Cause-Related Marketing Home Sales

Buy a house, give a house

On January 10, 2008, I highlighted the streamlined cause-related marketing campaign of TOMS Shoes, whereby for every pair of their Argentine-inspired alpargatas shoes you buy, another pair goes to needy kids in places like Africa and South America.

Now drawing inspiration directly from TOMS Shoes… and with just a little bit of puffery… LJ Urban says that when you buy one of their 35 LEED ND certified homes from their ‘Good eco-community’ in urban Sacramento, California, a home gets built in Burkina Faso. LJ Urban calls the campaign, ‘Do Some Good Now.’

In fact, LJ Urban, an eco-real estate developer in Sacramento, pays for the training of masons in Burkina Faso in a technique called Voute Nubienne. It includes using locally-made baked earthen bricks, making vaulted ceilings using an ancient Egyptian practice, and a locally-sustainable way of sealing the bricks against water. The training is provided by the French nonprofit, Association la Voute Nubienne.

LJ Urban will also pay for the training of one Burkina Faso mason for each 100,000 people that visit their website between now and July 1, 2008. Yesterday, I was visitor 5,149.

Using Voute Nubienne method means that these aren’t normal Burkina Faso homes.

They’re better.

Homes in Burkina Faso are typically built with metal roofs, which are expensive and turn baking hot in the Sub-Saharan summers. The vaulted roofs (see above) are notably cooler. Metal roofs also require timber for support, which is in chronically short supply in the Colorado-sized country of 13 million people. Finally, the Voute Nubienne technique helps obviate the problem with the mud brick homes literally dissolving into dust within a homeowner’s lifetime.

While many of the people of Burkina Faso are capable of creating their own bricks and even laying them, the vaulted roofs require masons trained in the 3,000 year-old craft. Cash is in short supply in Burkina Faso… metal roofs might require several year’s savings, for instance… so the barter economy there is very lively. Right now the trained masons are likely to take barter in payment rather than cash money. And the masons typically take on apprentices, meaning they train the next generation of masons in the Voute Nubienne technique.

I like this campaign a lot. The Californians that buy LEED certified homes in urban Sacramento are almost certainly the same kind of people who would donate to a cause like the Association la Voute Nubienne. LJ Urban oughta email the development’s brochure to Daryl Hannah now.

LJ Urban’s website has page devoted to answering the questions skeptics like me. I appreciate that. And I marvel at the genius of the architects who have stepped forward to address some real-world challenges.

If I had one suggestion it would be to make the Do Some Good Now website easier and cleaner to navigate. Nowadays people could come directly to almost any page in your website… they won’t necessarily enter through your front page.

And so every page on the site has to be self-contained enough so that visitors can quickly understand and navigate the content.

Part 2: How Chili's Used Cause-Related Marketing to Raise $8.2 million for St. Jude

[Bloggers Note: In this second half of this post I discuss the nuts and bolts of how Chili's motivates support from its employees and managers and how St. Jude 'activates' support from Chili's. Read the first half here.] How does St. Jude motivate support from Chili’s front line employees and management alike? They call it ‘activation’ and they do so by the following: They share stories of St. Jude patients who were sick and got better thanks to the services they received at the hospital. Two stories in particular are personal for Chili’s staff. A Chili’s bartender in El Dorado Hills, California named Jeff Eagles has a younger brother who was treated at St. Jude. In both 2005 and 2006 Eagles was the campaign’s biggest individual fundraiser. John Griffin, a manager at the Chili’s in Conway, Arkansas had an infant daughter who was treated for retinoblastoma at St. Jude. They drew on the support Doug Brooks… the president and CEO of Brinker International, Chili’s parent co...

Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

Walgreens and JDRF Right now at Walgreens…the giant pharmacy and retail store chain with more than 5,800 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico… they’re selling $1 paper icons for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). This is an annual campaign and I bought one to gauge how it’s changed over the years. (Short list… they don’t do the shoe as a die cut anymore; the paper icon is now an 8¾ x 4¼ rectangle. Another interesting change; one side is now in Spanish). The icon has a bar code and Jacob, the clerk, scanned it and handed me a receipt as we finished the transaction. At the bottom was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, answer some questions and you’re entered into a drawing for $10,000 between now and the end of September 2007. I don’t know what their response rate is, but the $10,000 amount suggests that it’s pretty low. Taco Bell’s survey gives out $1,000 per week. At a regional seafood restaurant they give me a code that garner...

An Interview with Cause-Related Marketing Pioneer Jerry Welsh

Jerry Welsh is the closest thing cause marketing has to a father. In 1983 after a number of regional cause-related marketing efforts, Welsh, who was then executive vice president of worldwide marketing and communications at American Express looked out his window in lower Manhattan at the Statue of Liberty. The Statue was then undergoing a major refurnishing, and in a flash Welsh determined to undertake the first modern national cause marketing campaign. I say modern because almost 100 years before in January 1885, the Statue of Liberty was sitting around in crates in New York warehouses because the organization building the pedestal ran out of money. And so Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the newspaper called The World , proposed a very grassroots solution reminiscent in its own way to Welsh’s cause-related marketing. Pulitzer ran an editorial promising he would print the name of everyone who donated even a penny. Sure enough pennies, along with dimes and nickels, quarters a...

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