Skip to main content

How to Find a Charity Partner for a CRM Campaign

The 411 on Locating a Cause Right for Your Company

Suppose you’re a community-minded company and you’re considering launching a cause-related marketing campaign, but in a world of causes, no cause is much more appealing than the next. Who do you partner with?

This question came to me while I was looking at the back of a bottle of 505 Southwestern Organic Green Chile Sauce. 505’s sauces are certified USDA Organic, which means according to 505 Southwestern’s website that it contains at least “95 percent organically produced ingredients.”

While the organic seal caught my eye, so too did the little pink ribbon, emblematic in the States of the breast cancer causes. 505 Southwestern gives a “portion of every sale” to the fight against breast cancer. Regular readers know how critical I am of that language. Last year 505 Southwestern generated $35,000 for breast cancer research.

Given their sensitivity to organic products, why did 505 Southwestern choose breast cancer for its cause-related marketing, instead of a cause that supports family farms, say, or rainforest protection or the Nature Conservancy?

Again, from the website, company founders do it in memory of their mother, Stella Solomon.

For years the conventional wisdom has been that you choose a cause based on ‘strategic philanthropy.’ If you’re an oil company, you pick environmental causes. If you make ladies purses, you pick women’s causes. If you sell toys, you pick children’s causes. If you’re a restaurant, you pick hunger causes. So far so good, right?

But what if you sell automobiles, or tattoos, or make non-organic chile sauces?

Here’s how I’d approach it.

First, decide what you need and want from a relationship with a cause. Is it publicity? Is it a sales bounce? Is it warm fuzzies? If it’s a combination, decide on the proportion of each. The big causes can do a lot of you. They can provide celebrities, they can help produce events, they can help generate publicity. But far fewer small charities will be able to offer the same menu of benefits. Also, bear in mind that the large charities will probably require you to pledge certain minimum donations before serious benefits start to flow. Send one of these big outfits a check for $10,000 and you’ll likely get little more than a nice letter of thanks.

Second, find out what you as a company are passionate about. Survey your employees or conduct focus groups or, better, do both. Find out who employees give their money and time to. Of those, time is the most telling factor. In the States, according to the Independent Sector, people who volunteer are 2.27 times more generous with their money than people who don’t. Meaning that volunteers give both more time and more money than people who donate only money.

Third, survey customers or other key stakeholders. Your employees may be pretty fired up about a cause, but if you expect customers, vendors or partners to generate all or some of the donation, you need to be sure that the cause resonates with them as well.

Fourth, determine if one cause can do all you need it to do. The foundations of most Fortune 500 companies in the United States give to hundreds or even thousands of charities so as to maximize goodwill, especially in local markets. That’s probably prudent. But when it comes to supporting a cause through a cause-related marketing campaign, I would generally argue that less is more. It’s too easy to dilute your message and your branding by having dozens of cause relationships. Proctor & Gamble manages to pull it off, but they have dozens of brands and a billion-dollar marketing budget. If you don’t, consider scaling back to no more than handful of charities that you can get behind and who can get behind you.

Agree? Disagree? Feel free to post a comment either way.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to

Why Even Absurd Cause-Related Marketing Has its Place

Buy a Bikini, Help Cure Cancer New York City (small-d) fashion designer Shoshonna Lonstein Gruss may have one of the more absurd cause-related marketing campaigns I’ve come across lately. When you buy the bikini or girls one-piece swimsuit at Bergdorf-Goodman in New York shown at the left all sales “proceeds” benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center . Look past the weak ‘ proceeds ’ language, which I always decry, and think for a moment about the incongruities of the sales of swimsuits benefiting the legendary Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Cancer has nothing to do swimming or swimsuits or summering in The Hamptons for that matter. And it’s not clear from her website why Shoshanna, the comely lass who once adorned the arm of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, has chosen the esteemed cancer center to bestow her gifts, although a web search shows that she’s supported its events for years. Lesser critics would say that the ridiculousness of it all is a sign that cause-related marketing is

A Clever Cause Marketing Campaign from Snickers and Feeding America

Back in August I bought this cause-marketed Snickers bar during my fourth trip of the day to Home Depot. (Is it even possible to do home repairs and take care of all your needs with just one trip to Home Depot / Lowes ?) Here’s how it works: Snickers is donating the cost of 2.5 million meals to Feeding America, the nation’s leading hunger-relief charity. On the inside of the wrapper is a code. Text that code to 45495… or enter it at snickers.com… and Snickers will donate the cost of one meal to Feeding America, up to one million additional meals. The Feeding America website says that each dollar you donate provides seven meals. So Snickers donation might be something like $500,000. But I like that Snickers quantified its donations in terms of meals made available, rather than dollars. That’s much more concrete. It doesn’t hurt that 3.5 million is a much bigger number than $500,000. I also like the way they structured the donation. By guaranteeing 2.5 million meals, the risk of a poor