Cause Marketing

Responding to Outside Magazine's Article on Livestrong.org

2012-01-27T04:00:00.000-08:00

The February 2012 issue of Outside magazine has a critical assessment of LiveStrong, Lance Armstrong’s anti-cancer foundation and I feel obliged to respond to it.

The first criticism is that LiveStrong no longer donates to cancer research efforts and instead has transitioned itself into a role as kind of information conduit for people fighting cancer. Lifestrong is now primarily a cancer awareness-raising charity.

The problem is that some of the charity’s supporters still promote Lifestrong as a cancer research charity. That, of course, is wrong and supporters should depict Livestrong's mission honestly and forthrightly.

Livestrong began phasing out of hard science research funding in 2005 because the charity's board didn’t feel like it could make a big enough dent in cancer research. Armstrong survived two bouts with testicular cancer.

A second problem, says the author of the article, Bill Gifford, is that Armstrong wears Livestrong around him as a kind of armor against the darts being thrown his way by the likes of 60 Minutes, Sports Illustrated, the Outside article, and others. Many people expect Armstrong to be indicted by a Los Angeles grand jury for illegal doping and probably perjury.

Gifford’s secondary point is that Armstrong and Lifestrong are so inextricably linked that any marketing effort on behalf of the charity directly and distinctly benefits the man. And so the goodly chunk of money that Livestrong pumps into branding and marketing pumps up Lance Armstrong as well.

Finally, Gifford and others have charged that Armstrong and his associates have materially benefited from Livestrong.com, a “content-farm” that looks suspiciously like Livestrong.org.

Let me address those one-by-one.

As I’ve said before, I’m in no position to say whether or not Armstrong doped.

However, Livestrong’s repositioning as a cancer-awareness charity strikes me as a result of the strength of the charity’s branding. The word ‘Livestrong’ doesn’t sound like a testicular cancer research charity. It sounds like a rallying cry.

The Livestrong board could have left the cause as a testicular cancer research charity. But the fact of the matter is that testicular cancer presently has one of the highest cure rates of all cancers; better than 90 percent.

And while testicular cancer isn’t exactly an orphan disease…roughly 8,000 Americans are diagnosed with it every year... that number is dwarfed by the approximately 225,000 women every year diagnosed with breast cancer.

So the Livestrong board faced a choice; be the charity of choice for a form of cancer that doesn’t affect a huge number of people and isn’t terribly deadly, or become something bigger. (A third option would be to become a generic anti-cancer research charity. But given the landscape of cancer charities that’s probably a fool’s errand).

I won’t fault Livestrong for the direction it took.

As for the criticism that Lifestrong over-brands itself, I’ll fall back on the defense of nonprofit marketing mounted by Dan Pallotta in his book ‘Uncharitable.’ Pallotta says, in effect, that marketing works. Who among us doesn't believe that if anti-tobacco forces marketed with as much budget and skill as the tobacco companies do that we wouldn't substantially reduce smoking?

Why, then, do nonprofits and their supporters expect to get same marketing results that for-profits get when nonprofits spend pennies on the dollar for their marketing?

Now, the issue of Armstrong benefiting from Livestrong’s branding is tricky. But at its core the issue is a version of ‘founder’s syndrome.’ As any nonprofit consultant worth her salt can tell you, the ultimate test of a charity’s long-term viability is whether it can escape the shadow of a charismatic founder.

Given that, Lifestrong might be better served by making that break with Armstrong sooner rather than later.

Finally, the whole Livestrong.com deal seems shady.

OluKai Cause Markets For Local Cause at Outdoor Retailer Show

2012-01-26T04:00:00.000-08:00

Trade shows are a natural for cause marketing because there are so many like-minded people under one roof. For instance, at the Outdoor retailer show that took place last week in my small State of Utah, the show was right around the 30th largest city in the State!

I almost always suggest to clients that if they’re going to do cause marketing at a trade show that they consider doing it on behalf of cause in the city where the show is being held. In so doing they have the chance to leave legacy that can long outlast the show.

OluKai, a footwear company, has real bon fides when it comes to cause marketing, corporate philanthropy and corporate social responsibility. Every year the company sends employees and others to Hawaii to help the nonprofit Maui Cultural Lands reforest the island and stabilize archeological sites.

But during the run of the show, OluKai held a pro sales event every day at 5pm and sent the proceeds to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Pro sales means that it targets the people at the trade show rather than consumers.

Listen now as Kellen Trachy explains what the OluKai brand is about, why supporting Hawaiian nonprofits is important to that brand, and why their pro-sales benefited a Utah cause.

Lastly, my apologies to Kellen for slaughtering the pronunciation of his last name. Kellen’s name is correctly pronounced like ‘Tracy.’

Made in America Cause Marketing

2012-01-25T04:00:00.000-08:00

Liberty Bottleworks fabricates rugged water bottles in brand-new factory in Yakima, Washington of recycled aluminum and using America-made machinery. Liberty is the only company making metal water bottles in America today.

While that sinks in a little consider that Liberty also has a strong cause marketing component with its partner Big City Mountaineers (BCM), a Denver nonprofit that gives urban kids a wilderness experience that often proves to be life-changing.

The night before my interview with Alex Strickland of Liberty at the 2012 Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City the company hosted a beer bash that raised $2000 for BCM.

During the Summer Outdoor Retailer show in August 2011, Liberty released a bottle featuring BCM's logo which benefited the nonprofit. This year the BCM benefit bottle (at left) was designed by Yakima graffiti artist Bernardo Boeragor.

Liberty pledges to do a new benefit bottle for BCM every year.

The company also produces a series of bottles imprinted with topographic maps. For each topo bottle sold, Liberty gives 1% of the profits to the Conservation Alliance.

Art and design is a big part of the appeal of the Liberty bottles. And because the company has a proprietary printing process that allows it print directly on the bottle, they can do designs no one else can. Boeragor's BCM bottle, for instance, has a cool raised texture that’s eye-catching and impossible not to touch.

Smart design. Cool art. A strong desire to help causes and Made in America of recycled materials. Liberty Bottleworks gets it.

Nike Vet Keeps Bike Inner Tubes Out of the Landfill and Benefits the Humane Society

2012-01-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

Paul Fidrych left a promising career at Nike to start a business with his wife that takes old bike inner tubes and upcycles them into useful things like dog collars, chew toys and water dishes. All while benefiting the Humane Society chapter in Portland. The company is cleverly named Cycle Dog.

To me that business model sounded like the much-heralded company TerraCycle, which upcycles juice pouches, for instance, into brightly-colored messenger bags.

When I suggested that analogy, Paul politely told me that Cycle Dog positions itself as the leading US recycled pet supply company. Cycle Dog is laser-focused on the pet market.

Listen now to this interview with Paul at the 2012 Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City as he talks about Cycle Dog's products, how they keep inner tubes out of the landfill, how they benefit the Humane Society, and how to crack open a cold one with man’s best friend.

Teva’s BOGO Cause Marketing Returns Company's Philanthropy to its Watery Origins

2012-01-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

Teva, the footwear company, started out making sandals for Colorado River Guides. And at its founding in 1984, Teva supported the nonprofit Save the Colorado, as it still does today. But as the company grew the footprint of its corporate philanthropy got ever-wider and more diffuse.

No one likes to say to worthy causes with compelling stories, after all.

But in this exclusive interview on the topic with the cause marketing blog, Jaime Eschette, the company’s long-time public relations manager told me that with the company’s current cause marketing effort… called A Pair for a Foot… the company returns to its watery heritage.

With every pair of Teva’s purchased in 2011 and 2012, the company and its partners will protect a linear foot of river, lake and ocean waterways, with a goal of protecting 4.3 million linear feet of water. It's a Buy One, Give One (BOGO) with a twist.

The effort includes employees, retailers, and volunteers as well as cash donations to the partner causes. The key partners are the Waterkeeper Alliance, Ocean Conservancy and Save the Colorado. Other capable charities will also participate.

Watch now to learn how Teva refined its corporate philanthropy efforts by interacting directly with its customers.

Cause Marketing Your Athletic Performance

2012-01-20T04:00:00.000-08:00

In the 1926 World Series Babe Ruth heard about 11-year-old Johnny Sylvester, a New York boy who had been hurt in an accident and was in the hospital desperately ill. The Babe rushed to the hospital to visit Sylvester and promised to hit a home run on his behalf. The next day the Sultan of Swat hit not one but three home runs for the youngster. Sylvester rallied, went to Princeton, served in World War II, had a successful business career, and died in 1990 at the age of 74, a lifelong Yankee fan.

(That's Johnny and the Babe at the left).

Good causes, it seems to the founders of New York City-based company Charity Bets, can be a terrific performance enhancers.

Now Charity Bets is betting that people are willing to wager their athleticism against their friends' scepticism!

Here’s how it works: You set a performance goal for a race event; triathlon, marathon, bike race, 10K, etc. Then you solicit pledges from your network of friends that you’re willing to bet them that you’ll hit some performance measure; finish in the top three, say.

Charity Bets calls that a progressive donation.

After you certify the results, Charity Bets duns the people who made a pledge and pays the charity. They currently work with more than 50 charities.

Charity Bets also takes over/under donations, and rep-based donations. A rep-based donation is based on the number of reps you do; say bench presses. An over/under donation pays more if you achieve some high mark. For instance, an over/under donation might generate $100 if you break the 3-hour mark in a marathon but only $5 if you run it in more than 3 hours.

In a sense, this is a more democratized version of one those promotions your local pro sports team does whereby a local sponsor offers $50 to the children’s hospital for every three-pointer hit during the season. Or $100 to the Ronald McDonald House for every touchdown scored during a game after the first 30 points.

Except that it’s hard to imagine that when Tom Brady is slinging touchdown passes that he cares whether or not the local State Farm Insurance agents group has to pony up a few hundred extra bucks to the Jimmy Fund.

But if you’re running along in a marathon and you hit the wall, the knowledge that if you can beat your performance goal that your buddies will have to pay a steeper price to your favorite charity might just be enough to help you power through.

Performance incentives really do work.

Tom Brady almost certainly has performance incentives of his own: games won; number of touchdown passes versus interceptions; fourth-quarter comebacks; number of times he and his wife model Gisele Bundchen show up in GQ magazine; etc.

One thing glaringly missing from Charity Bets is an easy way to contact and solicit your network. You could cobble together something with Crowdrise, the focus of yesterday’s post.

But Charity Bets’ business model would be greatly enhanced by the addition of social networking platform.

Cause Marketing Your Birthday

2012-01-19T04:00:00.000-08:00

My birthday is in February and recently I got the notice at the left from Crowdrise, a free online platform and social media site that helps you raise money for causes you care about.

It’s similar, in several respects, to the friends and family fundraising platform that comes your way when you sign up to participate in a race event on behalf of Komen, the American Diabetes Association or the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The difference is that with Crowdrise you decide what the cause is and how to make your case for it.

You can also be sure that Susan G. Komen for the Cure spent a darn sight more on their back-end software than did Crowdrise. That’s not a dig on Crowdrise or Komen as much as it is recognition that in the Internet age a lot of software which used to cost a fortune no longer does.

Because Crowdrise is independent of any single charity it feels more organic. You direct the effort, determine timelines, goals, messaging and the like. You’re not just another cog in a giant fundraising machine.

I’ve been watching Crowdrise for about 18 months now and they’ve latched onto an idea that I think is promising. Certainly it's presented with great fun.

“In case you didn't know,” the email said, “it's only a month until your birthday.”

Emails from Crowdrise tend to be cheeky, but not rude.

“That means it's definitely not too early to start thinking about how great it'll be to pretend you don't like all the attention you're going to get and, more importantly, it's a perfect time to get a birthday fundraiser going. Really, unless you're getting an iPad2, you should start a fundraising project on Crowdrise to raise money for your favorite charity and tell everyone to donate to your fundraiser instead of getting you a present.”

That’s the tone the American Red Cross’s advertising should have taken late last year with its advocacy and fundraising effort. With this copy Crowdrise strikes a blow... albeit a glancing one... that many of us don't need more stuff for our birthdays. Although if someone wants to send me an iPad2 for my birthday, I promise not to return it to the Apple store.

Crowdrise gets a lot of publicity because one of its founders and principal funders is actor Edward Norton. If that seems surprising, know that both his parents worked in the nonprofit sector. So he comes by his advocacy on behalf of nonprofits honestly.

Good on him and Crowdrise.

Cause Marketing the Auto Shows

2012-01-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

It’s prime auto show season right now across the country. The two biggest shows, the Detroit auto show is going on right now, while the Chicago show is coming up in early February. My home state’s much more modest show took place last weekend.

(At left is a Subaru, which offers its own cause marketing effort called Share the Love.)

All of which begs the question, how might auto shows utilize cause marketing in their promotional mix?

Here’s a few ideas:

Imagine a Rosy the Riveter kind of look with messaging that says, in effect, "Let's put the State/Region back to work."

Then in partnership with local micro-lenders when someone gets approved for a micro-loan during the promotional period, they are also entered into a drawing for a truck/car for their business from the car show’s sponsoring dealer’s association.

The drawing, of course, would take place during the car show in front of a lot of cameras.

If you really wanted to doll it up, you could present it as a version of those reality talent shows, like ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and let attendees vote on the winners using Facebook and Twitter.

You could even invest it with all that cooked-up drama that’s so typical of those shows: “Amanda Peterson the judges liked your business plan and operational moxie. But Auto Show attendees were more reticent” …dramatic pause! … “still, you’re safe from elimination.”

How many vehicles would be given away? It could be just one new car or truck. Or, it could be some combination of new/used vehicles such that there was at least one winner per county, or some other meaningful number.

Other likely partners might include banks and credit unions and one (or more) of the small business incubators in the State, and of course media outlets like a TV station, radio stations and newspapers.

The positioning is this: the State's car dealers are so invested in the State that they want to help small businesses lead the State's recovery.

New businesses, after all, are the engine of job growth in the American economy.

And the kind of businesses that apply for loans from micro-lenders or seek help from incubators are the smallest of the small, and, thereby, almost romantic. Everybody loves to hate big businesses after all. But a small startup is almost like a child in that in the abstract it’s all but immune to criticism.

Micro-lenders typically require a business plan and meet extensively with would-be borrowers to help them succeed.

Also, I'd suggest one 'male' business and one 'female' business, since while owning a business is aspirational for both genders, it's different for women than for men.

And vice versa.

Kroger’s Giving Hope a Hand Campaign is Gaining Momentum

2012-01-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

Kroger’s Giving Hope a Hand campaign, an anti-breast cancer effort is gaining momentum for much the same reasons that General Mills’ Boxtops for Education and Campbell’s Labels for Education have; it’s opened up the effort to other brands.

That is, Giving Hope a Hand… like Campbell’s Labels for Education and General Mills Boxtops for Education… has made the leap from its exclusive relationship with Kroger to including the participation of other brands, including Dannon’s Activa brand of yogurt, Freschetta pizza, Kraft cheese, Pepsi, Purina, Windex, and Ziploc, among others.

(Parenthetically, it’s interesting to note that other Dannon brands participate in Labels for Education. Ziploc also participates in Boxtops for Education! Kraft, of course, also does a prominent cause marketing effort on behalf of Feeding America).

At the left are the front and back panels of a box of Keebler’s Town House crackers that I saw in December 2011, but which certainly predated that time period. The Keebler brand is owned by Kellogg’s.

By following the lead of the ‘Boxtops’ and ‘Labels’ efforts, Kroger’s Giving Hope a Hand has done a valuable service for participating brands.

Freschetta, the freezer pizza brand from Schwan’s, can piggyback on the framework that Kroger has built. It could go as far as Keebler has with this box of Town House crackers, something less involving, or something in-between.

By building the framework Kroger, the only large grocery chain giant in the United States to successfully withstand the WalMart onslaught, spreads the risk of the Giving Hope a Hand and greatly broadens the potential reach of the campaign.

I last reviewed a Giving Hope a Hand effort in December 2010. That effort highlighted breast cancer survivor stories on packages of Kroger’s house brand of bottled water. I noted, approvingly, that it was one of the first examples of house brand cause marketing I’d seen.

Money raised by Giving Hope a Hand is currently directed to three breast cancer charities; Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer and Y Me.

Increasingly I’m coming to the conclusion that the greatest contribution a large company like Kroger can make in cause marketing isn’t a cash donation but rather building a framework that vendors, suppliers and other stakeholders can add to, while providing the charity with access to their customer base.

The Cause Marketing Script

2012-01-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

Current theory from Professor Ronald K. Mitchell at Texas Tech suggests that the people most likely to be a success at entrepreneurship are those who understand that there is an ‘entrepreneurship script.’

I contend that there is also a script in cause marketing.

In entrepreneurship the script, says Mitchell (who like Bob McDonald, the CEO of Procter & Gamble, and yours truly is an alumnus of the University of Utah) is “commonly recognized sequences of events that permit rapid comprehension of expertise-specific information by experts; mental representations of the causality-connected actions, props, and participants that are involved in common activities.”

I’ve cherry-picked from Professor Mitchell’s paper to come up with a list of attributes that I think characterize the best cause marketers:

They have a great base of domain knowledge of cause marketing

They are predisposed to action

They are deliberate network builders

They recognize changes and know how to exploit them

They have a great deal of cause marketing experience

They possess a schema about the way cause marketing works which comes from extensive experience

They have better and less biased recall of relevant information

They have and effectively use strategic resources

They efficiently translate problems into solutions

They understand how value is built

Agree? Disagree? Please comment below.

One (Bronx) Cheer for Philanthropist Kim Kardashian

2012-01-13T04:00:00.000-08:00

Fox News reports that reality star Kim Kardashian is pocketing 90 percent of the money raised from her eBay Giving Works auctions.

The auctions ostensibly benefit the Dream Foundation, which grants wishes to terminally-ill adults. Kardashian's father died of cancer. But Fox found that only 10 percent of the money actually went to the cause, something she states openly on her blog when promoting the auctions.

Ten percent is the minimum Giving Works allows.

Most of the items are from the Kardashian’s collection of fashion apparel. Fox reports past items have included:

A Herve Leger dress.
The robe she wore on “Dancing With the Stars.”
A pair of Christian Louboutin Nude Patent Platform Pumps.
A Rock Stella & Jamie Cropped Faux Fur Vest.
A pair of Balenciaga White Leather Peep-toe Platform Heels.

In effect Kadashian, a multi-millionaire has figured out a way to monetize the churn of her wardrobe inventory. All with the gloss of charity.

My headline says one cheer for Kim and that’s because she was open about the meager donation percentage. But it’s a Bronx cheer because 10 percent just ain’t enough.

Finding More Donors With the Ultimate Question

2012-01-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of years back I sat in on a very interesting presentation by Ryan Davies of Progrexion, a multi-disciplinary marketing research firm.

One of Progrexion’s house specialties is customer satisfaction surveys, one of the more dreary parts of marketing research. You know what I mean if you’ve ever been subjected to a customer satisfaction survey that runs 4 pages single-spaced in about 9-point type. Completing those surveys can be like that scene in the Dustin Hoffman movie Marathon Man when Sir Lawrence Olivier plays the Mengele-like ex-Nazi dentist Dr. Christian Szell who extracts information by pulling teeth.

But Progrexion draws from the work of author and Bain consultant Fred Reichheld to come up with a much more streamlined and painless approach. Reichheld wrote the 2006 book “The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth.”

Reichheld maintains that under pressure to meet growth targets modern corporate managers are going after the wrong customers and doing so badly. Hence the implicit statement in the book’s title that profits can be bad and growth wrong.

What’s the ultimate question? Well hold your breath because it’s all of eight words: “would you recommend this business to a friend?”

How people answer that question and a few more carefully selected questions are used to calculate something called the “Net Promoter Score.” The Net Promoter scores are based on a 0-10 scale and the measure the degree to which someone is genuinely pleased with your product, company or service and why.

Here’s the scale:

9-10 Net Promoter
7-8 Neutral
0-6 Detractor

Fine and dandy, you say, but what does this have to do with cause marketing or nonprofit fundraising?

Certainly the Ultimate Question and the Net Promoter score could be used gauge the success and lasting power of a cause marketing campaign or program. Want to know if your paper icon campaign is actually costing you money (even while raising money)? Ask the Ultimate Question.

But there’s another possible use.

Progrexion also uses the Ultimate Question as a lead generator.

In effect, the Ultimate Question and the Net Promoter Score is a way of identifying salesmen and mavens, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s terms.

And what cause marketing campaign couldn’t use more of both?

Cause Marketing Circa 2022

2012-01-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

The current issue of Fortune magazine, modestly called 'The Future Issue,' examines what the world and the world of business will be like ten years hence in 2022.

Fortune’s prognosticators see video projected on every window surface, 3-D printers on every desktop, smart holographic table tops as in the movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, real-time subtitles for teleconferences, and apps that help you put together your ideal office work group. (That's an Eden 3D printer on the left, although it's not exactly a desktop model.)

Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of nonprofits, although Fortune does see people working later in life thanks to new miracle drugs and treatments for chronic conditions like arthritis. Great, I get to work for years to come!

But it set me to thinking; what’s the 10-year future of cause marketing, nonprofit fundraising and corporate social responsibility?

I put on my Merlin cap and came up with these three ideas:

Big Data and Cause Marketing. Fortune raises the idea of ‘big data,’ which means making sense out of all the data points that your mobile devices generate. Your phone collects tons of data having to do with time and place. In the near future when your phone is also your digital wallet, it will generate even more data. Part of that data will be records of you buying Campbell’s soup instead of Lipton, buying a bracelet at Starbucks that supports some cause. In 2022 a new kind of mathematician/marketer will parse all this data and deliver to your phone cause marketing offers customized distinctly to your behavior and preferences.

Honesty Machines. In the near future competitors, advocacy groups, government agencies and others will be able to deploy mobile machines able to accurately and remotely monitor smokestack emissions. Or the amount of CO2 released at airport taxi stands by idling taxis. Or the amount of offal generated by factory farms. Think of them as lie detectors for your business. By 2022 corporate social responsibility won’t be a matter of self-reporting any more. Independent groups and agencies will do the reporting and they will catch the liars and the fibbers.

Crowd-Sourcing Your Idle Hours for a Cause. Crowd-sourcing has been going on in nonprofits for several years now. Think about how amateur birders, for instance, currently help to complete population counts for university researchers, the Audubon Society or the state fish and game services. But by 2022 it will all the more convenient. Imagine, for example, that you’re jetting off to Seattle for a meeting and your smart phone knows that you... an amateur astronomer... have time to help The Royal Astronomical Society identify potential planets in distant star systems while you’re on the plane. It will route to your mobile device screens of space for you to review and analyze.

What do you see in 10 years for cause marketing? Please comment below.

Amazon, I'm Calling You Out

2012-01-10T04:00:00.000-08:00

In 2011, Amazon’s sales were $43.59 billion and its profit was $7.64 billion. It is the world’s biggest etailer. That's part of their Seattle headquarters at the left.

And how much did Amazon donate to charity? It's not clear. Although I suspect that MercyCorps and the Red Cross have both received meaningful donations from Amazon.com.

We do, however, know that Amazon.com spent $1.5 million in lobbying in 2011, and more than $21 million since 2001. Likewise, we know that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder and chief executive, his mother and father, and his wife, author Mackenzie Bezos, have given more than $28,000 to Washington Senator Patty Murray (D) since 2009.

Amazon’s website reports that its “customers have contributed more than $35 million to global relief programs since 2001.” But Amazon’s piece of that is probably in-kind only.

A statement at Amazon.com says:

“We… contribute to the communities where our employees and customers live. Our contributions can be seen in many ways – through our donations to dozens of nonprofits across the United States, through the disaster relief campaigns that we host on our homepage, through our employees’ volunteer efforts, through the grants that we make to the writing community, and through the Amazon Web Services credits that we provide to educators.”

For instance, the Fernley Little League, Fernley Wadsworth Lions Club and Fernley Youth Football. Amazon has operations in Fernley, Nevada. Fernley is on I-80 about 20 miles east of Reno.

Apart from its donations to causes like the Pike Place Market Foundation, and the Macungie Farmers Market, Amazon takes a rather libertarian view on corporate donations to causes. The website explains the company's approach:

“At Amazon, if we do our job right, our greatest contribution to the good of society will come from our core business activities: lowering prices, expanding selection, driving convenience, driving frustration-free packaging, creating Kindle, innovating in web services, and other initiatives we'll work hard on in the future.”

Milton Friedman couldn’t have put it better himself.

“The discussions of the ‘social responsibilities of business,’” Friedman wrote in the New York Times Magazine in 1970, “are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Only people have responsibilities.”

Instead, companies should maximize their profits and return capital to shareholders so that individuals could then donate to whatever cause they wished to, or not. For companies to do anything besides maximize profits was simply immoral, Friedman wrote.

Listen, I’d be the last guy to say that Amazon should somehow be required to be a more generous corporate donor or to take up cause marketing in a notable way. (Although I’m not above shaming a company into doing either or both).

But Bezos, who is famously very bottom-line oriented, and his company seem not to have gotten the memo that cause marketing helps the bottom line and that customers expect a certain level of corporate charitable donations in 2012 in a way they didn't in 1970.

What I Learned When I Bought a Starbuck Indivisible Wristband

2012-01-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

Since November 1, 2011 Starbucks has been doing its best to help boost the economy via a cause marketing standard; the wristband.

'Indivisible' wristbands are $5 at 6,800 company-operated stores in the United States.

All the money goes to the Opportunity Finance Network, an umbrella group of 180 Community Development Financial Institutions, which specialize in making loans to small businesses. Starbucks seeded the effort with a $5 million donation.

Studies suggest that new businesses in particular are the ones most likely to generate jobs.

(Parenthetically, another company that started small and grew big, the Boston Beer Company, which makes Samuel Adams beer, has offered a small business mentorship and financing effort called Brewing the American Dream since June 2008).

Since all this has been well-covered elsewhere in great depth, I want to describe the exemplary way the transaction took place when I bought mine late 2011 at a nearby Starbucks.

The wristbands at my Starbucks were displayed on a shelf below the cash register. The barrista was super friendly. She took my order and I told her that I wanted to buy the bracelet.

“Oh, that’s so great! This is such a great idea,” she said as she reached for the wristband.

“Do you know what it’s all about?," she asked.

I did, but I let her go on.

“We’re working to help the economy recover and put people back to work.” And with that she reached and grabbed for the explanatory brochure at the left.

I didn’t open it then. But inside the brochure is an infographic worthy of an Al Gore presentation.

I handed her my credit card and she said, “Thanks for doing this.”

She was so unrelentingly cheerful and good-humored that I really felt thanked.

Plainly she had been trained well enough to understand and explain the effort as well as get behind it. It won’t be that way with every barrista at every Starbucks. But it was with this Starbucks and this barrista.

And that, my friends, is how a cause marketed paper icon or a premium items like a stuffed animal or even a wristband ought to be sold.

Cause Marketing en Español

2012-01-06T04:00:00.000-08:00

Late last year Walgreens ran the paper icon campaign at the left benefiting its long-time partner the American Diabetes Association in English on one side and Spanish on the other.

Walgreens is the giant drugstore/C-store chain with more than 8,000 locations coast-to-coast.

Such efforts are old hat in Canada, which is officially bilingual. But I can’t remember seeing any other paper icon efforts Stateside that came in two or more languages.

The potential payoff is efficiency: Walgreens/ADA only has to print one paper icon to reach two separate cultures.

But I doubt it will pay off. For one, the shape, design and colors make the icon easy to miss, no matter your culture. It’s rather blah.

Then there’s the interesting issue of which side to display at the register.

In big chunks of the Southwest and Florida you’d probably want to display the icon Spanish side up, and English side up in most of the rest of the country.

Except that even here in the Mountain States, where I live, there’s a substantial Spanish-speaking immigrant population. It’s not unlikely that a Spanish speaker might come into the Walgreens were I bought this but miss the icon because it was English side up.

Then there’s the question of the translation. My Spanish is of the high school variety, but it appears to me that the translation is directly from the English.

I don’t specialize in cross-cultural marketing. But I have heard enough cross-cultural marketing specialists speak about the discipline to know that they generally recommend against literal translations.

Finally, where’s the emotion in this appeal?

Absent in two cultures, I’m afraid.

More Cause Marketing Mashedup With Games in 2012

2012-01-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

One trend I expect to see more of in 2012 is the mashup of cause marketing and video/computer games.

Certainly the market is huge.

The Entertainment Software Association reports that 72 percent of American households play computer/video games. And it’s not just teens and preteens. The average game player is age 37. And while video/computer game players are more likely to be male than female, across the board 42 percent of players are female (which is about the same gender mix as the NFL's audience).

That it’s a 60:40 male to female strikes me as a positive for some businesses and causes. Men can be a hard audience to reach, especially if you can’t afford the premiums that come with sponsoring professional sports or buying sports television airtime.

Cause marketing has already been successfully undertaken by Zynga, makers of Farmville and Mafia Wars on behalf of the victims of the Haiti Earthquake of 2010. In 2011, they did another relief effort on behalf the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

Last year at this time Diet Coke produced a ‘Capture the Flag’ game that generated funds for the American Heart Association’s Heart Truth effort.

GamesThatGive.net allows you to play common video games like Solitaire, Sudoku, and Blackjack for free, while making a sliver of a donation to one of a number of nonprofit charities.

General Mills fruit snacks brands had a game that allowed you to donate a free XO laptop computer to school children in Africa based on performance in a game associated with the promotion.

Those examples notwithstanding, there’s a lot of room for growth and innovation here folks.

Contact me if you need some help figuring out how to make video/computer games and causes work well together.

The Worst Cause Marketing of 2011

2012-01-04T04:00:00.000-08:00

Pathology, that is trying to figure out what went wrong, is both fun and entertaining. Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of the CSI franchise on television among many other production credits, personally made $113 million! in 2011 thanks in part to our fascination with the pathology of crime.

Even when it comes to cause marketing this fascination with the bad is strong. Many more people find the Cause Marketing Blog because they searched on ‘bad cause marketing’ and similar search terms than found it by searching for ‘good cause marketing’ and equivalent terms. Yesterday's post, was my annual list of the best cause marketing of 2011.

You asked for it, so here it is listed in order of the date of the original post; The 10 Worst Cause Marketing Efforts of 2011:

Faux Cause Marketing Ad From Groupon Bombs on Super Bowl. After watching Groupon’s first Super Bowl ad campaign, all I could do was scratch my head and ask; “Holy crap, what was Groupon thinking?” They ran two ads: one started out looking like an homage to the people and culture of Tibet and it turns out to be actor Timothy Hutton looking smarmy and paying half price at a Chicago Tibetan restaurant thanks to Groupon. The second ad with a save the whales theme and featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. was no better.) Groupon’s Tibet ad somehow managed to be tasteless, inane, and insulting at the same time. The airtime alone costs $3 million in the high-stakes world of Super Bowl advertising. But that’s the smallest cost to Groupon. Instead the private company just erased millions of dollars in brand equity in one 30-second ad. This was faux cause marketing at its most reckless.

This Paper Icon Effort Didn't Exactly Bowl Me Over. A paper icon effort at a bowling alley in my market made me wonder who could have launched this ill-conceived effort. What was wrong with it? How to count the ways: • There was no indication of the benefiting charity and no explanation on the back, although I learned later it was issued by the local Susan G. Komen for the Cure chapter. • At 10 inches high it was bigger than it needed to be and required an expensive custom die-cut. • The layout and typefaces made it look cheap. • When paper icons are shaped after the sponsor rather than the cause, as in this one shaped like a bowling pin, it usually strikes me as being too self-referential to the sponsor and self-defeating. In this way the halo is reflecting light from the sponsor to the cause, rather than the cause to the sponsor.

Do These Anti-Teenage Pregnancy Advocacy Ads Really Work? Who Knows? Advocacy ads from The Candies Foundation, featuring Bristol Palin and Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, among others, aimed to “shape the way youth in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood.” Candies, for whom the Foundation is named, is a teen fashion brand. But watching them made me wonder if they don’t have a counter-effect. I know of a former smoker, for instance, who can’t watch certain movies because the sexy way smoking is portrayed therein makes him crave the wicked weed again. One medical researcher’s study confirms in part that anecdote. The Foundation’s website says that since 2001, Candie’s Foundation ads generated more than 500 million media impressions. A very large number indeed. The website also claims that teen girls who have been exposed to the Foundation’s campaigns see the negatives of teen pregnancy and parenthood more so than teen girls who haven’t seen the campaigns. Certainly I’m glad for that. But what I really wish the Foundation could claim is that teen girls who are exposed to the campaign are any less likely to get pregnant. I, for one, have my doubts.

Catty Faux Cause Marketing from Church and Dwight. In my ongoing effort to identify and root out faux cause marketing I came across this ad from Church & Dwight, makers of Arm & Hammer baking soda products, including Feline Pine kitty litter.The ad depicts militant beret-wearing cats fronted by ‘Che Gato,’ paws of fury raised against clay kitty litter, and the attendant dust, perfumes, and harsh chemicals. Che Gato is even looking left of the camera's perspective, like the iconic picture of Che Guevara. And that’s where the faux cause marketing comes into play. There’s a website with a dot-org extension; catsagainstclay.org. Now any of us could go and register an available dot-org extension. It’s not like ICANN, the official registrar of top-level Internet domain extensions, checks anyone’s nonprofit bona fides before allowing someone to register a dot-org domain name. That said, there’s a widespread expectation that a dot-org extension means that the website is for the public good. But www.catsagainstclay.org sends you directly to the product’s regular URL. Che Gato notwithstanding, there’s no revolution here. Just faux cause marketing.

Heidi Klum, Cancer Pin-Up Girl. Actress, supermodel, TV producer, philanthropist, and mother of four Heidi Klum wants you to buy the hoodie off her back to benefit StandUp2Cancer, the telethon and charity. The hooded sweatshirt retails on the STU2C website for $46.99 and features versions of its logo on front and back. Klum, of course, is lovely and talented and STU2C is an admirable, innovative and hard-pressing cause. STU2C has always struck me as a charity in a hurry, and I like that about them. Cancer has bedeviled the world for too long as far as I'm concerned. But I’m always little chary when causes use sex to sell. Why? How does STU2C know whether it’s the sex appeal or the cause that’s working on people? Plus, there’s just something too weird about cancer pin-up girls.

Justin Bieber’s Cause Marketing Should Be More Bieberiffic.Canadian teen heartthrob Justin Bieber wants you to buy his new perfume line called Someday, and when you do all net profits “after taxes, royalties, expenses and company requirements are deducted” will go to Pencils of Promise, a school-building charity and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It’s hard to say whether or not Bieber is making any scratch on this deal. Royalties is one way celebrities make money from endorsements. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. However, in the wake of a $5 million class-action lawsuit filed in June 2011 against Lady Gaga for the way she sold a special bracelet meant to benefit Japan earthquake relief, the fact is Bieber and Give Back Brands need to be a little more transparent here. Bieber’s rabid fans probably don’t care require an exact breakdown of the transaction, but for the sake of prudence Bieber needs to be more precise. The fact of the matter is that Paul Newman, the first celebrity to build his own “all benefits company,” set a very high standard of probity and frankness with ‘Newman’s Own.’ And both regular folks and the blood-sucking lawyers who filed suit against Lady Gaga expect model behavior from celebrities.

Respecting Your Cause Marketing Partner. From Freschetta, the bake-at-home pizza brand found in your grocer’s freezer case, came this pink ribbon cause marketing campaign that seemed ashamed of its esteemed non-profit partner. Here’s the campaign: when you bought pink-beribboned packages of Freschetta pizza products, Schwan Food Company, the brand's owner, donated $1 up to $50,000 total to guess who? You almost have to guess because the type is so small in this FSI (Free-Standing Insert) you might not be able to read it without the help of artificial magnification. It's only slightly better on Freschetta's website, which requires an extra click behind the mention of the campaign on the home page to find out who it benefits. In fact, with the aid of magnification and good strong light, I can report that the ad says the donation is headed towards Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, one of the most respected hospitals and cancer research facilities in the world. So why so little respect of its nonprofit partner from Schwan?

Cause Marketing from Dillard's That Doesn't Exactly Fit. Dillard’s, the department store chain, had a cause marketing effort benefiting Feeding America last year that hit all the high points, until… cue the record scratch sound-effect… it didn’t. What did Dillard’s do right? It’s a pretty good list. First off Dillard’s choose a venerable cause marketing partner, Feeding America, which has an accomplished record in cause marketing and a vitally important mission. At $2 per transaction, the donation amount is generous. The promotion itself was activated through this ad in my local newspaper.There was a QR code in the ad that leads to a video about Feeding America’s Give a Meal holiday campaign, so check off that cool tactical implementation. Dillard’s, which has about 300 stores across most of the country, specifically states that the total donation amount is as much as the value of $40,000 in meals, so mark off the transparency checkmark, too. So far, so good. But here’s where Dillard’s stumbled, the promotion in question is for bras, shapewear, sleepwear, and other lingerie items. Like I said, cue the record scratch sound-effect. What do well-fitting bra and panties have to do with hunger? Darned if I could guess.

Towards a More Hygienic Cause Marketing Campaign for Lysol. The Lysol brand disinfectant Blue Ribbon Attendance Challenge awarded $25,000 in prizes to the school with the highest average attendance from November 1 to 30, 2011. If you’re like me it took me a couple of beats to understand what school attendance has to do with Lysol. But even after I got it the Lysol Challenge didn’t seem to do all the things Lysol needs it to do. What Lysol really needs out of this effort is to generate good buzz for a brand that’s pretty stale. What part of anything I’ve described above would you Tweet or post on your Facebook or Tumblr page? Part of the problem is the donation amount. Total prizes of $25,000 just can’t be taken seriously in a country with more than 90,000 elementary schools! But by itself a better and fairer prize package wouldn’t make you more likely to Tweet out the Lysol Blue Ribbon Attendance Challenge either. Imagine in addition to better prizes some kind of contest asking schools to produce a small play that depicts germ-free hygiene in schools, and open up divisions for middle schools, junior and high schools. Naturally videos of the plays would end up on YouTube. In fact, YouTube oughta be the official entry vehicle for the contest. Call it the Lysol Blue Ribbon Video Challenge. And, of course, thousands of videos would be publicity fodder for Lysol and its PR agency, who would pitch this story to media outlets wherever schools enter the Challenge.

Stealing Your Competitor's Cause Marketing Approach. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then TOMS Shoes must be beaming with pride. Skechers a brand of shoes that occupies the vast middle range of pricing and quality offers a line called, I kid you not, BOBS, which promises to give a new pair of shoes to a needy child when you bought a Shoe Carnival gift card valued at $25 or more through Dec. 24. TOMS, of course, did more than anyone to popularize this buy one, give one approach (BOGO) by giving away a free pair of TOMS Shoes to a needy child in the developing world every time you buy a pair. I don’t think TOMS would complain about other companies lifting the BOGO approach. But for a direct competitor to do so with a similar name (I mean, c’mon, BOBS?) comes off as underhanded.

The Best Cause Marketing of 2011

2012-01-03T04:00:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about cause marketing is also one of the things I love about my wife; it (like she) continues to surprise me. Here are 10 cause marketing efforts or campaigns, culled from more than 200 posts in 2011, that were cool or fun or smart or effective or innovative or surprising. And sometimes all of those adjectives at once!

Here in date order of the original post are my top eleven Best Cause Marketing Efforts of 2011.

Instant-On Cause Marketing for Earthquake Relief. In March I was wowed by an instant-on cause marketing effort from Infinity on behalf of the American Red Cross for the victims of the Tōhoku earthquake that arrived in my email box less than 6 days after the quake rocked Japan’s northern islands. Cause marketing has its failings and one of them is that picking causes, figuring donation amounts, concepting and messaging, and clearing legal can take so darn much time. In cases like Haiti earthquake in January 2010 and Tōhoku in March 2011, time is of the essence. Kudos to Infinity for bringing their campaign… a matching effort… online so quickly, and for providing their example of alacrity to other sponsors.

Win One, Give One Cause Marketing. As we’ll see, Buy One, Give One remains an important strategic approach in cause marketing. In May I reviewed a new spin on the strategy from General Mills, which offered a Win One, Give One promotion benefiting schoolchildren in Africa. In 2001 specially-marked packages of Betty Crocker Fruit Rollups were vouchers for a free XO computer. A matching number were donated to school children in South Africa. There’s was a fun online game you could play that generated further XO donations. General Mills also donated cash to One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit behind the XO, based on sales of packages of Fruit Rollups.

Cause Marketing for Dudes. In 2011, cause marketing aimed specifically at men begin to come into its own. One of the best such efforts came from Budweiser, which asked men to forgo shaving to save water. Called 'Grow One. Save a Million' (GOSAM), the promotion has been going on in a low-key way since 2010. Budweiser also donated $150,000 to the River Network, a watershed conservation charity. But in 2011 the campaign went Hollywood with the inclusion of Nick Offerman, the butch star of the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation. GOSAM was primarily Facebook and PR-driven. As a hirsute fellow myself, I think it wouldn’t take much effort to turn this into something very like Lee National Denim Day, only for dudes.

Buy One Give One Blankets. The New York office of the design firm Beattie McGuinness Bungay designed and is selling an infant blanket meant to help new parents in the developing world to understand things like vaccinations, average infant growth, breast-feeding, illness-warning signs and the like, and they’re taking a Buy One Give One approach to marketing the blankets. ‘The Information Blanket’ is made of double-knit cotton and features bold info-graphics screen-printed in water-based dyes. The BOGO (Buy One, Give One) price is $40 and the donation-only price is $25. The Information Blanket isn’t the equivalent of a new baby manual. It’s more comparable to one of those laminated quick reference guides they sell at bookstores which lay out how to conjugate verbs in Latin or easy Wordpress shortcuts. It’s design and cause marketing teaming up to take on one of the thorniest problems in the developing world.

Buy One Plant One Cause Marketing. Footwear company Oboz, which is a contraction of the words Outside-Bozeman specializes in shoes and boots true to its Montana roots. Their BOGO cause marketing is a straightforward and appealing; buy a pair of Oboz and the company will plant a tree via a cause called Trees for the Future. Trees for the Future thinks of trees much the same way that Heifer International thinks about domesticated animals; that is, as a provider of wealth for people in the developing world. Trees for the Future plants trees that can become a source of wealth to local families. Think about it, in addition to the environmental benefits of trees they also provide fruits and nuts, fuel, sap, windbreaks, shade, fertilizer, fodder, a protective canopy for other plants, and more. Since its founding in 1989 Trees for the Future has planted 50 million trees in 12,000 villages in 58 countries. It’s the coolest charity I’d never heard of. Three cheers for Oboz for finding it.

Paper Icon Campaign at Whole Foods Helps Launch FoodCorps. In August I was impressed by Whole Foods use a paper icon campaign to help launch the Garden Grant Program, whose aim is to offer 1,000 schools a $2,000 grant to either create or expand an existing school garden. The nonprofit partner is New York City-based FoodCorps, a subset of AmeriCorps. There were a number of things I liked about the campaign. * It was full-color front and back. * The headline served as a clear to action. * They used a narrative account to persuade. * There were donation options at $5 and $10. * There was a UPC code to speed transaction times. * It was placed on the counter, right next to the credit card machine. * It effectively branded both FoodCorps and Whole Foods. But what I like best was the enthusiasm with which the bag boy sold it to me!

The Best Cause Marketed Country Band. U2 gets my vote as the best cause marketer in rock and roll based on their efforts on behalf of [RED] and Bono’s own cause-marketed clothing line called ‘Edun.’ But which country act earns honors as the best country music cause marketers? In September my answer was the Zac Brown Band. Marketing bands and their music these days is a whole lot different than when file sharing came along. The Zac Brown Band, a country music act, uses cause marketing as a part of its promotional mix. Regular readers will remember that back in July 2010 Dodge sponsored a cause marketing effort that featured the Zac Brown Band in a promotion called ‘Letters for Lyrics.” In July 2011 the band announced a deal with outdoor retailer Gander Mountain that benefits the charity Soles4Souls, which provides shoes to children worldwide. When you buy a co-branded Zac Brown Band-Soles4Souls baseball cap at GanderMountain.com, proceeds go to the charity. Rock on, Zac Brown Band!

IGA Stores Using Private Label Food Brands To Benefit Wounded Warriors Project. Last September through November participating IGA stores across the United States offered $0.05 to the Wounded Warrior Project for each case of certain private label food brands sold. IGA is a huge buying and distribution cooperative for 5,000 member stores in 40 countries. The Wounded Warrior Project is a nonprofit charity that raises money and awareness for the nation’s injured service members. I’ve been agitating for private label cause marketing in these pages since November 2008. Here’s why: in recessions private label brands do very well. But once the hard times are over, consumers return to the name brands. But if a cause marketing effort could help an outfit like IGA preserve even 5 percent of the customers that switched to store brands during the recession, it could potential be worth tens of millions to the bottom line every year.

Embedding Cause Marketing into Your Business Model. Tegu makes handsome blocks made from sustainable hardwood embedded with magnets in its Tegucigalpa, Honduras factory. And cause marketing is as embedded in the business model as the magnets are in the blocks. The result is a toy that’s more interesting to kids than just blocks, and the very opposite of something mind-dumbing, like Angry Birds. When you buy a set of blocks, Tegu allows you to choose between two causes to support. You can choose: To have 12 trees planted in Honduras (and elsewhere). Or, help educate a caste of Honduran kids that would otherwise do scavenging work in the Tegucigalpa city dump. As of this writing the counter at Tegu.com says 18,011 trees have been planted and 1,798 days of school have been donated.

Integrated Cause Marketing with Starbucks and MSNBC. Long-time readers know I’m a sucker for integrated cause marketing campaigns that are activated across multiple media because I believe they’re more effective and because… having done of few of these campaigns myself… I know how much hard work they are. That’s why I like this one from the Morning Joe Show on MSNBC and Starbucks. When you buy a package of Starbucks branded Morning Joe coffee at your local grocer, Starbucks with MSNBC donate to the DonorsChoose.org project of your choice using a redemption code. Morning Joe is the name of the MSNBC morning talk show hosted by former member of (U.S) Congress from Florida, Joe Scarborough, along ‘with’ Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist.

Nature Valley Puts You In the National Parks. One Way Or Another. Nature Valley granola bars, a General Mills brand, wants you to experience the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Great Smokey National Parks in-person, or virtually. Nature Valley sent camera crews to capture 100 or so trail miles in each park using much the same technology that Google does for its famed street views on Google Maps, only all the equipment was mounted on people, not vehicles. In February 2012 Nature Valley will unveil the first stage online. And you and I can follow along at a real-time walking pace. When I posted in October, Nature Valley was also donating $1 for every UPC code entered from a box of Nature Valley to the National Parks Conservation Association up to a maximum of $100,000. I applaud Nature Valley’s donation of money and time for making these… what to call them?… ‘trail-umentaries,’ ‘docu-hikes.’ It’s a invaluable service to the parks.

Cause Marketing Your Bowl Game

2011-12-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

Two of the 35 bowl games held this season… the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl… overtly use cause marketing to appeal to fans.

In the United States the college football season basically ends the first week in December. The bowl games are a series of post-season contests featuring teams that don’t normally play one another. The Armed Forces Bowl, which airs at noon today (ET), for instance, pits BYU against Tulsa, which have played against each other just seven times.

Bowl games are festive, even indulgent affairs. Team members and coaches get the full VIP treatment. There’s plenty of food, marching bands, pep rallies, cheerleaders and in a handful of cases, parades. At the Armed Forces Bowl the cheerleaders and mascots pay a visit to the Cook Children’s Hospital.

The Armed Forces Bowl is meant to call attention to members of the military, present and past, active duty and reserves. “The Dallas-Fort Worth based bowl game has featured a military theme since 2006,” press notes say. “Patriotic overtones recognizing all five branches of the military are prevalent throughout the game. Past Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowls have included fan-fest areas showcasing military hardware; flyovers; demonstrations by several of the military’s top skydiving teams; on-field induction ceremonies; military bands and honor guards; and the awarding of the annual "Great American Patriot Award" (GAPA) presented by Armed Forces Insurance."

At today’s game the honoree at halftime will be Salvatore Giunta, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, one of only 85 currently living.

Bell Helicopter is a brand of Textron, a defense contractor and aircraft manufacturer.

Kraft has been promoting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, which airs Dec. 31., as a culmination of its efforts on behalf of Feeding America. On Tuesday, Dec. 27, Kraft announced at press event that it was donating more than 25 million meals to Feeding America. Last year, the first for Kraft’s sponsorship of the bowl, the company donated 21 million meals.

Starting in August, Kraft drew on a number of football greats along with celebrity chefs Pat and Gina Neely, whose faces graced a number of ads during the course of the season. That's them at the left in an ad from People magazine.

“To further support the mission of the bowl,” promotional materials say, “organizers are donating a meal for every ticket sold, as well as in the name of every player participating in the game. Players and coaches from the University of Illinois and UCLA also plan to volunteer at Bay Area food pantries on Friday.”

Of the two, the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl is much better marketed, and more of a pure-play cause marketing effort. That’s probably because ESPN owns the Armed Forces Bowl and treats it like just another media property. By contrast the San Francisco Bowl Game Association owns the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl and appears to have turned over all the marketing to Kraft.

It’s a clever use of a bowl game, by Kraft. But they do walk a sponsorship tightrope here.

The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl is at best a second tier bowl game. That’s why they could so fully take over the marketing. By the same token, in most years it features teams with mediocre records. This year’s contest pits Illinois, which is 6-6, against UCLA which at 6-7 has a losing record! So on game day itself, Kraft is marketing to a pretty small TV audience in a baseball stadium (AT&T Park in San Francisco) whose capacity is just 40,184.

Of course, neither contest is the first to mashup a bowl game with a cause. That honor goes to the East-West Shrine Game, an all-star game that features college seniors and benefits Shriner’s Hospitals for Children. The East-West Shrine Game debuted in 1925!

The next game takes place on January 21, 2012 and sponsorships are still available.

Seven Simple Steps Cause Marketers Should Take Before the End of the Year

2011-12-29T04:00:00.000-08:00

The end of the year is fast approaching and with it your final opportunity to improve yourself as a cause marketer. Here are seven simple-steps you could do in the next 30 minutes to improve your cause marketing career before year end.

Make an Appointment for Early 2012 with Your Opposite Number at the 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. Here’s why: much rests on how well you work with your colleague. 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. Smart copywriters keep a file of proven and tested sales copy, letters, ‘packages,’ and the like. You should swipe 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 will appear in this space on Jan 3. 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.

Open 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 track someone down. Begin to cultivate relationships with skilled and experienced cause marketers right now.

Make a Year end Charitable Donation. 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. But find other charities to admire and donate to them as well. Then watch how they communicate with you. Learn about how they position their cause in a noisy marketplace. Get a sense for what they do well, and what they don't.

The Importance of Proximity in Cause Marketing Relationships

2011-12-28T04:00:00.000-08:00

AutoZone, the car parts dealer with more than 4500 stores across the United States is headquartered in Memphis Tennessee. So too is St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Not surprisingly AutoZone is a cause marketing supporter of St. Jude. Fedex, another Memphis-based company sponsors the St. Jude Classic, a PGA Tour event held each year at the TPC Southwind golf course, also in Memphis.

It isn’t always the case that cause marketing tie-ins take place between companies and causes in the same area code. For instance, another of St Jude’s sponsors is Target, headquartered 700 miles upriver in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

But if you’re a cause looking to start a cause marketing relationship a logical place to look for cause marketing sponsors is in your own backyard.

Here’s five reasons why:

The prospect is more likely to take your call. Locality improves the chance that the sponsor will respond.

You probably already know someone there or can more easily make a connection than if the prospect is some distance away.

The people at your prospect sponsor are more likely to understand and care about your cause. A local museum probably doesn’t have to explain what sets them apart to a company in the same city. AutoZone probably has staff and executives whose kids have been treated at St. Jude.

The development cycle is faster. You could pass an idea by a would-be sponsor over coffee at Starbucks. If they’re lukewarm, you can be back at your desk later that morning working on the next iteration.

A yes is easier because there's less friction. Proximity leads to trust. In the case above, when you buy a Polar Bottle with a picture of your pet imprinted on the bottle, the company made a $5 donation to the local Humane Society chapter. The promotion ended just before Christmas. Who can doubt that the promotion was enabled in part by the fact that Polar Bottle is less than a mile away from the Human Society of Boulder Valley?

Swearing For a Cause

2011-12-27T04:00:00.000-08:00

Got a potty mouth on Twitter combined with a yen to do good? You may want to sign up for Charity Swearbox.

Here’s how it works: After you sign up every time you use a bad word on Twitter, Charity Swearbox takes note. At the end of the month they send you a notice along with a suggested donation. The default amount is $1 per word, but that’s a suggestion only.

Charity Swearbox has whole host of tweets with naughty words. So don’t go there if you’re offended by profanity.

Currently four causes benefit from Charity Swearbox: Eff Cancer, 50/50, an aid effort for famine victims in East Africa, BeatBullying, and Instrument Lenders Canada. Charity Swearbox is actively looking for other charity beneficiaries, too. So far Charity Swearbox has generated $38,147.

This is the kind of grassroots cause marketing/fundraising that’s only possible with the advent of cheap social networks. And, of course, it’s way more accurate than the self-policing version like the picture at the left.

Another difference from the old analog version of the swear jar is that if you Tweet out a bad word it’s premeditated in a way that verbal swearing may not be. In other words, Charity Swearbox members might be swearing for a cause!

@jaylardi tops the leaderboard with $28 in donations. Lest you think he is particularly profane, @jaylardi signed up 124 days ago and has 1842 Tweets in that time. He averages one profanity approximately every 74 Tweets.

Great job @jaylardi. Keep up the good work!

Merry Christmas From the Cause Marketing Blog

2011-12-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

The long-standing Christmas Eve tradition at the cause marketing blog is to show the video of the prior year’s appearance of Darlene Love singing 'Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)' on the Late Show with David Letterman. You can see Love’s 2010 appearance above.

Indeed, she's scheduled to perform on Letterman again tonight, Friday Dec. 23, 2011. Check your local listings for times.

Love first recorded ‘Baby’ in 1963 and is still going strong at age 73 (according to Wikipedia). Watch the video and you’ll know not only why they (finally) inducted her into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2011, but you'll wonder how Love could possibly be 73.

But surely there’s a rocking good Christmas song that’s less 30 than years old (‘We Are the World’ doesn’t count because, God bless 'em, Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson didn't write an actual rock song. For the same reason, 'Feed the World' doesn't fit the criteria either).

The good news is that I found a Christmas song that actually rocks and is right around 30 years old. That is to say, I remembered this great song from rocker Billy Squier when he performed it on MTV in December 1981 (when I was about 7 months old). Watch closely for MTV’s original VJ’s: Martha Quinn, Nina Blackwood, JJ Jackson, Mark Goodman, and Alan Hunter.

When I played the song for my wife, she vaguely remembered it. But her first reaction was: "wow, Billy Squier has got a great voice!"

So in 2010 I added Squier’s ‘Christmas is the Time to Say I Love You’ to the blog's Christmas tradition.

Here's 2 more additions for 2011.

The first is for those who like their Christmas music with a strong dose of irony. It's called 'Twist of the Magi' by the country sister-act SHeDAISY and features Rascal Flats.

I'm not a big fan of country music, least of all when it comes to Christmas music, but this is my exception. There's no video, but here's the audio track.

The last addition for 2011 is my favorite Christmas song, 'O Holy Night,' which is based on an old French carol. The recording I've posted is sung with real depth of emotion by Josh Groban.
The best verse is about social justice, and, therefore, entirely appropriate to the cause marketing blog.

Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise us,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Many suffer this holiday season. Now and in the New Year please be generous with your time and resources to help those in need.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Adding a Seal Campaign to Your Cause Marketing Repertoire

2011-12-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

‘Seal’ campaigns defy easy categorization in cause marketing. They’ve been around forever. Witness the American Dental Association (ADA) Seal of Acceptance which dates from 1930.

Strictly speaking seal campaigns are a kind of licensing deal. Generally they involve pre-set criteria and or testing.

(The even older Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval was begun by the magazine of the same name in 1900 and the Underwriter’s Laboratories first opened its doors in 1894. Both were founded as for-profit entities).

If your product or service meets the criteria and passes applicable tests you are eligible to apply to display the seal of approval/acceptance. Usually the license involves a fee, sometimes a hefty one.

And like sponsoring the Olympics, all paying the licensing fee does is give you the right to spend more money on activating the deal! If other forms of cause marketing are a kind of partnership, seal campaigns are more like a business deal.

For the most part if you meet the criteria and pay your fee, what you get from the provider of the seal is a contract, a logo, and a usage guide.

The handful of seal providers that publish magazines might also periodically list the companies or products that received their seal. The Campbell's Healthy Request ad at left appeared in More magazine.

If you’re a sponsor, you have to decide what it’s worth to display a seal from a reputable provider. But if you’re a charity or an association, especially in the health field, it might be worth it to explore the idea of a seal campaign to broaden your range of cause marketing 'inventory.'

The ADA, Underwriter’s Laboratory and, to a degree, Good Housekeeping maintain laboratories and physically test items. The ADA tests to see if items in question do what they profess to do. UL famously tests for safety. Since items that bear the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval carry a 2-year warranty, Good Housekeeping tests for efficacy.

But your seal campaign needn’t require a laboratory. I’d be willing to bet that the American Heart Association certification only requires that Campbell’s contractually assert that its Healthy Request soups fall within the guidelines the organization has set for sodium, cholesterol and fat per serving. I’d be surprised to learn that the Heart Association actually tests Campbell’s Healthy Request soups.

Likewise, the certification of the Burt’s Bees toothpaste from the Natural Products Association probably only requires the company to legally declare that the ingredients in the toothpaste meet the Association’s criteria as natural.

This is not to say the certifications from the Heart Association or Natural Products Association are unscientific or illegitimate in any way. The American Heart Association has spent tens of millions of dollars determining healthy amounts of sodium and fat and cholesterol in food. The Association’s seal campaign, therefore, helps them leverage that research.

Could your nonprofit launch a seal effort? That depends in part on the degree to which your nonprofit possess key scientific understanding that could be monetized with a seal.

The Business Value of Serving as a Drop-Off Point for Food or Christmas Gifts

2011-12-21T04:00:00.000-08:00

There's just a few more donation days before Christmas for your local food bank... or Toys for Tots, or Sub for Santa, or the Salvation Army’s Giving Tree... and this ad that appeared in a Walgreen sales flyer in late November made me wonder about the business value to a retailer or firm of serving as a drop-off point.

Here’s what I came up with:

Publicity
Walgreens got a little positive publicity from the Ellen DeGeneres Show. You might get something similar in your local market if your local Giving Tree or Sub for Santa effort has media sponsorship.

New Sales
Walgreens put the ad on the same page as a spread of fairly inexpensive toys, the subconscious message being that if you’re of the mind to do so, you could just buy one or more of these toys and deposit it in the collection barrel.

Likewise, if you’re outlet is a grocery store, someone could certainly add a couple extra cans of tuna or chili con carne to their shopping cart and drop them off in the food bank’s bin on your way out.

Increased Foot Traffic
If your business is an insurance office or a dry cleaner or another kind of service-based storefront that doesn’t generate a lot of foot traffic, then you’d probably be well served by some kind of matching program. That is, “with every can of food you drop off at Acme Dry Cleaners, we’ll match it can for can.”

Bounceback
Once in your doors, you’d want to do couponing or sampling some other tactic to get people to come back to your business. As in, “Drop off an unwrapped toy at Salazar Brothers Insurance and we’ll give you a free smartphone calendar app that stores important birthdays, anniversaries, and other reminders, including when renewals are due.”

Engaging Your Employees I think there’s also value in enlisting support from your employees. Unless you have a well-developed internal distribution system, chances are someone from your office will probably have to collect the items and deliver them to the Salvation Army or Toys for Tots or the food bank.

If someone agrees to volunteer for a half-day or a day, pay them for their volunteer work. People love the sense that they’re valuable to your company. But even more people… Millennials especially… crave the feeling that they’re contributing to the greater good. People with a generous impulse want to volunteer, but extra time during the holidays is always in short supply. So if they can volunteer while on the clock, so much the better.

Associate Your Company With a Respected Nonprofit Brand
Everyone loves the Salvation Army. Pound for pound the Sally Ann is one of the most efficient and effective charities around. My local food bank is almost as highly esteemed in my community. Why wouldn't your company want to be associated with causes like that? Especially since your expense for doing so is almost nil. By making your storefront a drop-off point, you enjoy a small halo effect of being associated with a venerable charity.

Christmas Cause Marketing from Lockheed Martin

2011-12-20T04:00:00.000-08:00

Unless you subscribe to some publication like the Army Times or Aviation Week and Space Technology, or you frequent the Yellow or Blue lines of the Washington D.C. Metro subway on the Virginia side of the Potomac, chances are you don’t often see much advertising from military contractors. But this is Christmas. And to hear Lockheed Martin tell it, sometimes Santa himself needs their C-130 aircraft to see that needy kids have toys to play with come Christmas Day.

The ad features Lockheed Martin employees supporting Toys for Tots, a charitable effort of the US Marine Corp Reserve.

With revenues of $47 billion in 2010, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest defense contractors in the world with specialties in aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft. On the left side of the ad you see a photo of a row of C-130s, which the company has produced since the 1950s.

Quoting a Mother Jones article, Wikipedia says that Lockheed received 7 percent of all the funds paid out by the Pentagon in 2009.

I don’t have a problem per se with defense contractors doing cause marketing or advertising their support of a cause like Toys for Tots. But I do wonder why they did it so poorly.

I found this ad in the Dec. 5 issue of Time magazine, not on a billboard face at one of the subway stops near the Pentagon. And yet to read it, you’d swear you were reading one of their dry B2B out-of-home ads that litter stops on the Blue and the Yellow lines.

For instance, the headline speaks of the call of ‘duty,’ which is powerful imagery in the military, but less so for readers of Time magazine, much less Joe Six-Pack.

The last sentence of the body copy may be the most telling: “Of all the missions our aircraft perform around the world, delivering holiday joy is definitely the happiest.”

(It must have taken all the self-restraint the Lockheed Martin copywriter had not to use the phrase ‘mission-critical’ in that sentence).

But the ad doesn’t really support the assertion that Lockheed Martin aircraft delivers holiday joy.

There’s nothing in the ad that tells us how the C-130 has been used as a ‘flying sleigh.’ Has a C-130 has ever been loaded up with toys donated by Lockheed Martin and its employees to deliver to kids in the developing world, or to an American Indian reservation, or a poor urban center? This ad is mute on that count.

But if Lockheed Martin has done something like that, well, then, that’s 10 times the ad that this one is.

1 Exemplary Cause Marketing Effort, 4 Activations

2011-12-19T04:00:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday found me Christmas shopping and in two very different retail settings I came across examples of St. Jude’s Thanks + Giving effort, which are integrated in an exemplary fashion.

At the left is an ad from Entertainment Weekly magazine for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital which activates the Thanks + Giving effort with the call to action, “This Holiday, give thanks for the healthy kids in your life, and give to those who are not.”

Sponsors support their participation in Thanks + Giving with in-store promotions. I bought the gift card at the left at my nearby Old Navy where I had a choice between several versions of these kids’ art cards. Aside from the gift cards, the Old Navy I went to had little else that demonstrated their support of Thanks + Giving.

By contrast, at AutoZone where I picked up a new lamp for my car’s headlights, Thanks + Giving was evident in several places. The front doors had a window cling that announced AutoZone’s support. Likewise, there was a printed screen-surround for all the computer monitors at the front counter that invited people to make a donation.

That screen surround served to remind the parts clerks to ask for a donation. But since the monitors turn around to display information to customers, the surrounds were also meant for customers as well.

Dick’s Sporting Goods also supports Thanks + Giving with in-store promotional material. But they also advertise the promotion on their weekly flyer, as seen at the left.

The reason why St. Jude is supporting Thanks + Giving with advertising while sponsors activate the campaign in-store is to create synergy and momentum for the campaign. One of the oldest rules of advertising and promotion is that almost no one buys after the first mention. It is only by dripping away at people that you can hope to reach them at the time they’re ready to make a purchase or donation decision.

St. Jude’s ads demonstrate that it is an active partner in the promotion. It’s not just a free-rider lapping up the publicity spilled from the dishes of its deep-pocketed corporate partners.

Trouble is, by itself St. Jude can’t profitably do enough advertising to really move the sales needle for its partners or donations for itself.

But every day hundreds of thousands of people will walk through the doors of Thanks + Giving’s retail partners. Once in the doors there’s little external advertising that could influence those potential customers. So signs, screen surrounds, and employees who mention the company’s participation in Thanks + Giving are the last influencers.

Cable and telecommunications companies talk about the last mile of their network. It’s a reference to the expense and challenge of getting cable or telecommunications services into the home or business.

In a like manner, the last 100 meters for a retailer comes once a prospect is in the store. Cause marketing efforts like Thanks + Giving or Macy’s Believe campaign can bring people into a retail setting. But for cause marketing to influence purchasing decisions once there, the customer either has to know about it, be reminded of it, or learn about it inside the store.

Making Christmas the Most Wonderful Time of the Cause Marketing Year

2011-12-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

As a holiday, Christmas is surprisingly challenging to cause market around, but a local homebuilder has the bones of a good campaign based on a gingerbread house-building contest that could be duplicated almost anywhere.

Cause marketing is commonly linked to holidays. I’ve even argued in this space that the pink ribbon campaigns offer retailers, in effect, an extra selling season.

But with some notable exceptions, like Christmas benefit albums, the redoubtable Salvation Army bell ringers and a few Christmas festivals scattered across the country, Christmas cause marketing isn’t as common as you might expect, even though for most of America’s charities the end of the year is when a hearty chunk of funds are raised.

There’s reasons of course.

Unlike Valentine’s Day, to name another holiday selling season, Christmas in the United States is for many still a holy day, notwithstanding all the commercialization. And it tends to be a very busy time with family and friends.

But think of all the potential advantages Christmas holds for cause marketers and fundraisers.

Christmas is a time of giving.

There’s countless potential ‘hooks;’ Santa and his elves, Christmas trees, bells, carols, holly, brass bands, mistletoe, candy canes, reindeer, etc.

It comes at the end of the year when Americans are mindful of tax deductions.

And a Christmas festival based on gingerbread houses has great potential, even if it’s not yet widely exploited.

The gingerbread house campaign in question asks you to build a gingerbread house patterned after a home model built by Ivory Homes. The top prize is $1,000 for you and $1,000 for your charity of choice.

The campaign, which benefits United Way of Salt Lake, is direct, easy to explain and understand, and appropriate to the sponsor.

Good for Ivory for charging admission to the event.

Since one of Ivory’s goals is almost certainly to drive traffic to their many developments, they might consider some kind of round-robin ‘tournament’ that begins at four or eight their developments before culminating at the larger event where the winners would be crowned. The gingerbread houses that get the most fan or judges votes (or some combination of the two) moves on to the next round.

Ivory should probably also consider divisions for children say ages 5-8, and 9-12. I can imagine a men’s division, even a division for professional chefs and bakers, and a people’s choice award. To involve its own staff, Ivory could even challenge its own construction crews, vendors and contractors to build gingerbread-style children’s playhouses and then auction them off to benefit United Way.

This campaign cries out for social media elements as well.

And notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday about the tawdry way Skechers stole TOMS Shoes branding and cause marketing approach, there's nothing wrong or immoral about basing a Christmas fundraiser/cause marketing promotion around gingerbread houses.

Stealing Your Competitor's Cause Marketing Approach

2011-12-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then TOMS Shoes must be beaming with pride.

Skechers a brand of shoes that occupies the vast middle range of pricing and quality offers a line called, I kid you not, BOBS, which promises to give a new pair of shoes to a needy child when you buy a Shoe Carnival gift card valued at $25 or more through Dec. 24.

TOMS, of course, did more than anyone to popularize this buy one, give one approach (BOGO) by giving away a free pair of TOMS Shoes to a needy child in the developing world every time you buy a pair.

TOMS, famously, has never purchased any advertising, even though it enjoys fabulous word of mouth. Something I contributed to early on.

Every time I see someone wearing a pair of TOMS Shoes I ask them about it. Without exception they’ve all heard of the BOGO, although most tell me that isn’t why they bought them.

TOMS Shoes come in kids sizes and even the kids I’ve talked to about them report much the same thing. Except that, if anything, with kids the cause message seems even more resonant.

A local clothing retailer in my market has a lame radio ad out wherein all the friends a kid talks to got TOMS for Christmas but him, and boy does he feel left out!

You can even find a hot secondary market in TOMS Shoes on eBay and elsewhere.

This kind of cheap me-to cause marketing is inevitable, of course, and totally legal. Dannon yogurt, for instance, does a me-to effort benefiting a breast cancer charity, very similar to Yoplait’s long-established effort on behalf of Susan G. Komen.

Inevitable or not, it's still comes off as underhanded.

Cause Marketing from Kathy Ireland

2011-12-14T04:00:00.000-08:00

Kathy Ireland is raising money for Jewelers For Children through the sales of her eponymous jewelry line at Fred Meyer Jewelers, and I want to help this ageless paramour from my youth.

If only I knew what Jewelers for Children was.

Ronald McDonald House Charities helps support Ronald McDonald Houses, which are homes away from homes for families who have children in hospitals. The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption helps enable adoptions. Target does a lot of work with St. Jude, which is a children’s research hospital in Memphis. J.C. Penney supports after-school programs at 4-H and Boys and Girls Clubs of America. Home Depot and Lowes help Habitat for Humanity, which builds houses for people who need them.

But Jewelers for Children I had to look up.

It turns out to be a charity of the jewelry industry. Since its founding in 1999, it has donated more than $37 million to children’s charities, four of which… St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Make-A-Wish Foundation of America, and National CASA Association… have each received more than $6 million. By any reckoning, Jewelers for Children has raised and donated real money.

Definitionally, Jewelers for Children is a kind of federated fund not so different than United Way or the United Jewish Communities, only with an emphasis on children’s causes. That’s a smart approach. But by itself Jewelers for Children doesn’t say enough to really help Kathy Ireland move her jewelry.

Jewelers for Children has a tagline: ‘A Gift of Love for Children in Need.” That gives the charity’s board plenty of latitude when it comes to grant-making each year. But it doesn’t give you or I much reason to prefer Kathy Ireland’s line over that of another jeweler with similar offerings.

What Jewelers for Children needs is a tagline that helps narrow down what it means by ‘children.’ Are they ill children, distressed children, homeless children, children in the developing world, children who need to learn how to read, hungry children, etc.

Failing that, Fred Meyer and the lovely Miss Ireland need to include a whole sentence or two that describes the approach Jewelers for Children takes to helping our youngest citizens.

Using Bounceback Offers in Paper Icon Campaigns

2011-12-13T04:00:00.000-08:00

A lot of retail establishments do paper icon campaigns, but relatively few seem to have embraced the bounceback offer. That’s why I was glad to see the bounceback coupon at the left from Denny’s.

Right now Denny’s, a chain with more than 1,500 restaurants across the United States, is selling and displaying paper icons benefiting Toys for Tots, the toy giveaway charity. When you buy the paper icon at the left, Denny’s gives you the bounceback coupon below for an order of Pancake Puppies, which are sort of like doughnut holes.

Pancake Puppies, which usually sell for $2, almost cry out for a cup of coffee or hot chocolate to accompany them, so Denny’s is betting that when I redeem the coupon that I’ll buy at least that and, more likely, think of the Pancake Puppies as a kind of appetizer for a larger meal.

For that reason, almost every retailer that sells paper icons should probably try and figure out some kind of bounceback offer appropriate to their business.

Back in the day at Children’s Miracle Network we used detachable coupons, but Denny’s approach has its advantages, namely in branding and expense. Denny’s approach is almost certainly less expensive and more flexible.

In the restaurant the paper icons were prominently displayed behind the host’s station. But they are hardly the only thing displayed in the restaurant. Right now Denny’s are plastered with their Christmas promotion for Arthur Christmas, an animated film about Santa’s workshop where it is the elves who run the show, not the Fat Man himself. Arthur Christmas is on the windows and the front door, on the placemats, in the menu and on the menu. That is, there are menu items named for Arthur.

Because that’s the case, the paper icon campaign sort of feels like a bolt-on to the existing movie promotion.

But the bounceback offer tells me that Denny’s took this paper icon campaign very seriously indeed.

If you do paper icon efforts, you should, too.

The American Red Cross Deserves Better Cause Marketing Creative Than This

2011-12-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

At Causemarketing.biz I often review elements of cause marketing campaigns but I generally shy away from reviewing creative.

That's because I don’t have a hardcore agency creative background. So it’s hard to trot out those kind of credentials, as in, ‘Back when I was at Crispin + Porter, Alex Bogusky used to say it was OK to try something different so long as it didn’t look like a mistake.’*

With those confessions out of the way, the creative for the American Red Cross series looks like a mistake to me.

The ads are meant to drive you to redcross.org/gifts, where you can pledge donations in various amounts to support the Red Cross’s vital mission, or to get you to donate blood. (Let me say that regardless of my criticisms of the ads, the American Red Cross is an vitally important cause that deserves your support.)

The creative features a clay everyman with several other 3-D objects set against 2-D drawings in the foreground and/or background.

The copy of the first ad at the left tells me that the ad agency that developed it did their homework. It says:

“This Holiday Season don’t just give stuff. Give something that means something.”

How often I’ve had that very conversation with all kinds of different people. Unless you’re going to give me tickets this Christmas to the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics or a super-thin new Piaget Altiplano watch (if Santa’s reading, I’d be happy to get Altiplano tank watch in yellow gold, thank you very much), chances are I’ve already got something like what you have in mind that is perfectly serviceable.

Consequently, I don’t need more stuff. Most of the people I talk to on the subject say much the same.

But the art part of the creative leaves me cold. I don’t like the off-white color of the ads. I don’t like how bow-legged the clay figure is. I loathe how indistinct his features are and how his hair seems to be opening like a fish’s gill opens to oxygen in the water.

It's all just so dreary and drab that I think Alex Bogusky would say it looks like a mistake.*

The American Red Cross deserves better.

*To be clear: I’ve never worked for Crispin + Porter much less met its legendary former creative director, Alex Bogusky.

How You Self-Educate Will Determine Your Success as a Cause Marketer

2011-12-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

How do you, my fellow cause marketers, keep learning?

How you answer the question of self-education determines things like: how successful your cause marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income and your lifespan. Researchers have even shown a correlation between happiness and education.

It’s almost axiomatic that more you know the more you want to know... and as Socrates pointed out, the more you realize how little you actually do know! If education isn't as often humbling as it is enlightening than you're probably not doing it right.

I hope this will be a conversation rather than a monologue or disquisition, so I invite you to comment on what you do to stay on top of your game as a cause marketer.

Business/General Interest

I subscribe to and read a number of business magazines so as to understand current issues, trends, economics and the like, as well as several news magazines. I don’t have a business degree so I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of how business does and does not work. I also read newspapers and magazine, but mainly online. I especially admire the reporting in the Wall Street Journal and Wired.

Inspiration can strike almost anywhere, so whenever I’m in a waiting room I make a special point of reading magazines I don’t subscribe to or normally read. Sometimes that means women’s magazines, trade publications, hobbyist and special interest magazines, etc. It’s almost a lead-pipe cinch that when I read these kinds of publications I learn something I didn’t know, gain some new insight, or synthesize what I’m reading with something I already know.

When I find something that I believe has lasting value, I scan or save it onto an external hard drive. The same hard drive holds many thousands of examples of cause marketing campaigns.

I read Seth Godin’s and Guy Kawasaki’s blogs and I’ll pop into Techcrunch, and Gawker from time to time. Not because I’m a geek, but because I’m not.

I use an RSS reader and Google Alerts for certain keywords, including cause marketing.

Knowledge of the Wider World

I’ve largely given up on reading fiction. But in its place I’ve become an inveterate history buff, with a special interest in the ancient world… the Sumerians, Egypt, Greece and Rome, early European history, etc. And, of course, American history, too.

I’m a big fan of the coursework produced by The Teaching Company and The Modern Scholar. Both offer taped courses, allowing one to learn on the go. If I’m driving alone, likely as not I’m listening to some of these recordings.

Hundreds of universities in North America and Europe are putting out thousands of hours of lectures and podcasts online. Check iTunes and individual universities for specific subjects.

I’m kind of a sucker for the social science popularizers; Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, David Shenk, and others. I'm fascinated by the topic of expertise studies. And, I'll read almost anything on Ben Franklin who was an autodidact almost without peer.

I also keep a notebook with me at all times to help me track ideas and thoughts. Like the saying goes, the only way to have great ideas is to have a lot of ideas. My notebook helps me not only track them all… good and bad… but also weed out the stinkers.

Cause Marketing

There are a handful of professional seminars and conferences that address the issues of cause marketing and offer training. In the United States David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum has supplanted IEG’s Sponsorship Conference, in part because the IEG treats cause marketing as a subset of sponsorship. In the UK, the granddaddy is Business in the Community's Annual Conference.

There are a few books at Amazon on cause marketing, but the ultimate book on the practice is still to be written. On my bookshelf is Cause-Related Marketing by Sue Adkins, Marketing from the Heart, by Sue Linial, Brand Spirit, by Hamish Pringle, Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen, Cause Marketing for Nonprofits, and Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding, both by Jocelyn Daw. Also, Cause Marketing for Dummies by Joe Waters and Joanna McDonald.

I actively read a handful of blogs on cause marketing from Katya Andresen, Joe Waters and Cone, Inc., plus others on nonprofit issues.

While you can get online and offline graduate degrees and certificates in various aspects of nonprofit management, still missing is any kind of certificate or other advanced education in cause marketing. In my opinion this glaring deficit needs to be remedied.

Cause Marketers, Be Purposeful in Your Use of QR Codes

2011-12-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pounding the table for cause marketers to use QR codes now for about a year now, but too often, a new report finds, we’re using them to direct traffic to our website or Facebook page.

Instead, customers expect the codes to take them to content that’s pertinent to the print piece they just scanned. Taking them to the front page of a website is a missed opportunity, says a report from Direct Marketing IQ.

Customers “don’t have time to waste,” the reports says. “They want to be served content, offers, surveys, etc. that matter to them.”

Certainly customers have proven their willingness to point their smart phones at the codes; scan rates in first quarter 2011 were 4500 percent higher than 1Q 2010.

Where should the QR codes take people instead?

Augmented reality images on smart phones.

Promotions and co-promotions.

Contests and sweepstakes.

Links to video presentations.

Downloadable giveaways to certain donors.

Targeted Facebook/Twitter interfaces.

Special content on microsites.

Coupons.

QR codes offer enormous opportunity to cause marketers. But we must be purposeful in how we use it.

Does the End of White Coke Cans Mean the End of Cause Marketing on Packaging? Um...No.

2011-12-07T04:00:00.000-08:00

The cause marketing world is all a-Twitter with the news that Coke is retracting its first-ever mostly-white cans meant to call attention to the plight of ursas maritimus. (Collector alert!) Apparently, too many consumers took the special packaging of polar bears gamboling across the tundra for Diet Coke, which, in fact, comes in silver cans.

I don’t have the energy to assign blame, ask if Coke over-reacted, wonder about the institutional competence of Coke’s marketing team, or worry about what this means to the future of cause marketing’s place on packaging.

That’s because cause marketing’s place on packaging is long since ensured, as the ad at the left from Fast Company helps demonstrate.

Buy a specially-marked bottle of Belvedere vodka and LVMH, the brand’s owner, will donate 50% of profits to RED’s Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. LVMH is the acronym for the French luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, (whose CEO is Bernard Arnault, Europe’s richest person, FYI.)

The packaging uses RED’s trademark brackets, which frame Belweder, the Polish presidential palace. As a non-drinker, I can’t knowledgeably comment about Belvedere’s qualities, but this Christmas/New Year’s promotion strikes me as being well played. The label makes smart use of RED’s branding, Usher is a good choice as pitch man, there's a QR code in the ad, and Bono assures us that the Global Fund is making real headway in Africa, just like the quote attributed to Usher says.

Of course all bets are off if Diet Coke drinkers mistake it for a bottle of their favorite cola. ;).

To Take a Page from Kohl's Cause Marketing Success, Start With IKEA

2011-12-06T04:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I confessed my man-crush on Kohl’s and their remarkable cause marketing efforts using stuffed animals, books, CDs and toys: Since the year 2000, Kohl’s has generated $180 million for kids’ causes.

But Kohl’s has more than 1100 stores in 49 states. Could Kohl’s approach scale down to a business with just 1-2 storefronts?

My answer is an equivocation. Kohl’s has done deals with whoever owns the rights to Dr. Suess, among many other name-brand children’s book authors. A small operator like Dante’s Pizza, a real three-store chain in Dothan, Alabama that I Googled, wouldn’t be able to pull off that kind of deal.

But the good news is that they probably wouldn’t have to do it exactly the way Kohl’s does.

At the left is a flyer from big-box retailer IKEA, which has around 50 stores in the United States. Buy one of their toys during the promotional period and IKEA’s foundation will donate $1 to education programs from Save the Children and UNICEF.

IKEA’s U.S. website says that in 2010 the same promotion generated more than $15 million for the two charities.

The toys aren’t themed to IKEA or co-branded with anything else. They’re just toys that are exceptionally well-priced. Just as Kohl’s prices their Kohl’s Cares for Kids items for its customer profile, so too does IKEA.

The secret for IKEA’s cause marketing promotion is the same as their overall business model, namely buying well.

So if Dante’s Pizza in Dothan wanted to try a cause marketing promotion like IKEA’s, they’d just need to find appealing toys that they could get inexpensively and then sell for a competitive price, say $5 or less.

Where's the Social Media in this Youth Targeted Cause Marketing Effort?

2011-12-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

The direct sales business… think Amway, Avon, and Shaklee… has a demographics problem, namely attracting the next generation of sales reps. Avon has addressed the challenge by launching Mark, which targets 18-30 year olds with bright, fun, less expensive products than Avon’s mainstream line and sold by youthful reps using a heavy dose of social media.

Mark has proven to be a good extension for Avon. A January 2010 story in the New York Times on Mark put annual sales at $70 million and numbered sales reps at around 40,000 in North America.

Like Avon, Mark has a cause attached to it. But, as I’ve demonstrated before in this space, in the United States breast cancer, Avon’s signature cause, is pretty rare for women under age 30. So Mark chose domestic violence instead. Its own charity, called m.powerment, donates to causes working to end domestic violence.

In the iteration at the left, when you buy the necklace worn by Twilight star Ashley Greene, proceeds benefit m.powerment and its partner causes. Again, this is all straight from the Avon playbook. Avon has done this dozens, if not hundreds of times.

The Times article makes it clear that Mark is all about reaching younger women in a way that’s familiar to them.

“Mark Girls in North America, mainly 18- to 24-year-old women who are changing the nature of direct sales by using the brand’s personalized e-boutiques, iPhone app and new Facebook e-shop, one of the beauty industry’s first forays into Facebook e-commerce.

“We’ve taken the same DNA of direct selling that has always been a part of Avon’s history and applied it to the digital world for our Mark reps to reach their customers,” said Claudia Poccia, president of Mark at Avon, which introduced the brand in 2003. “Now, we’re offering our Mark reps the opportunity to sell products not just door to door, but on Facebook, wall to wall.”

So given the youth of the audience and Mark’s sales approach, I wonder where the social media element is to this cause marketing campaign?

Co-Sponsorship and Cause Marketing

2011-12-02T04:00:00.000-08:00

All cause marketing is a form of co-branding. But one kind of co-branding is far less common in cause marketing than in sports sponsorship, namely the kind of co-sponsorship you see at the left in this page from a Shopko sales flyer.

The sports folks have long been very good at mashing up sponsors.

The Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, for example, could be sponsored by Ford. The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl could be presented by Dasani water.

Stateside local sports arenas… especially for pro sports… are almost certainly named for a sponsor; Wrigley Field, Rich Stadium, Coors Field, MetLife Stadium, etc. Inside each of these facilities are hundreds of square feet of advertising for non-competing brands.

So while you might see ads for five or six car dealers, Coors’ naming rights allows them to exclude Budweiser at Coors Field in Denver. Likewise, there’s no Coors sold at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.

[Kate B. in Louisville tells me that the State of Missouri has a "law that establishments serving liquor (bars, baseball stadiums, etc.) cannot sign an exclusive liquor contract (although they can have exclusive contracts with soda companies). I received a business degree from St. Louis University (which has received lots of funding from Anheuser Busch), where I learned about that law. Busch Stadium gets around it by having 1 very small stand that serves Schlafly beer (a smaller St. Louis brewery)].

Some charities have done this kind of co-sponsored cause marketing with certain media properties. But I can’t recall too many charities that have pulled off this kind of co-sponsorship with one of their main charitable efforts.

And notice how smart the match is between Iams, the premium pet food brand and Febreze, the household odor eliminator.

The Helen Woodward Animal Center would be in line for special praise for having pulled off this feat of co-sponsorship except that both Iams and Febreze are manufactured by Procter & Gamble. Nonetheless bully for them for having sewed up two brands from one company, itself a major achievement.

But ignore the fact that both brands come from the same company and concentrate instead how you could apply co-sponsorship to your cause or your sponsorship of a cause.

Add a BOGO to This Cause Marketing Promotion

2011-12-01T04:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Tempur-Pedic, which sells mattresses, ended a month-long promotion in support of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. When you took a test-rest on one of their mattresses at participating retailers, and then activated online a validation code, a $10 donation was made to the cause, up to a $100,000 maximum.

Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest. In 2010 43,000 people in the United States were diagnosed with the disease and 37,000 died (although not necessary in the year they were diagnosed). Six percent of all cancer deaths are attributable to pancreatic cancer. Pancreatic cancer is responsible for the death of actor Patrick Swayze in September 2009.

But a second element of the promotion remains in place. When you buy a limited-edition Tempur white teddy bear, seen at the left, proceeds go to the cause. The bear is stuffed with the same proprietary foam used in the Tempur-Pedic mattresses.

Cool idea but it’s something of a risk for Tempur-Pedic.

Tempur-Pedic is sold based on a chain of ideas: NASA scientists developed the basic idea > Swedish scientists improved on it > Danish quality manufacturing and know-how make the mattresses the best around.

But they aren’t inexpensive. The Tempur-Pedic mattresses alone start at around $1,100 and go up to just less than three times as much.

Given that, Tempur-Pedic risks cheapening its brand if it charges too little for the bear. Tempur-Pedic’s asking price therefore is $59. But again, $59 ain’t cheap for a something you could pick up at a garage sale for $0.50. So Tempur-Pedic takes some of the sting out of the price by offering two bears for the $59 price.

Not a bad ploy. But I think they could have added greater value by making it a BOGO: buy one, give one. Instead of delivering two bears to whoever ordered them, Tempur-Pedic could send one to hospitals that have a children’s cancer ward.

Boom! It's a triple-win.

Christmas Cause Marketing on TV

2011-11-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

I started my cause marketing career back when gasoline cost about $1.15 a gallon, the median price of a house was a little more than $80,000 and a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost ‘just’ $850,000. And yet cheap as prices were back in 1992 do you think any sponsor would spring for even one national cause marketing ad on TV?

The answer is a resounding ‘no!’

Yet right now there’s goodly number of sponsors whose Christmas ad mix includes cause marketing messaging on behalf of a cause. At left are two current ads that I found on YouTube, one for Coke’s campaign on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund and the other from Macy’s Believe effort benefiting Make-a-Wish.

It may be that the version running in your market is different, but it’s enough to say that both firms are actively advertising their cause promotions on TV.

I won’t bother dissecting either ad beyond saying that the Coke ad is just a little too earnest while the Macy’s ad strikes just about the right tone.

But I want to have a little fun with these ads, so I’m launching a little contest. The winner will receive a copy of Joe Waters and Joanna MacDonald’s book ‘Cause Marketing for Dummies.’

Here’s the contest. Whoever comes closest to predicting the total number of views both videos will have on their respective YouTube channels at 11:59 PM (Mountain Time) on December 31, 2011 will win a copy of the Cause Marketing for Dummies book.

As of this writing the Macy’s ad currently has 18,346 views, while the Coke ad has 20,281.

To enter the contest email your predictions to aldenkeene at gmail dot com. The deadline to enter is Dec. 15, 2011.

Getting the Nose of Your Cause Marketing Under the Tent

2011-11-29T04:00:00.000-08:00

The last installment of the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study released yesterday found that social media cause promoters aren’t the ‘slacktivists’ that they’re often portrayed to be.

The study was conducted for the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University and sponsored by Ogilvy Public Relations.

Instead, the study finds, people who engage with causes via social media are:

Just as likely as non-social media cause promoters to donate money to the cause
(41 percent vs. 41 percent).

Twice as likely to volunteer (30 percent vs. 15 percent).

Two and a half times more likely to participate in a cause walk or event
(25 percent vs. 11 percent).

Four times more likely to contact their political representative
(22 percent vs. 5 percent).

Four times more likely to request donations to support their charitable work
(11 percent vs. 3 percent).

Five times more likely to recruit others to sign a petition for a cause
(20 percent vs. 4 percent).

The bottom line is that social media may in fact be a very good way for a cause to get its ‘nose under the tent’ of potential supporters.
Read the full results here.

Using Cause Marketing to Better Keep Customers for Life

2011-11-28T04:00:00.000-08:00

When I saw the cause marketing ad at the left in my local newspaper, my first reaction was, frankly, uncharitable. I thought: my golly hearing aid retailers must have gaudy profit margins! Those uncharitable feelings aside, I think there’s some lessons for using cause marketing to better keep customers for life.

Here’s the offer. When you buy your first hearing aid(s) from My Hearing Centers, the company will donate $100 to “the children’s hearing and speech center,” presumably an in-house entity. My Hearing Centers will also offer as much as $1200 towards the purchase of new hearing aids when you trade-in existing hearing aids. My Hearing Centers promises that your trade-ins will be refurbished for use by kids in need.

My Hearing Centers is a five-unit chain with locations in the Mountain West states of Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.

In a 2009 review, Consumer Reports found that the hearing aid market was fractured and that hearing aids were expensive. In Metro New York City, the research agency purchased 48 hearing aids at prices ranging from $1,800 to $6,800 a pair. Of those, Consumer Reports found that 2/3rds were a misfit for the wearer’s level of hearing acuity.

Moreover, hearing aids are almost certainly not a one-time purchase. You can reasonably expect to need a new set every 5-7 years.

Given those realities, you can see why My Hearing Centers structured the cause marketing offer the way they did. A sixty-year-old customer who wants the latest technology might buy perhaps $21,000 worth of hearing aids before dying at 81, the average age of death for women in the United States. Giving up as much as $1,200 in discounts on the purchase of, say, a $7,000 hearing aid to preserve the relationship with a customer is cheap money if the customer comes back three more times.

What the My Hearing Centers is doing with their cause marketing here is meant to tap the lifetime value of customers. Most firms ought to think in terms of the lifetime value of a customer, and cause marketing can help companies to maximize that value.

To illustrate the concept of lifetime value, let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope figuring using automobiles as an example.

Suppose that I’ve got 40 more years of automobile driving left in me before I die or otherwise no longer drive. If I buy a car every 7 years and keep going back to the same dealer or the same make of automobile then I might buy 5.7 more cars over those 40 years. If my next car costs $30,000 and prices go up an average of 4% a year then my second car would cost $37,960, my third car would cost $48,032, my fourth car would cost $60,776 and my last car would cost $76,901. My lifetime value as a car purchaser to one or more dealers would therefore be approximately $253,669. Wouldn’t it be worth it to a favored auto dealer to offer a donation to my charities of choice as an inducement to again buy my next car from them?

What we’re talking about here is investing in customer loyalty and retention, which almost always makes sense. That's because for most businesses it’s cheaper to keep a customer than to find and develop a new one.

Lifetime value isn’t just about big-ticket items like cars or hearing aids. Coke knows my lifetime value. That’s why they offer My Coke Rewards, a customer loyalty and retention program. The four or five grocers that I shop at most frequently understand lifetime value, too. That’s why many of them offer rewards cards.

My Coke Rewards has a cause component (read my August 2011 post about it here) that generates funds for schools, sorta like the label campaigns from Campbell’s and General Mills. Such efforts are a first-cousin to what My Hearing Centers is doing here.

But I think My Hearing Centers could take a page from Coke and regularize their donations to the children’s hearing cause such that trade-ins always generate a discount and a donation to the children’s hearing cause.

But if they made the choice to turn this from a one-time promotion to a long-term loyalty and retention program, then they’d have to commit to staying in regular contact with customers, highlighting their work with the cause and reminding customers that when they buy their hearing aids from My Hearing Centers good is done for children.

One of those communication efforts is a must-do. Since they can probably predict with some degree of accuracy when they project a customer is ready for a new set of hearing aids they must communicate that when they’re ready to trade-in their old hearing aids that they will end up being well-used by needy children.

Happy Thanksgiving Cause Marketers

2011-11-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

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 slabs of pumpkin pie with whipped cream.

Just yesterday 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.

We Americans 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 amateur and professional skeptics chip away at the myth.

The latest 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 New England well before the Columbian Exchange.

Nonetheless, Americans are pretty much undaunted by these revelations.

Here’s why: the holiday as we now celebrate it is just so beautiful. 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 plastic margarine 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. And, thanks for practicing cause marketing wherever you are.

And, happy birthday Katie!

“It Ain’t Bragging If You Can Back It Up”

2011-11-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

Kohl’s the Milwaukee-based department store with about 1130 stores in 49 states has raised $180 million for kids’ education and health through its cause marketing efforts, and with this ad in their weekly flyer they’re bragging a little.

That’s not an unrivaled amount of money for a company to generate via product sales cause marketing: VIVA GLAM is now north of $225 million in funding for HIV/AIDS; Newman’s Own is over $300 million; Geoffrey Beene is right around $150 million.

(Comment below with anyone I've missed).

But all those cause marketers had a jump on Kohl’s.

VIVA GLAM and Geoffrey Beene both started their cause marketing efforts in 1994. Newman’s Own was founded in 1982. By contrast, Kohl’s Care’s for Kids was launched in the year 2000.

Maybe a small brag isn’t out of line!

After all, like the great pitcher Dizzy Dean…the last Major Leaguer to win 30 games in a season…famously said, “It ain’t bragging if you can back it up.”

Kohl’s can plainly back it up.

Where does all that money go? Much ends up at children’s hospitals. But I was fascinated to see the following news item register on my radar late last week.

Kohl’s has made a $1.25 million sponsorship pledge to TED. Quoting from the press release, “as part of the partnership, Kohl’s will be the sole presenting sponsor of the inaugural TEDYouth event in New York on Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011 and will help TED launch TED-ED, a new resource on TED.com, providing free educational content for educators and students.”

My first reaction was, ‘imagine what a difference $1.25 million could have made to the www.khanacademy.org,’ the nonprofit online educational site with an existing library of more 2,700 lessons on everything from macroeconomics to microbiology. Ironically, all the lessons at the Khan Academy are taught by Salman Khan, who has spoken at TED.

But here’s Kohl’s thinking, again quoting from the press release.

“Kohl’s is committed to kids education and, at a time when school districts nationwide are feeling the pinch of budget cuts, we are partnering with TED to help bring free, exciting new educational opportunities and content to kids across the country,” said Julie Gardner, Kohl’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer. “TED presentations make learning fun and we believe the new programming created by our partnership will be compelling for kids and will help teachers who struggle to find great educational experiences with scarce resources.”

I hope Kohl's bet pays off.

Cause Marketing to Santa Babies

2011-11-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

Huggies is back with another too cute version of their flagship brand of disposable diapers, this time based around Father Christmas. When you buy Huggies limited-edition ‘jeans’ or Santa diapers or baby wipes, Kimberly-Clark will donate as many as 21 million diapers to causes in the United States and Canada on the basis of one diaper per specially-marked package of diapers sold.

Certain social media interactions will also trigger a donation.

Huggies has run much the same promotion with their faux-denim 'jeans' diaper. As many as 17 million diapers will go to Feeding America, the large food bank, and as many as 2 million will go to Food Banks Canada. As many as another 2 million diapers will be spread amongst local diaper banks nationwide.

The promotion ends December 31, 2011.

As I noted back in May 2011, Huggies developed the basic campaign after conducting a survey in 2010 of mothers and their diaper needs. The study, called ‘Every Little Bottom’ was released in June 2010.

The study of more than 2,500 mothers included questions like “Keeping your child in a clean diaper is one of the most important things you can do for them as a mother.” And, “Changing you child’s diaper is a wonderful way of showing how much you love them.” And, “Have you ever done any of the following to ensure you could afford enough diapers for your child?” followed by a list of economizing measures mothers might make to keep diapers in their family budget.

Mothers overwhelming said yes to all three questions.

Needless to say, certain findings in the study represent something of a tightrope walk for Huggies, which carry a premium price. If disposable diapers are taking too big a chunk out of the family budget, why not shift to cloth diapers or cheaper competing brands?

Other questions in the survey address those very issues.

Not surprisingly, rather than dwell on any potential negatives for Huggies, the survey instead turns up the following facts that in turn inform the cause marketing campaign as it stands.

1 in 3 American moms have to “choose between diapers and other basic needs like food.”

Moms struggling with diaper need are more likely to miss school or work.

Babies that aren’t changed regularly “are more likely to experience signs of irritation and discomfort, cry more, and suffer from worse diaper rash.”

Sponsors don't often declare what lead them to a specific cause marketing campaign. But this Thanksgiving season, we can be glad that Kimberly-Clark showed its hand.

Cause Marketing In the Zeitgeist

2011-11-21T04:00:00.000-08:00

Jay-Z, rapper, impresario, and would-be member of the Forbes 400 is in the news because his Rocawear line of clothing sold a T-shirt that co-opts the attention given to Occupy Wall Street, but fails to share with OWS any proceeds from sales.

Sacrebleu! Imagine the cheek of the fellow who “…has the political sensibility of a hood rat …To attempt to profit off of the first important social moment of 50 years with an overpriced piece of cotton is an insult to the fight for economic civil rights known,” as one OWS protester was quoted in Hollywood Reporter. The shirt has since been pulled from the Rocawear website.

It was not always such.

How people or businesses made their money hasn’t traditionally been a matter for the consumer decide other than with their dollars, so long as the commerce in question wasn’t illegal.

Of course there has always been a natural check on people who try to benefit themselves in unsavory ways, as anyone grew up in a small town can attest. But Jay-Z splits his time between urban centers on the East and West Coasts, not in the rural hinterlands.

Instead, what’s at work here is the burgeoning power of the consumer. The developed world has plenty of stuff, and the economy notwithstanding, the purchasing power to buy more. In a world of nearly endless consumer choices, we can afford to be discriminating.

Better still, we consumers can be trusted to make responsible choices, says James Livingston, author of the heterodox book “Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul.”

Writes Livingston in the December 2011 issue of Wired magazine, “when presented with real choices backed by discretionary income, you consumers typically do the right thing, whether it’s springing for a hybrid or shopping at the farmer’s market.”

Consumers don’t need Jay-Z’s sassy T-shirt, but they especially don’t need it if he’s not going to share the proceeds of the group he’s sassing.

The lesson is clear: the consumer culture is prepared to hold anyone to account, even hipsters like Jay-Z.

Helping More Causes Benefit from Crowd-Sourced Cause Marketing

2011-11-18T04:00:00.000-08:00

I’m always a little bit chary of the many contests that offer a donation to charities that get the most votes, or Likes, or pageviews, or Tweets. Pepsi Refresh and American Express Members Project are prominent, but hardly the only examples of these kinds of Crowd-Sourced Cause Marketing promotions.

Maxwell House, a coffee brand from Kraft, does its own version of this Crowd-Sourced Cause Marketing called Drops of Good in partnership with the cause Rebuilding Together.

My problem is that such promotions so often become beg-a-thons, and pathetic ones at that. Since promotional money is always tight, only a relatively small handful of humble supplicants ever get funded. After 2.1 million votes, Maxwell House’s top grant was $10,000, which it gave to five communities. Another five got $5,000.

And because of the winners-take-all approach of most of these promotions, a charity that gets even a few hundred less votes than the finalists is basically out of luck with nary a consolation prize.

Now you could argue that a charity’s act of rallying support from its constituents for such promotions probably teaches the staff lessons about persuasion and friend-raising and cements goodwill among supporters.

But that’s a little like kissing your mom; comforting, but hardly romantic.

What if, as a consolation prize, Amex, Pepsi, Maxwell House and the many others left online a searchable list of all the causes who have been nominated over the years and included the details, some kind of comment feature, links and contact info?

It would serve as a kind of seal of approval, an imprimatur the causes could promote around. Just as a film will tout an actor who has been nominated for an Academy Award, a cause could promote the fact that it was nominated for a Pepsi Refresh prize.

The sponsor would have to puzzle over the questions of how long to leave it up, how to allow changes to entries, logo usage, what verbiage they’d permit nominated charities to use in promotions, etc.

The value to the charities would be modest. Maybe some Internet link-love from the sponsor and the occasional referral. But it would be better than nothing, which is what currently comes to those who finish out of the money.

But for the sponsor leaving the list up allows it to be in the company with hundreds or even thousands of causes.

And that’s the very essence of cause marketing.

Cause Marketing for Veteran's Causes Shows Support for Military Vets

2011-11-17T04:00:00.000-08:00

In the lead-up to Veteran’s Day, held in the U.S. last Friday Nov. 11, 2011, Time magazine ran a cover package that concluded that the Americans and military veterans have never been further apart culturally.

Why? Well, the warrior culture and mainstream American culture don’t intersect much, the thinking goes. Many American political leaders have never served, in steep contrast to, say, the Vietnam War era when nearly 2/3rds had served in the military. And without a draft the all-volunteer military just doesn’t touch that many Americans.

Nonetheless Time’s conclusion struck me as reaching.

I myself was in the National Guard. My brother retired from the Air Force and one uncle died in the service. My father-in-law served a hitch in the Army. A business associate was in the Special Forces. An old roommate served several tours in Afghanistan as did a neighbor. J.R. Martinez, a wounded vet, is the odd-on favorite to win Dancing With the Stars this season. And my friend and fellow cause marketer Noland Hoshino is an Air Force vet.

And that brings me to cause marketing. Veteran’s causes are well represented in cause marketing. The Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University published a study that found that the cause that most resonates with Americans right now is supporting the troops, something several sponsors seem to have already understood.

Outback Steakhouse has long made cause marketing with a military theme a key piece of its promotional mix and community support. On Veteran’s Day veterans and active duty military got a free Bloomin’ Onion appetizer and non-alcoholic drink. Outback has also sent employee volunteers to the Middle East to feed the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010 Outback also had a special menu called “Red, White and Bloomin.’” When you ordered from that menu, Outback would make a donation to Operation Homefront. Outback’s donation to Operation Homefront came to $1 million in 2010.

The Georgetown study, called the Dynamics of Cause Engagement, found that 71 percent of American were very or somewhat knowledgeable about the topic of ‘supporting our troops’ while 39 percent were very or somewhat involved with the cause. The corresponding numbers for ‘feeding the hungry,’ the second highest scoring cause, were 65 percent and 39 percent. In general, Americans are more likely to be supportive of cause s that they are knowledgeable about.

Internet retailer O.co offers anyone with a .mil email account a free membership to Club O, a loyalty program. Members of Club O get free shipping, exclusive shopping events and “5 percent rewards dollars back on every purchase,” according to a media release from Overstock. The promotion was tied to Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 21, 2011. Overstock also has an existing relationship with the Wounded Warrior Project.

Even the little guy can get in on the action. The Eau Claire Express, a summer baseball team comprised of collegiate players, did a military night in their game May, 19, 2011. The Express played the game in camouflage jerseys and servicemen and woman received free admission. While the Express charges admission, the players can’t be paid or they would lose their amateur eligibility. So the Express commonly donates a portion of home game receipts to local schools, hospitals, Special Olympics, and the like.

Of course there’s much more cause marketing targeting military vets and active duty service men and women, including Chase’s efforts highlighted at the left.

We don’t treat our vets as well as we could. And we certainly don't understand warriors the way they understand each other. But Time magazine’s conclusions notwithstanding, all the veteran’s cause marketing demonstrates America has a soft gooey center when it comes to the military, veterans, and veteran’s causes.

Monetizing Your Cause’s Archives

2011-11-16T04:00:00.000-08:00

Some causes have been around long enough that they have a mountainous inventory of really great communications items that could potentially be monetized. But how?

The challenge is more common than you might think. The Muscular Dystrophy Association is sitting on hundreds of hours of variety-show entertainment performed on its annual telethon since 1966. Assuming it owns clear rights to those performances, the MDA ought to be able somehow monetize that inventory. My old employer, the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, has similar if far less extensive inventory of entertainment performances.

Likewise the National 4-H Council has 110 years-worth of posters and the like commissioned from the best graphic artists of the day. I know because I’ve personally seen the tiniest fraction of it. Wouldn’t the 4-H Council love to realize some proceeds from its treasure trove of communications materials?

Long-standing causes like the Audubon Society, the March of Dimes, Federal Duck Stamps, and others almost certainly have asked how they can wrest money from their own extensive archives.

A firm in Seattle has one piece of the puzzle.

During the 1930s a number of American artists did work for the Work Projects Administration (WPA) and an alphabet soup of other federal government agencies meant to put people to work. There are fabulous murals in post offices and other Federal buildings of the era, for instance, and thousands of photographs including Dorothea Lange’s iconic ‘Migrant Mother,’ captured in 1936.

One of the agencies that benefited was the National Park Service. Between 1936 and 1941 the WPA commissioned at least 35,000 poster designs, although only a fraction of that was for the National Park Service. Now an online retailer called Ranger Doug Enterprises is selling reproductions of 16 vintage posters from the era along with contemporary posters designed in the old WPA style, and benefiting National Parks in the United States.

The 13” x 18” posters, both the 1930s era and their contemporary cousins sell at RangerDoug.com for $40. Ranger Doug Enterprises promises to give 1 percent of proceeds to the National Parks for arts education programs. Whether that’s in lieu of or in addition to any licensing fees isn’t clear.

For that matter, in this age of print-on-demand, a cause with a cool archive of communications materials that was willing to set up an e-commerce website could probably manage its own monetization strategy, or at least partner with a printer to print and fulfill orders.

Adding QR Codes to Chili's Create-A-Pepper Effort Gives Campaign Added Dimensions

2011-11-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

If you add a QR-code to a paper icon campaign, just how many code scans can you expect?

Chili’s, the restaurant chain, added a QR code to its Create-A-Pepper paper icon which engendered 291,000 scans in September 2011. As of this writing, the Create-A-Pepper campaign generated $3,013,735 in donations to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital so far in 2011.

It’s tempting to conclude that almost 10 percent of people who bought a Create-A-Pepper paper icon also scanned the QR code, but it’s not quite that simple.

Not all the money from Create-A-Pepper campaign comes from the paper icons and Create-A-Pepper lasts longer than just September, which is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Moreover, Chili’s had a different QR code on other campaign marketing materials in restaurants which led people to a thank you from a St. Jude patient.

“As the latest trend in mobile technology, QR codes gave Chili’s a unique way to say thank you while encouraging guests to donate to the Create-A-Pepper to Fight Childhood Cancer campaign,” Chili’s spokeswoman Julie Flowers told Mobilecommercedaily.com.

“By incorporating the QR codes into this charitable campaign, it was a great way to relate to Chili’s tech-savvy guests while giving St. Jude supporters another, easily accessible way to donate to the charity,” she said.

But wait, there’s more.

Chili’s patrons who scanned a QR code and opted-in to receive emails got an unique trackable donation link they could send to friends and their social network. The more people who donated to St. Jude via the link, the more benefits…think free appetizers and desserts… accrued to the patron.

Smart!

My friend and fellow cause marketing blogger and author Joe Waters and I were once talking enviously about another one of St. Jude’s admirable and compelling cause marketing efforts. Joe said, St. Jude puts out ‘cause marketing porn.’

Here’s yet another case in point.

Cause Marketing from Dillard's That Doesn't Quite Fit

2011-11-14T04:00:00.000-08:00

Dillard’s, the department store chain, has a cause marketing effort benefiting Feeding America that hits all the high points, until… cue the record scratch sound-effect… it doesn’t.

So what is Dillard’s doing right? It’s a pretty good list.

First off Dillard’s choose a venerable cause marketing partner, Feeding America, which has an accomplished record in cause marketing and a vitally important mission.

At $2 per transaction, the donation amount is generous.

The promotion itself is activated through this ad in my local newspaper.

There’s a QR code in the ad that leads to a video about Feeding America’s Give a Meal holiday campaign, so check off that cool tactical implementation.

Dillard’s, which has about 300 stores across most of the country, specifically states that the total donation amount is as much as the value of $40,000 in meals, so mark off the transparency checkmark, too.

So far, so good.

But here’s where Dillard’s stumbles, the promotion in question is for bras, shapewear, sleepwear, and other lingerie items. Like I said, cue the record scratch sound-effect.

What do well-fitting bra and panties have to do with hunger? Darned if I can guess.

And that would be OK if Feeding America had as much affinity as, say, Susan G. Komen for the Cure or St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, both of which have enjoyed all kinds of outrageously unrelated cause marketing tie-ins over the years that were no problem because they generate so much affinity.

I’m not saying Feeding America can’t get to the point when bra fittings benefiting the charity don’t even raise an eyebrow from most people.

I’m just saying I don’t think they’re there yet.

Join the Cause Marketing Blog Google Newsgroup, Get a Tool You Can Use Today

2011-11-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

Kind Readers:

William F. from Tampa, Florida is the latest to join the Cause Marketing Google Newsgroup.

It couldn’t be easier to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

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

And like William, when you subscribe I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix that includes examples.

It's a great brainstorming tool and helps ensure that your campaign has all the components appropriate for that flavor of Cause Marketing.

Rest assured that I will never sell your name or contact information.

So join today.

Warm regards,

Paul
Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Is it Time for Share Our Strength to Rebrand?

2011-11-10T04:00:00.000-08:00

On the heels of yesterday's post about rebranding the two big label campaigns benefiting education, in today's post I show how when one anti-hunger charity rebranded itself, it doubled in size, while another anti-hunger charity is also growing, if less impressively, under its old branding.

The nation’s largest anti-hunger charity, Feeding America, has been knocking it out of the park in terms of its fundraising since its rebranding in September 2008.

Here are the numbers: In 2008 it raised $577 million; in 2009 it raised $639 million; in 2010 $706 million; and for fiscal year 2011 it generated $1.2 billion. For those of you keeping score at home, Feeding America has doubled in size since its rebranding, and in the teeth of the worst recession in America in a generation.

Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger charity that focuses on children, has also been quickly growing. In 2008 it raised around $14 million (not including results from its subsidiary called Community Wealth Ventures), in 2010 revenue was just less than $26 million and David Slater, the nonprofit's director of communications, tells me they're on pace to raise $34 million in 2011.

It would be intellectually dishonest not to point out that Feeding America’s donation numbers are inflated by the amount of in-kind donations it receives. By the same token, it's very much easier to double the size of $14 million charity in four years than a $577 million charity in the same time frame.

In terms of its brand, Share Our Strength is kind of a mess. There’s the cuteness with the S.O.S acronym, even though Share Our Strength hasn’t openly embraced it in at least a decade. Regardless, the full name just doesn’t mean much in an age of search-engine literalness. Before it rebranded, Feeding America was known as “America’s Second Harvest,’ which, like Share Our Strength, is both wonderfully aspirational and delightfully nondescript.

Then there’s the logo which I find too precious. Oh, I see the faces. But I can’t figure out what an apple core has to do with helping to feed hungry children. There’s just too many negative ways to read that visual for it to communicate effectively.

Share Our Strength works to build the capacity of local organizations to feed hungry children. It doesn’t actually send food anywhere… that’s what Feeding America is all about.

Feeding America is more about tactical day-to-day feeding of the hungry. Share Our Strength's approach is more strategic. Both nonprofits have worthy missions. But Share Our Strength is better positioned to positively effect the long-term future of hunger in America.

Too bad Share Our Strength’s current branding doesn’t better reflect the strength of its position.

Time for Labels and Boxtops for Education to Rebrand for Growth?

2011-11-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

For some time now the two big prominent label collection efforts, General Mills Boxtops for Education and the much more senior and yet smaller Label’s for Education... founded by Campbell’s... have opened their respective campaigns to non-competing brands. It’s the classic win-win.

In so doing, they broaden their exposure and increase the amount of possible funds raised for schools. I suspect Campbell’s and General Mills also broaden their cost structure.

Meanwhile, the new partners are happy to participate with either of these well-established efforts because all the groundwork has long since been laid down and because both efforts enjoy strong relationships with tens of thousands of schools nationwide.

To get to this point both of the original sponsors have made efforts to erase their names from the efforts. ‘Boxtops’ is no longer named for General Mills. Label’s no longer features Campbell’s name or branding.

With all that now behind them one of label campaigns has the opportunity to take it to the next step by stripping out the increasingly anachronistic nouns in their names; ‘boxtops’ and ‘labels.’

Boxtops for Education participants now include such non-boxed items as Green Giant broccoli, Boise printer paper, and Hefty paper plates and platters. The ad at the left announces that seven Time, Inc. magazines titles have now joined Labels for Education campaign. Clip the UPCs from the magazines and take them to the schools; just the same as clipping the Label’s for Education seals off containers of Emerald nuts or Glad storage bags.

Plenty of brands have made this kind of transition. When it was becoming a computer company way back in the 1940s and 1950s, International Business Machines was hampered by its name, so it became IBM. Kentucky Fried Chicken wanted to get away from all three of its names, so it became KFC.

Making your name an acronym is the easiest way to rebrand. BFE and LOE don’t exactly sing. But neither did AT&T the first time anyone heard it.

‘Boxtops’ or ‘Labels’ could go all the way and completely rename their efforts. I won’t suggest any names, but it would be fun to help them rename their campaigns.

Why would they bother?

Think back on the IBM and AT&T examples. How does IBM sell business services if its name still says ‘Machines’? How does AT&T sell wireless telephony if its name still says ‘Telegraph’?

To be more pointed, how does Boxtops expand its effort to companies that don't have boxes?

The counter argument is that Labels for Education and Boxtops for Education have decades of built-in brand equity. There’s no denying that.

But more valuable still is all the infrastructure both efforts have in their relationships with tens of thousands of schools nationwide. Leaving aside Scholastic, what other brand can you name that is literally in every school in the country and for whom schools and parents both have largely positive feelings?

Given that, Boxtops and Labels could both be much bigger if they were willing to jettison their legacy names.

What if Denny’s Threw a Cause Marketing Fundraiser and Everyone Showed Up?

2011-11-08T04:00:00.000-08:00

Denny’s, the restaurant chain with about 1550 outlets across the country, wants your nonprofit to hold its fundraiser at one of their restaurants. When you book an event there, Denny’s will donate “10% of pre-tax sales generated by your group” back to your cause, church, team, school, club, advocacy group or fraternity/sorority.

This is familiar ground trod by plenty of restaurants, both chains and single-store outlets alike. As I’ve written before, bookstores, office supply chains, even bakeries could do the same promotion.

My question is, why limit the promotion to just causes?

Seriously, is there any reason why Denny’s shouldn’t extend the same deal to any group of, say, a dozen or more people, for-profit or not-for-profit?

That is, when a dozen or more people in your firm meet for a meal at Denny’s, then a donation of 10 percent of pre-tax sales generated by your group goes to a favored cause.

I’m guessing Denny’s has to cut a check for the donation. So what’s the difference between cutting a check and sending it to a cause when the donation was generated by a for-profit group or a by nonprofit group?

Let me be clear. I’m not suggesting that if a 15 construction guys from the same company come in to Denny’s for breakfast that they get a 10 percent discount or kickback. The 10 percent still goes to a charity. The only difference is that the promotion is opened up to other sizable groups.

Denny’s could either have a defined universe of charities it supports or it could cut a check to any 501(c)(3). The former would be easier, but the later isn’t impossible given the number of databases of causes.

Denny’s would certainly want to set some kind of threshold for the number of people in a party. I’m suggesting 12, but Denny’s knows what that number ought to be. Denny’s might ask that the bill be paid on one check or that require that the group give advance notice so they can staff appropriately.

Why would Denny’s entertain such an option?

Well, the regular promotion almost certain is meant to increase the number of people who eat at their stores. By extending the promotion to regular for-profit groups, Denny’s greatly expands the number of people who might participate in the promotion. Likewise, the number of causes that would be benefited would also increase.

Five Pieces of Unsolicited Cause Marketing Advice to Actor Hugh Jackman

2011-11-07T04:00:00.000-08:00

Versatile action star and Broadway song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman has started a new ‘all-benefits company’ that he explicitly says was inspired by Newman’s Own.

Here’s five bits of entirely unsolicited cause marketing advice to Mr. Jackman from yours truly.

1. Put Your Face On the Packaging. I don’t know what Laughing Man means and probably most of your potential customers don’t either. Speaking of Newman and yourself, you told Entertainment Weekly magazine, “This is a really great to, uh, exploit your popularity, basically. It is shameless exploitation.” Except the name Laughing Man is hardly shameless exploitation of your celebrity. To really be shameless and to get the most bang for your buck, you need to put the face of one of World’s Most Beautiful People on the packaging of Laughing Man.

2. Turn Your Face Into a Caricature. Brands including Betty Crocker, Uncle Ben, KFC, the Quaker Oats Quaker dude and even Paul Newman are all represented by illustrated characters. Betty Crocker looks different now than she did even 10 years ago. As an illustrated character Paul Newman could wear a chef’s toque or a beret or an apron. Making yourself into a caricature allows you to distance yourself a little from the brand, remain ageless. It means you don’t have to do new photo shoots every time you roll out a new product, just a new drawing. And it allows your brand to survive even after your death.

3. By All Means Continue to Tell Stories on The Packaging. Right now the packaging for Laughing Man tells the stories of the farmers and small businesspeople that the company works with and for. By adding your cartoon visage, I’m not suggesting that you get rid of those important back stories. You can and should keep them. I once did an informal study of the packaging for premium food brands and found that they had at least 20 percent more words on them than non-premium brands. Remember what the direct mail guys say: “tell more, sell more.”

4. Find Your Complementary Partner. Newman’s longtime partner was novelist and playwright A.E Hotchner. Read either of their the two books they wrote together to get a sense about their working dynamics on Newman’s Own. But it seems clear that Hotchner and Newman complemented each other greatly. You can’t do this all on your own. You need a partner who can do things you can’t or won’t do.

5. Be Prepared to Do this ‘til You Die. In his later years Newman joked that he was better known for Newman’s Own than for his acting career. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But it is true that Newman spent much more time in his role as an indefatigable social entrepreneur and philanthropist than he did in other role except as a husband and father. He was still personally approving and distributing the company’s profits until just two years before his death.

Finally, and this is a bonus suggestion; figure out how to sell goods manufactured in Africa under your brand. Africa, especially, has a very small manufacturing base. It’s a great benefit to Africa’s small farmers to buy their chocolate and tea and coffee beans. But you could bring still more money and benefit to Africa if you could figure out how to have those and other items manufactured there.

Best wishes! I genuinely hope you do at least as well as Newman’s Own, which has donated more than $300 million to charity since 1982.

Head Scratching Cause Marketing

2011-11-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

Almost two weeks ago I was in a local two-store pizza chain and my kids found the handcard at the left for me.

But what they found wasn’t immediately clear to me.

At first glance, I thought it might be a way to drive cause marketing to smaller retail establishments, something I’ve called for in the past.

A second glance made me think it might be a cause marketing powered inducement for customers to give some feedback.

Indeed, that is the intent. But a cause marketing appeal is not the actual inducement.

Instead ‘Businesses that Matter,’ the name on the handcard, is a subset of Deals that Matter, a Groupon competitor that offers to donate 15 percent of their proceeds to causes you care about. When you sign up, Deals that Matter lets you name your preferred charity for the donation.

So what is Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals’ logo doing there on something that seemingly doesn’t directly benefit the charity?

From Deals that Matter’s perspective it’s there to suggest at their bona fides. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has been around for coming up on 30 years. Deals that Matter appears to be about a year old. Of the two partners in this relationship Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals has much more credibility.

What does Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals get out of the deal?

That’s a darn fine question.

Right now this is an asymmetrical relationship. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals is almost certainly giving more than its getting, although Deals that Matter is listed on the charity’s sponsor page as a ‘Fundraising Partner.’

It could be that Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals is investing in a company its managers think has the chance to grow.

Whatever the case, I can tell you that when I was at what was then called “Children’s Miracle Network” we would have never done a deal like this unless we received no less than $50,000 from the would-be sponsor.

The Winter Doesn't Mean the End to Outdoor Fundraising Events

2011-11-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

The snow has already begun to fly here in the northern hemisphere, so that means all those outdoor charity walks, runs, races, golf tournaments and such are done everywhere except in the sunbelt until Spring 2012, right?

Not so fast, Jack Frost.

In fact, plenty of opportunities remain for outdoor events during the cold winter months. You just need to think outside the Summer equinox box.

For instance, I’m helping a friend with a first of December fun-run benefiting the local homeless shelter. Weather in my neck of the woods can be pretty dicey in December. But that will be part of the fun because the short run will pass by the State’s biggest Christmas-lights lighting ceremony.

I’ve heard of snowmobile rallies, cross-country and downhill ski fundraisers, ice skating events, polar bear plunges, ice fishing tourneys, even golfing in the snow!

Add one more. A series of snowshoe events from Tubbs, which makes snowshoes.

Starting in January 2012 at nine locations in Canada and the United States you can participate in Stubbs Romp to Stomp (a fun name which puts me in the mind of the old Led Zeppelin song ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’).

In Canada the event benefits the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation (CBCF) and in the U.S. it benefits Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Early registration ends November 15, 2011.

Stubbs Romp to Stomp has generated $1.7 million for Komen in its 10 years. The events last year drew more than 6,200 participants and raised $450,000.

The events are set up almost exactly like any Komen Race for the Cure events. You can participate as a team or individual and there’s a fitness program to get in shape for the event. Money is generated by participants seeking pledges, entry fees, and local sponsors.

The only real difference is the snow!

So put on a warm thinking tocque and figure out how to fundraise in the cold.

"Help the World's Women and Girls." Website Tells You How Many Slaves You Employ

2011-11-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

I am reading the book ‘Half the Sky’ right now, a powerful and deeply affecting book about the plight of women and girls in the developing world by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The book addresses four major threats to being female in the developing world; high maternal mortality, human trafficking, which can be understood in most cases as slavery; sexual violence; and mundane daily discrimination against girls and women.

Kristof and WuDunn, a husband and wife team, are loathe to recite the statistics because as all of us with fundraising backgrounds know, statistics tend to numb people’s minds and force them into non-action. Instead they tell story after story of individual heroines and victims both. I urge you to read their book.

I don’t have their discipline so I’ll cite one statistic from ‘Half the Sky,’ which I see as a sort of capstone. Thanks to routinized discrimination, violence and neglect perpetrated against women and girls there are at least 50 million females missing from the world, and maybe closer to 100 million!

As a husband and father of daughters, that sickens me.

How different the developing world is from the United States where it is men and boys who are, thanks to a variety of factors, struggling.

The bottom line for me is that I’m committing myself to help the plight of girls and women in the developing world. If that sounds vague and nonspecific, it's because I’m still figuring out what to do and how I can help.

This much is certain, in too much of the world girls and women are abused, trafficked, mutilated, enslaved, and even murdered for largely cultural reasons. Every bit of this is immoral and wrong. It must not be allowed to continue and I can’t sit idly by while it happens, even if I’m not sure yet what I ought to do.

At the very least, I will use this blog to tell stories and, when and where appropriate, rally support.

All posts on the topic will be headlined under the rubric: "Help the World's Women and Girls."

My first post on the topic is about an intriguing project from two ad agencies that are working in conjunction with the nonprofit called Call + Response to raise awareness about 21st century slavery. When you visit www.slaveryfootprint.org you can get an approximation of the number of people it takes, working in forced labor, to maintain your modern lifestyle.

The online calculator takes you through 11 screens and asks questions about you, your lifestyle and your possessions. You can either go through the questions with certain predetermined presets or you can get very specific and name, for instance, the number of suits and leather shoes that you own.

My slavery footprint was 65, which was very unsettling.

www.slaveryfootprint.org is especially well-designed and the methodology seems rigorous, if perhaps not entirely bullet-proof.

It’s available as an app, on Facebook and you can certainly Tweet it out, as I will.

Check it out and see where you stand.

Companies that Rank High in CSR Also Known for Cause Marketing

2011-11-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

On October 18 2011 I wrote a post about the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2011 CSR Index and how by my reckoning six of the top ten and 33 of the 50 companies listed did at least some cause marketing. A few days later reader Jessica Marlo left the following comment.

"It really bothers me that you can't share this information with the rest of us! What companies make up the the "six" of the top ten and "33" of the 50? Sheesh!"

I left the list out of the post not to perturb Jessica or anyone else, but because most such lists tend to be like chloroform in print; real snoozers.

But I promised Jessica that I’d post the list. So fortify yourself with a good strong belt of caffeine and plow in.

Now, this is admittedly idiosyncratic. Some of these firms may have done cause marketing that I’m unaware of. By the same token, the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has more than 5,000 cause marketing images. I don’t see all the cause marketing in North America much less the world, but I see a lot of it.

Likewise, this is a list of cause marketing. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Caterpiller… number 19 on the Boston College list… does a benefit golf tournament somewhere for a worthy charity or two. But that’s not cause marketing. Likewise Texas Instruments… number 15… is almost certainly a generous corporate philanthropist. But that’s not cause marketing either.

I’ve counted as cause marketers companies whose subsidiaries do cause marketing. Berkshire Hathaway, which is basically a big stock index, gets counted because subsidiaries like Dairy Queen do cause marketing.

What follows is the Boston College list redacted to include only the 33 that I know for a fact do cause marketing. The number at the left represents where they finished on Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship 2011 CSR Index. The number at the right is Boston College’s cumulative score. The full list is here.

If you feel like I’ve mislabeled any company herein, please let me know. Comment below or send me an email at aldenkeene at gmail dot com.

1 Publix Super Markets Inc. 80.59
2 Google 77.10
4 Kellogg’s 76.16
6 Berkshire Hathaway 75.78
7 FedEx 75.73
8 Campbell Soup Company 75.40
11 Johnson & Johnson 74.49
12 The Walt Disney Company 74.35
13 Coca-Cola Bottlers 74.14
14 Hershey Company 74.06
17 Clorox 73.88
18 Microsoft 73.87
21 Lowe’s Home Improvement 73.53
22 Procter & Gamble 73.46
23 Kraft Foods Inc. 73.31
24 PepsiCo 73.31
25 Toys ‘R’ Us 73.30
26 Home Depot 73.24
27 Quaker Oats 72.94
29 Target 72.78
30 Avon Products 72.73
31 Timberland Company 72.50
32 General Mills 72.31
33 Kohl’s 72.19
34 Whirlpool 72.17
35 CVS Caremark 72.10
37 Macy’s, Inc. 72.00
43 Costco Wholesale 71.53
44 BMW 71.44
45 Dannon 71.31
47 Staples 71.31
48 Dean Foods 71.18
49 Samsung Electronics 71.16

Making Cause Marketing More Systemic

2011-10-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

Coca-Cola has been drawing neutral to positive reviews for its white can promotion benefiting the World Wildlife Fund. Mark me down as neutral to negative, because I don’t think it goes quite fair enough.

Here’s why: Amory Lovins, the slightly heterodox environmental scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute has a new book out called “Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era,” wherein he finds that we don’t often enough take a systemic approach to energy and resource conservation. The result is missed opportunity.

I think the same is true in cause marketing.

Here’s the outlines of the promotion as constituted: Starting tomorrow, Nov 1, 2011 through February 2012, Coke will release its flagship product in white cans in order to draw awareness of the plight of the Arctic and the shrinking habitat of the polar bear in particular. Coke has used polar bears in its advertising since 1922.

Coke will donate $1 million to the WWF and asks that Coke drinkers also donate to the WWF via text to donate. To donate $1 to the WWF, text the package code to 357357. Starting tomorrow you can also donate online at ArcticHome.com.

Coke will also match up to another $1 million in such donations. Coke’s total donation could therefore reach $3 million. Coke will also air ads and help sponsor a new IMAX film on the topic called ‘To the Arctic 3D.’

According to the Packaging Digest, “WWF has a vision to help protect the polar bear's Arctic home. This includes working with local residents to manage an area high in the Arctic where the summer sea ice will likely persist the longest. This area—potentially covering 500,000 square miles—could provide a home for the polar bear while protecting the cultural and economic needs of local people.”

The WWF enjoys a good reputation and I expect will make good use of the $3 million mitigating the effects of climate change on polar bear habitat.

But imagine, instead, that in addition to everything else Coke has pledged to do that it also promised to paint white the roofs of all the buildings that it owns or leases.

Most roofs are black and as such they absorb heat and light. White reflects heat and light back into the atmosphere.

Cecil Adams of the syndicated column The Straight Dope put it this way in a column published in April 2010, “according to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, white-coated roofs can reflect 60 to 85 percent of the solar energy that hits them and stay as little as nine degrees above air temperature. Dark-colored roofs, by contrast, typically reflect 20 percent of sunlight or less, and a black asphalt roof reflects only 5 percent.”

He goes on to write, “a white (or at least light-colored) roof provides two benefits. The first is reduced air conditioning costs, which can drop 15 to 20 percent. The second benefit is more cosmic. A lighter-colored roof will reflect as much as 80 percent of the solar radiation that hits your house back into space. This increases the albedo (reflectivity) of the planet, which could help reduce global warming-surely a worthwhile goal for any home improvement project.”

Coke’s business is basically to produce the syrup for its drinks and market the same. Local bottlers turn that syrup into the actual Coke products that you drink. So I doubt that Coke owns or leases even 1,000 buildings in North America.

But think of what Coke would be able to claim if it painted all its rooftops white. Coke would be saying, in effect, “we’re not just raising awareness of the effects of climate change on our beloved polar bear. We’re doing more than just helping polar bears through our partnership with the WWF. We’re doing our small part to actually increase the reflectivity of the planet.”

Future ads could feature the polar bears on the roof of Coke's headquarters building in Atlanta, cool and comfortable on the all-white roof.

So long as it didn’t over-reach, Coke could legitimately claim that it not only talks the talk, it walks the walk.

That’s a more systemic approach to cause marketing!

The World Series of Cause Marketing

2011-10-28T04:00:00.000-07:00

The winner of the 2011 World Series will be determined tonight at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. But four causes, recognized during the first four games of the Series, have already won the big spotlight that the Fall Classic brings. Those causes are: Welcome Back Veterans; the Roberto Clemente Award; Boys and Girls Clubs of America; and Stand Up to Cancer.

Each was separately highlighted during the 2011 Series.

This is no small thing. Game 2, for instance, had 14.69 million viewers. Not quite ‘Dancing With the Stars’ numbers, but respectable given the two teams playing for the Championship this year.

The cause featured in Game 2 was the awarding of the 2011 Roberto Clemente Legacy award to David Ortiz, the designated hitter of the Boston Red Sox. The Roberto Clemente Award recognizes the MLB player who “best represents the game of baseball through positive contributions on and off the field.”

That’s video of Ortiz being recognized before the start of the game at the left. There was a little more to it than what’s shown in the video, but not much.

Indeed, every week during football season in college and professional stadiums across the country similar awards are given at halftime to students-athletes, community leaders, or alumni who have done their alma mater proud.

The major difference is that Chevrolet is footing the bill for the Roberto Clemente Award. And, of course, Game 2 had those 14.69 million television viewers.

Because such awards happen so frequently and because they always take the same approach, they’re almost unwatchable for anyone who isn’t personally involved. Both in the stadium, and on television. And, of course, they’re forgotten almost as soon as they’re over.

Roberto Clemente was a famous humanitarian. He died December 31, 1972 in an airline crash trying to deliver relief supplies to the victims of the massive Managua, Nicaragua earthquake that had happened earlier in December. His remains were never found.

So imagine if instead of showing Ortiz behind the statue of Clemente shaking hands with MLB and Chevrolet officials that instead they told the story of someone who has been helped by Ortiz doing whatever it is that won him the award.

Remember, people don’t get worked up over statistics of millions of people in jeopardy. Or, for that matter, millions of people helped. What moves them are the narratives… the stories… of individuals.

Imagine if Chevy and MLB offered a ‘Roberto Clemente Fellowship’ to a few hundred young fans to spend three months or six months doing service in rural Latin America, where Clemente did so much humanitarian work... and where MLB gets so many of its best players these days. Now imagine that their stories were told to MLB's fanbase.

Imagine if Chevy offered to match donations that TV viewers made via their cell phones to the ‘Roberto Clemente Memorial Education Fund’ to build schools in rural Latin America.

Imagine if MLB really wanted to get innovative with its cause partners and come up with something better than a static award presentation.

Long-Term, Committed Monogamy in Cause Marketing

2011-10-27T04:00:00.000-07:00

Some sponsors do so much volume and have such great visibility and recognition that they almost have the pick of charities to partner with. So, like actor George Clooney, some sponsors have been seen with a lot of different pretty faces over the years.

Toys R Us has had cause marketing relationships with at least 4 charities in the last 20 years and is currently with Toys for Tots.

In the last year Purina, the pet foods brand, has done cause marketing campaigns with Adopt-A-Pet.com, as seen at the left, and with Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

But there is value to strict monogamy in cause marketing relationships. After all, which is cuter, George Clooney canoodling with girlfriend #32 or a couple that’s been married 65 years that still holds hands and snuggles?

With that in mind, here’s my short list of the positives of long-term monogamous cause marketing relationships.

Customers begin to think of you and your charity partner as an inseparable pair. And that’s good for both your brands. To illustrate, here’s a pop quiz…who’s the partner for these organizations/brands? (answers below).

Subway
Ronald McDonald House Charities
Yoplait
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

The relationships between your staffs deepens. Like an old couple you understand each other’s rhythms, moods, and annual calendars. And you accommodate yourself to your partner’s needs and disposition.

You understand each other’s business models. There’s a Steely Dan song called “Hey 19” that explains it all. The song is about the disappointment an older man feels with a younger lover at having to explain all the things meaningful to him. The pertinent line is: “Hey 19, that’s ‘Retha Franklin. She don’t remember the queen of soul…” There’s value in not having to perpetually explain everything to your partner.

Your communication has grown past the puppy love stage. You can speak frankly without upsetting each other. And you can raise really out-there ideas without worrying about losing face.

You become each other’s memory. I don’t remember where I read it, but someone once said that part of the pain of divorce is that when couples split they lose part of the memory that their partner had for the couple’s friends, events, feelings, facts and the like. Similarly, even with changing staffs chances are someone in the relationship remembers why one approach in the past did or did not work.

That’s my short list. Feel free to add to it in the comments below.

(Quiz answer key: Subway+American Heart Association; Ronald McDonald House Charities+McDonalds; Yoplait+ Susan G. Komen for the Cure; St. Jude Children's Research Hospital+Target).

Nature Valley Puts You In the National Parks

2011-10-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

The thing you never understand about the Grand Canyon, until you actually go there, is that no photo does it justice. It’s so deep and so wide that the limited field of view provided by still or video cameras comes up seriously wanting. And no photo, by itself, is immersive enough either.

Now Nature Valley granola bars, a General Mills brand, is trying to do justice to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Great Smokey National Parks by letting you experience them as a virtual hiker.

Nature Valley and its agency McCann Erickson sent camera crews to capture 100 or so trail miles in each park using much the same technology that Google does for its famed street views on Google Maps, only all the equipment was mounted on people, not vehicles.

In February 2012 Nature Valley will unveil the first stage online. And you and I can follow along at a real-time walking pace. Writes Joe Berkowitz on FastCompany.com, “the resulting concept…is a model for how marketers can make a useful contribution to a cause without over-branding it.”

I disagree with Berkowitz’s conclusions about over-branding causes. The only cause that comes close to being over-branded is breast cancer, and I'd argue long and hard that even the pink ribbon isn't over-branded either. As things stand, over-branding U.S. National Parks is simply impossible. Despite the current governmental budget woes, no one believes buffalo in Yellowstone will soon be sporting signs on their humps saying “This Vista Made Possible by Nature Valley.”

And having been there I can tell you that the only corporate logos you’re likely to see in the Grand Canyon itself are on backpacks or water bottles.

For the most part I’m with Dan Pallotta when he says that if we believe that marketing works, why do we hamstrung nonprofit causes by passive-aggressively insisting that they not spend the money necessary to do it right?

Pallotta’s example is that if the tobacco companies are spending $500 million a year on advertising and marketing, why do we howl when the American Cancer Society spends $1 million in combating those messages?

Nature Valley is a long-time supporter of the National Parks in the United States. Right now, in fact, for every UPC you enter from a box of Nature Valley, General Mills is donating $1 to the National Parks Conservation Association up to a maximum of $100,000.

I applaud Nature Valley for making these… what to call them?… ‘trail-umentaries,’ ‘docu-hikes.’ It’s a valuable service. Whatever their name, I plan to check them out next year.

But having experienced both Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon (although, regrettably, not the Smoky Mountains) up close and personal, my expectations will be very high.

Trick or Treat for UNICEF Embraces New Giving Tech

2011-10-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

For three generations… since 1950… the United States Fund for UNICEF has sponsored Trick or Treat for UNICEF a door-to-door fundraiser conducted by children and meant to take place on or around Halloween, October 31.

In 60 years Trick or Treat for UNICEF has raised $164 million, an average of $2.7 million a year. Not bad!

But the problem, if you can call it that, is that the campaign has traditionally generated the donations in cash, with all the attendant challenges that entails.

Moreover, the people who donated last year are likely to be unknown to the United States Fund for UNICEF and almost certainly forgotten by the kids, meaning there’s little continuity from year to year.

Surely there’s a role here for technology.

And indeed the United States Fund for UNICEF has embraced a slick new way for kids to Trick or Treat for UNICEF.

Today kids can Trick or Treat for UNICEF, raise good sum of money and never touch a single nickel of it.

This Halloween the kids can print out a canister wrapper like the one at the left which features a QR code. When people scan the code using their smartphone they can make a direct donation to UNICEF.

What if the person who answers the door doesn’t have a smartphone or the necessary QR reader?

Well a persistent Trick or Treater also knows that people can text “TOT” to UNICEF (864233) to make a $10.00 donation to Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF. The $10 will be added to donor’s phone bill.

The United States Fund for UNICEF doesn’t mention it, but of course they’re collecting the phone numbers of donors. Come next Halloween they could message a prior donor directly. They could even send a punch list to kids asking them to knock specific doors of prior year’s donors.

If that sounds slightly creepy… even for Halloween… remember that that’s exactly how political candidates campaign door-to-door nowadays. Their party gives them a list of registered voters from their party broken out by their precinct/district. Then they specifically knock on the doors of people who belong to their party and are registered voters.

Kudos to the United States Fund for UNICEF for bringing this classic fundraiser up to date.

Subscribing to the Cause Marketing Blog is as Easy as Harry Potter's Accio Spell

2011-10-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

Kind Readers:

Gwen D. from the Northumberland region of the U.K. (home to Hogwarts!) 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.

Like the Accio spell on Harry Potter which brings desirable objects to you, when you subscribe each new post comes directly to your email, usually every business day. It's like Muggle magic!

And like Gwen, when you subscribe I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix that includes examples.

It's a great brainstorming tool and helps ensure that your campaign has all the components appropriate for that flavor of Cause Marketing.

Rest assured that I will never sell your name or email address.

So join today.

Warm regards,

Paul
Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Happy Birthday to the Cause Marketing Blog!

2011-10-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

Five years ago on Tuesday October 17 I posted for the first time on this blog. On Tuesday November 1, 2011 I’ll celebrate my 700th post.

Since October 2010 I’ve posted, almost without exception, every business day. I compare it to writing a daily newspaper column, with all the attendant challenges of coming up with something new… or at least different… to say five days a week.

Like Ernest Hemingway famously said:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

I don’t bleed with the same brio that Hemingway did. So my thanks to you my faithful readers for your patience when I’ve been a poor stylist, a bad grammarian, and the many times when I stopped before I had finished.

In remembrance of posts past here’s my very first one, which still has punch and force these 1800 or so days later, (even if I do say so myself).

Eyeballs vs. Tears

Barely a day goes by that I don't see some kind of cause-related marketing, some good and some not so good.

With this blog I will examine in detail those cause marketing promotions, advertising and campaigns; when they get it right, and where it goes wrong.

Cause-related marketing has been around for more than 20 years now. Even people who don't know the term, understand what it's all about; send in the Yoplait lid and 10 cents goes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

But, according to IEG, while cause-related marketing is growing faster than sponsorship as a whole, cause-related marketing currently represents less than 10 percent of the larger sponsorship market. That sounds like a positive, but cause-related marketing has been as high as 10 percent of sponsorship.

For all its heart, cause-related marketing is still settling for the sloppy seconds left over from the NFL, NASCAR and the like. I think that's because while those big guys understand that sponsorship is about eyeballs, the sisters of the orphans and all their charity cousins think it's about tears.

When it comes to cause-related marketing, they're only half right.

Payless Gives Shoes 4 Kids; the Basic Black Pump of Cause Marketing

2011-10-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

This holiday season Payless ShoeSource will donate $1.2 million worth of shoes free of charge to children in North America, and 11 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Now in its fourth year the program… called Payless Gives Shoes 4 Kids… is accepting applications from nonprofits right now at Paylessgives.com.

Having just finished Ross Shafer’s slender volume called ‘Grab More Market Share: How to Wrangle Business Away from Lazy Competitors,’ I wonder if Payless hasn’t come a little late to the party with this helpful if pedestrian program.

Shafer’s premise is that in tough economic times it may be easier and cheaper to out-compete rivals than to win over entirely new costumers by simply doing the things competitors are unwilling to do.

There’s a certain logic to Shafer’s thinking. Now-defunct electronics chain Circuit City spent many years and millions of dollars winning customers. And even if the stores weren’t the same as Best Buy it’s a simple transition for former Circuit City customers to shop now at Best Buy. By doing enough things better, Shafer argues, Best Buy sent Circuit City to the ash heap of retail history.

Payless, Shafer says, shuttered 218 stores in 2009, which he infers came as a result of the fast-growing Zappos.com, now owned by Amazon.com.

Zappos.com faces a number of challenges against a bricks and mortar retailer, none the least of which is that few of us are willing to buy a pair of shoes we haven’t worn. Zappos.com overcame that by allowing you to easily return shoes you don’t like free of hassle and shipping costs.

Zappos.com is famous for its customer service, while Payless is mainly famous for its low prices and stack ‘em deep, sell ‘em cheap merchandising.

One of the main benefits of cause marketing and the kind of philanthropy represented by Payless Gives Shoes 4 Kids is that it can help companies standout from competitors and give them a new story to tell the public and the press.

Something that TOMS Shoes, in comparison to Payless, does very well.

In fact, as I think about it, if TOMS Shoes buy one, give one cause marketing efforts were a sexy slingback, then Payless's philanthropic efforts would be basic black pump.

Nothing wrong with a basic black pump, of course. But it's not what people talk about.

Cause for Dessert

2011-10-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

If you’re a restaurant, even in a quick-service category, it’s hard to imagine a transactional cause marketing campaign you could launch more easily or quickly than a dessert promotion. When a customer buys a slice of cake, pie, a dish of ice cream, or some other dessert you make a donation to your cause partner.

In most cases you wouldn’t want to promote a salad or a main course. At a sit-down restaurant most customers come into your establishment to order an entrée and in many cases you probably give them a salad with the meal. So you don’t need to promote entrees.

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

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

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It just requires the lead time to figure out what that special drink is and to stock up on the necessary inventory.

Drinks could, however, be a bad mix for certain causes.

Desserts are potentially more universal than drinks since even youngsters and teetotalers (like moi) could order one. And while there’s a handful of causes you probably couldn’t partner with… anti-obesity causes come to mind…I reckon there’s more safe ground with dessert than drink promotions.

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

The above ad is for a special pie benefiting Susan G. Komen for the Cure from Village Inn, a national chain in the United States.

Through October 31, 2011 when you buy a whole Berry Pink Pie, $1 will go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The maximum donation is unstated, but the minimum is $25,000.

Village Inn has created a custom pie for the Komen promotion, but you don’t necessarily need to follow suite. You could probably something from your regular dessert menu.

Likewise, Village Inn is promoting the sales of whole pies here. But depending on your margins, chances are you could do just fine donating $1 out of $4-$7 dollar single plate of dessert.

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

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

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

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