelry which Saught sells on its website.

At left is the “Laurels of Us” necklace, which features streamlined doves and olive branches and was designed by Song Lin. The necklace sells for $129.90, which is on the high end of Saught’s offerings.

Saught is a cause, but it’s not a charity; it’s a social enterprise. With its efforts in Cambodia, Saught's goal is to create a sustainable model that can be exported to other post-conflict countries. Saught works with existing organizations in Cambodia to acquire the raw materials and then turn them into desirable jewelry.

The metals come from the Cambodia Mine Action Centre in Phnom Penh, which has a staff of 2400. By itself that number gives you a sense of the size of the problem in Cambodia, which is around 181,000 square kilometers (69,900 square miles), about the same size as the U.S. State of Missouri. But Missouri has 6 million citizens, while Cambodia has 15 million. Cambodia’s population density means time is of the essence in removing mines and UXO. CMAC actively demines Cambodia and educates Cambodians on the dangers posed by mines and UXO.

Much of the jewelry comes from the Fileo Development Organisation. Fileo is an Italian NGO that teaches young Cambodians the skills of Italian style jewelry making. Saught’s other main supplier is another NGO called Rajana Association, which also teaches Cambodians jewelry and other craft making.

I love these kinds of enterprises. Who wouldn’t be taken in just the back story alone? I’ve got a sister-in-law who can’t resist this kind of stuff, so she may find something from Saught under the tree come Christmas time. But Saught’s long-term prospects depend entirely on how well it markets its products.

The obvious bears repeating, no social enterprise is sustainable… no matter how cool… if you fail to sell the stuff produced by it.

Cause Marketing Miscellanea

Three different cause marketing efforts worth calling your attention to.

On Friday, Nov. 16 participating Menchies will donate 10 percent of sales to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Sandy relief. Menchies is a self-serve frozen yogurt chain with about 230 locations across the globe.

“Like the rest of the nation, we are deeply moved and feel we have a responsibility to be supportive in helping those impacted by the devastation Hurricane Sandy caused,” said Amit Kleinberger, CEO of Menchie's Group Inc in a press release.

The campaign is activated via in-store promotional materials and public relations.

Somali-born fashion model Ubah Hassan (that’s her at the left) and a partner have launched a line of umbrellas called Maji that generate a donation sufficient to provide water for 20 people in the Horn of Africa, a drought-torn region that includes Somalia.

The umbrellas, in silver/black and blue/gold, are $40 at the Maji website. The charity partner is Oxfam America.

The campaign is activated via PR, notably through interviews with the lovely Miss Hassan. (How is that Somalia turns out so many beautiful models?) I learned about the campaign thanks to Polina Hoering, who commented on my Media Post column this month. So, thanks to Polina for the heads up.

On Monday, Nov. 12, when you placed a qualifying online order with Queensboro, the company made a $3 donation to the Wounded Warrior Project, in honor of Veteran’s Day.

Queensboro Shirt Company is a Wilmington, North Carolina-based promotional products company with a special emphasis on apparel.

The campaign was activated via the company’s online promotional efforts.

Let's Clear Out This Cause Marketing Logjam

Suppose you’re a small entrepreneur with a generous impulse and you want to offer sponsorship dollars to one or more charities, especially prominent ones. How would that phone call or email go?

Karma52, an cause-based apparel company, is finding it tough going.

That’s because the biggest causes ask for (and get) large upfront commitments from would-be sponsors. They require such commitments as a kind of qualifier. If you can’t afford a cause's upfront, for instance, then it can assume that you’re not a likely partner. Moreover, causes are rightly concerned that they risk their brand by getting involved with a sponsor that is either a bad match, a dishonest operator, or worse.

But in their caution, causes are leaving money on the table. The Fortune 1000 has largely been picked through by causes. Most of the large companies are either already doing cause marketing or it doesn’t make sense for them. The future growth of cause marketing for causes will be with smaller companies. 

Karma52’s business model is like Threadless.com. Launching in the second quarter of 2013, Karma52 will create original artwork representative of a cause, one per week. Karma52 will put the design on T-shirts and other apparel and merchandise, and then give a portion of sales to the cause.

“Thus,” says Karma52’s promotional materials, “good karma goes back to a country that has been good to them, and they reap good karma manifold for giving. The opportunity for good karma occurs 52 weeks every year, and 52 worthy national causes are helped. By wearing Karma52 apparel, customers wear their good karma!”

Karma52 asks potential partners for no cash, only the ability to use the cause’s logo and feature the designs in an online gallery. Karma52 certainly also hopes that the cause will activate the sponsorship via PR and online.  But, so far, American causes haven’t responded well.

Instead, says Karma52, “most organizations are requiring a specific dollar amount to be pledged, or one year in business, or need to discuss with their board and then never get back to us…  Ironically, if we donate to non-USA causes, they are quick and thankful to agree. However, our preference is to give back to our country and its inhabitants by supporting American causes.”

In effect, we have a kind of Catch-22 in place for Karma52 and other such social enterprises. They can’t afford the upfront donations or commitments, and their business model requires that they have relationships with multiple causes.

Over the years I’ve heard a number of such stories from entrepreneurs and other enterprising companies.

I think there’s room for some sort of mechanism… or an intermediary… whereby small companies could engage with charities, big and small, without putting the cause at risk or requiring unlikely commitments from putative sponsors. There's an answer to this dilemma, but to my knowledge it just hasn't been developed yet.

Until then, the logjam can only be cleared if someone extends a little trust.

If your cause would like to partner with Karma52, contact help@karma52.org, hila@karma52.org, or keith@karma52.org. The phone number is: 657-212-5423.

B2B Cause Marketing From the Financial Industry

I posted on B2B cause marketing last Friday and really didn’t expect to come back to the topic for a while to come. Then I came across an effort from Mischler Financial Group which, in conjunction with Veteran’s Day, announced that 10 percent of its November profits will be donated to the Wounded Warriors Project (WWP).

Veteran’s Day in the United States was Sunday, Nov. 11. Mischler bills itself as the securities industry’s oldest and largest Service Disabled Veterans Business Enterprise. The firm’s founder and CEO, Walter Mischler, was disabled in the Vietnam War. Mischler is a West Point grad and the son of a career U.S. Army officer. He’s a patriot, in other words.

Founded in 1994, Mischler’s business is back-office financial services for private and public institutions. They end up being the junior underwriter in a number of bond issuances. Mischler is not a consumer financial services firm like, say, Fidelity or Charles Schwab.

I don’t know how big Mischler’s book of business is, or what its profits are likely to be for November. But in 2010, the company presented a $10,000 check to the Wounded Warriors Project, which was based on an unnamed portion of each trading commission going to the cause. 

Mischler sorta wears its Americanism in its sleeve. In the about us section of the website, most of the pictures of the staff feature an American flag to the right of the subject. (For instance, Walter Mischler at the left) The picture’s composition will be familiar to anyone who ever served in the U.S. military. I’ve got a picture lying around my house somewhere from my basic training days that is basically the same except that I'm all decked out in green.

That said, Mischler’s sponsorship of WWP feels totally natural to me. What could make more sense than a disabled American vet who’s done OK for himself than to use his company to donate to a cause that helps other disabled veterans?

This is the way it’s supposed to work in America.

On Friday, we talked about the advantages of accessing employee in B2B cause marketing. But that’s not the only possible approach. Mischler’s portion of the month’s profits approach could easily be adopted by almost any B2B firm.

But if they were creative, a B2B firm could even take up Mischler’s 2010 approach whereby they donated a portion of each trade’s commission. For instance, the company that makes glass windshields for an automobile manufacturer could base their cause marketing donation on the number of units they either make or deliver in a certain time frame.

A distribution warehouse could base their donation on the number of units they clear in some period of time. You get the picture.

I’m glad to see this effort from Mischler and I hope it encourages other B2B firms to embrace cause marketing.

Gateway Cause Marketing for the B2B Crowd

Most cause marketing is hosted by companies that face the consumer; retailers, restaurants, and the like. But B2B cause marketing has long existed, if on a much more modest scale than consumer-based cause marketing. The usual sticking point is foot traffic. Your average warehouse just doesn’t generate enough foot traffic to support something like a paper icon campaign. That’s why B2B cause marketing, when it’s done, usually takes a different tack.

Toolmex, in Natick, Mass., supplies the industrial marketplace with things like power chucks, end mills, milling inserts, electric motors, and CNC lathes. Few of us have ever set foot in a place like Toolmex.

So what kind of cause marketing does the company do? Well, you could describe it as gateway cause marketing for a B2B supplier like Toolmex. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from the press release:

“Toolmex Industrial Solutions is proud to support Toys for Tots this holiday season, and is helping to make the holidays brighter for disadvantaged families. From November 9th through December 14th, area businesses and employees are encouraged to bring new, unwrapped toys for children ages 2-12 to the company’s Natick, Massachusetts or Schaumburg, IL locations.”

“‘Last year we were very successful in contributing to this worthy cause,’ said Sharon Bronaugh, Marketing Director. ‘In the Natick facility we had three pick-ups in three weeks leading up to the holiday. We know that we can do it again with help from our employees, partners and customers.’”

I don’t know how many employees Toolmex has at its facilities, but with this effort the company plays to its strengths; the cause marketing appeal is largely focused on Toolmex employees, not customers.

There are internal benefits to such efforts, none the least of which is it gives focus to employees with a generous impulse during Christmas and the holiday season. It probably helps improve employee morale and loyalty. It might even have a hand in things like improving employee teamwork and productivity. It gives a sense of higher purpose while serving needy kids.

If your company’s business is in the B2B space and you’d like to try cause marketing, you could hardly do better than a gateway cause marketing effort like this on behalf of Toys for Tots.

Election Day Cause Marketing

Preliminary estimates suggest that voter turnout in yesterday’s general election in the United States was several million short of 2008. But don’t blame the nation’s quick-serve restaurants, which took all kinds of cause marketing-style measures to encourage Americans to exercise their franchise.

Here’s a few examples.

• Tim Horton’s offered a free donut to anyone who purchased any beverage while sporting an ‘I Voted’ sticker. Horton’s also surprised voters at polling locations in Ohio, Michigan and Buffalo, New York with free coffee/lattes and donuts/muffins.

• On election day you could get a free taco at California Tortilla locations along the East Coast when your showed your ‘I Voted’ sticker, no purchase necessary. 

• Select locations of LaMar’s Donuts in Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska offered a free donut to people wearing the ‘I Voted’ sticker. In the lead-up to the election LaMar’s promoted a straw poll of voters as activated by donuts shaped like either a donkey (representing the Democratic party) or an elephant (representing the Republican party), although it had no predictive power. At LaMar’s, Mitt Yumney outpolled Dough-Bama 50.2 to 49.8 percent. 

This isn’t cause marketing in the way we usually think about it. But there’s definitely a cause involved here…voter turnout…  and the principles of cause marketing are being utilized to motivate human behavior, which is the essence of cause marketing.

Just another way that cause marketing has inculcated itself into our everyday life.

Veteran’s Day Cause Marketing with Outback Steakhouse

Holidays are natural hooks for cause marketers to hang their promotions on and Veteran’s Day in the United States is increasingly a favorite peg.

This effort from Outback Steakhouse is a prominent example. On Monday, Nov. 12… Veteran’s Day 2012… and Tuesday Nov. 13, any active duty or military veteran can get a free ‘Bloomin’ Onion’ and a Coca-Cola beverage at any participating Outback Steakhouse location with valid ID, no purchase necessary.

In addition, from Tuesday, Nov 13 through the end of the year, vets and active duty military receive a 10 percent at Outback, again with valid ID.

What are the advantages of pegging your cause marketing to a holiday? The simple answer is that three or four generations of retail promotions centered around the holidays have habituated consumers to the idea.

Sure, back to school sales make sense for August and chocolate promotions for Valentine’s Day. Consequently, those kinds of tie-ins have been around since time immemorial. But if you think grilled steaks sound perfectly suited for a Labor Day or a Memorial Day BBQ it’s because that message has been marketed to you for the last 30 or so years.

Veteran’s Day is a natural for a cause tie-in, especially given the fact that for the last 2-4 years veteran’s causes have ranked the highest when Americans are asked what causes they most care about.

In this case, it is the veterans themselves who are the cause, rather than some mediating veteran’s charity. Outback has an existing relationship with the charity Operation Homefront, which supports active duty and wounded warriors and their families.

Outback activated this effort via email, PR, and some TV (see at left). There is a Facebook component wherein they ask you to tell the stories of military heroes.

Reporting the Results for Dine Out No Kid Hungry

Share Our Strength reports that its one-day ‘Dine Out No Kid Hungry’ campaign at a number of the nation’s restaurants on Sept. 8, 2012 generated more than $5 million, more than twice last year’s total.

Regular readers know that I like to report the results of campaigns when they’re available.

No Kid Hungry is year-round anti-child hunger effort that concentrates on improving access to existing childhood nutrition programs, educating low-income families on how to stretch their food dollars, and raising public awareness on the issue of child hunger.

Dine Out No Kid Hungry was a one-day effort at 292 restaurants across the spectrum and representing 8,200 locations nationwide. Notable chains included Arby’s, Bruegger’s Bagels, Denny’s, Fuddruckers, Corner Bakery Café, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, and others. By itself, the Arby’s chain generated $2.5 million for the effort.

I remember Arby’s activated its sponsorship in its weekly fliers, see at left. Share Our Strength activated the campaign as a whole through social media, PR, and the website http://dineout.nokidhungry.org, which included a map that pointed you to participating Dine Out No Kid Hungry restaurants in your zip code.

Gamifying Pet Cause Marketing

Back in October 2012, Purina ran a FSI ad highlighting an intriguing trivia game promotion benefiting www.adoptapet.com. Think Jeopardy for dog and cat lovers. Because of my focus on National Breast Cancer Awareness Month I didn’t have the opportunity to post on the promotion in October, which was scheduled to run as long as from October 23, 2012 through November 29, 2012.

I say 'scheduled to' because the promotion ended on Tuesday, November 1 when the donations reached the $50,000 mark, the cap amount. As of yesterday, Sunday, Nov. 4, you could still play the trivia game, it just no longer generates a donation for www.adoptapet.com.

Here’s how Purina’s gamified cause marketing promotion worked. You logged onto www.pureloveforpets.com and choose either cat or dog trivia. Then there was a registration process that required your name, email and address. For each correct answer, Purina donated $0.25 to adoptapet.com. Each email address was limited to a $10 donation per day. That is, 40 correct answers, although you could play as long as you liked.

Pureloveforpets.com listed a leader board and three people, Liz H., Christy L., and Sheila L. each had donated $100 with their correct answers. That is, they logged in every day for the 10 days the promotion lasted and had a minimum of 40 correct answers per day. Liz H., the overall leader, answered 521 questions correctly. Plainly, the game identified some very passionate players.

I picked the dog category and found the questions difficult. I didn’t Google any on the questions, although no doubt some people did. Here’s a few samples with the correct answer highlighted:

Another name for Zwergpinscher is what German breed?
>Min Pin
Llasa Apso
Dachshund
Shih Tzu

What breed is the model for the collectible mantelpiece dogs produced in Britain since the 1860s?
English Foxhound
English Bulldog
Cairn Terrier
>Staffordshire Spaniels

What breed will point and retrieve while hunting in packs, which is very unusual for sight hounds?
>Podenceo Canario
Polish Greyhound
Polish Hunting Dog
Polish Lowland Sheepdog

What is the regal name of the family dog on television's Life of Riley?
Prince
Princess
>Rex
King

Which of the following breeds is a South African guard dog?
Billy
Beauceron
Barbet
>Boerboel

All signs point to the conclusion that Purina has a tiger by tail with this promotion; it ended within 11 days and it attracted a substantial number of people who played every day.

So what’s next? What’s the next level? Game players of all stripes tend to play their favorite games several days a week. But this game seems to have ended too soon.

Where Are the Black Swans of Cause Marketing?

For years Europeans and the Romans before them presumed that there was no such a thing as a black swan because all the swans in the Old and New Worlds were white. As a result, the aphorism “all swans are white” signified something that was obviously true.

Finally European explorers sighted a black swan in Australia in 1697 and a pair were captured in 1726. Turns out black swans are common enough in Australia and New Zealand.

About that David Hume…the Scottish logician-philosopher who lived from 1711 to 1776 …wrote: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” 

In the hands of logicians like Hume and mathematician-investors like Nassim Taleb, the author of the 2010 book on randomness called The Black Swan, the possibility of ‘black swans’ is a problem of logic and probability and for Taleb especially, a monumental challenge in generating reliable investment returns at an acceptable risk.

Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes Taleb’s ‘black swan theory.’

“The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:"

1. “The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.” (Hurricane Sandy, for instance)
2. “The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)."
3. “The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs.”

I’m not logician, philosopher, mathematician or investor the way that Taleb is.

Instead I ask, where are the black swans of cause marketing? That is, what’s possible but hasn’t been seen yet? And, perhaps more interesting, while cause marketing enjoys relatively high esteem right now, what unexpected events could change the public's perception?

I hope you’ll weigh in in the comments section below.

Cause Marketing When You Can't Use the Phrase 'Super Bowl'

With National Breast Cancer Awareness Month behind us, is not too soon to start talking about cause marketing and the next big holiday coming up, namely Super Bowl 2013.

Rudolph Foods, which bills itself as the world’s largest manufacturer of pork rinds is celebrating Pork Rind Appreciation Day on Super Bowl Sunday, with a modest cause marketing campaign that features an oversized ambition. When you buy a package of Rudolph pork rinds, the company will make a $0.10 donation to Gridiron Greats, a nonprofit that provides medical and financial help to former NFL players and their families in dire need. The modest part is that the donation is capped at $10,000. That needs to be a bigger number.

But I very much admire Rudolph Food’s ambition. Snack foods are a big part of the Super Bowl. But you could chew your way through a lot of advertising dollars trying to keep pace with the likes of Frito-Lay, the $13 billion snack foods division of PepsiCo. Heck, in its press releases Rudolph can’t ever use the phrase Super Bowl. To do that you either have to be a media outlet like yours truly or an NFL/Super Bowl sponsor.

In a 2011 article, Bloomberg Businessweek put Rudolph’s sales at around $100 million. Moreover, Rudolph has a complicated relationship with Frito-lay because it makes the snack company’s pork rind product Baken-ets under contract. Businessweek says that roughly half of Rudolph’s sales are to Frito-Lay.

In short, even if it had deeper pockets, it would be challenging for Rudolph to go head to head with Frito-Lay in straight up advertising. Pork Rind Appreciation Day, with its accompanying Facebook component and a contest to win a Super Bowl Party for 25 people with a new 50” plasma TV, is a way to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

This promotion is meant to get into the Super Bowl conversation without paying for $3 million ads. Pork Rind Appreciation Day is a good start, but I think they need to get more guerilla in a way that respects and honors their cause partner.

Super Bowl XLVII will be played in the Superdome in New Orleans. So imagine a party in the French Quarter or the Garden District or even one of those big hotels on Canal Street filled with former players who are or have been helped by Gridiron Greats.

The point of the party for Rudolph Foods would be to help these former players tell their stories… some of which will be quite sad… reminding the media and fans of their legacies, as well as their current needs.

Naturally, the party would be filled with low-carb Rudolph pork rind products.