Cause Marketing

Exporting Caring and Dollars American Express’ Member’s Project , which will fund one member project to the tune of as much as $5 million based on the vote of American Express card holders, is now down to five finalists: National Parks Foundation, for the repair and refurbishment of the 391 National Parks. American Solar Energy Society to create a small solar-powered generating unit suitable for residential homes. US Fund for UNICEF Children’s Safe Drinking Water initiative to deliver clean, pure water to children worldwide. DonorsChoose.org, a web-enabled way to match school needs with outsiders willing to help. American Forests initiative called Plant a Million Trees, a global reforestation campaign to plant trees in the United States and around the globe. For those of you keeping score at home, two out of five of those projects have truly global reach. And as of this writing, the UNICEF safe water campaign holds a commanding lead in advance of the August 7 deadline. UNICEF’s lead ma...

You Say You Want an Evolution? There’s not a card-carrying cause marketer who’s been in the business more than 10 years or so who doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Cone , Inc. the cause-marketing and social responsibility agency now owned by the Omnicom Group. Back in the day 14 years ago when we were knocking on corporate doors, putting together proposals and making presentations to corporate marketers about the only substantive weapon we had at our disposal that suggested that cause marketing worked was the old Cone-Roper survey of attitudes about cause marketing. It was a revelation and it helped enormously. The Cone surveys have been often updated over the years. The latest version of the Cone study, called the Cone Cause Evolution Study , is out and many of my fellow cause-marketing bloggers and analysts have already done an admirable job of addressing the study’s intriguing findings. Check Selfish Giving , or David Hessekiel’s newsletter at the Cause Marketing Forum , for instan...

Cause-Marketing with a Hispanic Flavor In Thursday’s posting we raised the question posed by Gabriel Q., who works for a notable California multi-cultural consultancy: what about cause marketing to multi-cultural audiences? Gabriel was specifically interested in cause-related marketing and Hispanic-Latino audiences. Of course marketing to multi-cultural audiences can be damnably difficult because…just to take up just Hispanics-Latinos…Spanish speakers in the United States may come from dozens of countries. While Spanish itself is a lingua franca, there are hundreds of accents, and thousands of culturally-specific word meanings. Considering the 1951-mile-long border between Mexico and the United States, Mexican Spanish predominates, especially in the American Southwest. But there are also 3.3 million people born in the Caribbean and 2.1 million people born in South America now living in the United States, according to 2003 survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. The 2000 U.S. Census identif...

New reader Gabriel Q., who works for a prominent multi-cultural consultancy in California, asks if I’ve ever posted on the topic of multi-cultural cause marketing, specifically cause-related marketing targeted to Hispano/Latino audiences. It’s an interesting topic to be sure, but I had to confess that I have never written on the subject and I don’t recall ever seeing any studies with regard to multi-cultural in general or Latino/Hispano cause marketing specifically. In this two-part post I’ll address about the topic of multi-cultural marketing through the case of two ‘Muslim colas.’ On Tuesday I’ll tackle Gabriel’s direct question of Hispano/Latino cause marketing. Three ‘Muslim colas’ were launched in Europe in 2002-2003, two of which got an astonishing amount of fanfare for their cause marketing efforts and their uncompromising anti-Western marketing positioning. To get a feel for how much publicity they got, just type ‘Muslim cola’ into your browser. The colas were Mecca Cola, launc...

The Times they are A-Changing The bottled water industry generated $15 billion in revenue in America in 2006. It will top $16 billion this year. That’s more than Americans spent on movie tickets or iPods. And while 50 percent of Fijians don’t have access to clean, reliable water, millions of gallons Fiji Water is shipped most of the way across the Pacific and then trucked from the coast to chi-chi hotels or otherwise sold at a premium across the country. This even though almost every American could walk to the closest tap and draw out clean, safe and often good-tasting water. These and other choice facts come out in Charles Fishman’s well-wrought 6,000-word piece on water in the July Fast Company . At a time when the bottle watered business has never been better, I predict that the only direction it can go from here is down. The times they are a-changing. Fishman concludes: Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up ha...

Scared Pointless When it comes to cause marketing the disease charities have potential conflicts of interest that other causes probably don’t. For example, if the American Heart Association does a cause-marketing campaign with Bayer’s 80mg ‘baby aspirin’ then there’s an implied endorsement of both Bayer and the 80mg dose, whether or not the AHA offers an explicit endorsement of either or both. About 10 years ago, the attorneys general of several States gave the single disease charities a good scare when it comes to cause marketing by drafting a document about the legal and ethical use of the practice for certain kinds of charities. However, the document never received the support of the full membership of the National Association of Attorney’s General, according to their communications director. Nonetheless, in the wake of that unwanted attention, many of the single-disease charities developed strict policies about what they will and will not do when it comes to cause-related marketing...

A New Rigor is Found In Arguments for Corporate Social Responsibility The most lasting rebuke of corporate social responsibility came from Milton Friedman , the small of stature economist who even in death continues to cast a huge intellectual shadow. In September 1970 Friedman wrote “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profit,” for the New York Times Magazine. In it, he argued persuasively that corporate social responsibility was just so much twaddle, socialism in a corporate wrapper that undermines a free society. Businesses that practiced corporate responsibility were playing Robin Hood with someone else’s money. “The discussions of the ‘social responsibilities of business,’” Friedman wrote, “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 do...

Time to Dust Off Your Plans For Getting Your Charity on Radio In more than 100 markets in the United States radio station owners are programming dozens of new channels. Maybe one of them could carry programming for and about your nonprofit. I’m talking about HD Radio or digital radio. What is HD Radio? HD Radio offers a quality of sound similar to what comes out of your MP3 player, meaning less hiss and static than AM or FM. HD Radio is a terrestrial signal (as opposed to a satellite signal) broadcast by the same radio stations that are already in your market. Unlike satellite radio, HD Radio is subscription free and for about the next year or so it's also commercial free. Broadcasters can include data channels that display on your digital radio tuner such things as what song you’re listening to and what’s on related channels. HD Radio channels can NOT be heard on standard radios and require a digital radio tuner, which start around $100 in the United States. Here’s how it works...

Using Customer Satisfaction to Find Donors I sat in on a very interesting presentation last week at the Wasatch Online Marketers Association (WOMA) by Ryan Davies of Progrexion , a multi-disciplinary marketing and marketing research firm with offices in San Francisco and Utah. One of Progrexion’s house specialties is customer satisfaction surveys, one of the more dreary (if necessary) 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 along with 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 Tru...