Pennies from Heaven

CLOSE ON GUS -- He holds the envelope in his hand, trying not to show his excitement. But you can practically hear his heart pounding. Now, almost afraid to look, he slowly edges the check out of its envelope. He closes both eyes. Now he opens one eye and peeks.

INSERT -- On the "Expenses" check emerging from the envelope.

First we SEE the name: AUGUST GORMAN. And then...the amount: $85,789.80!

GUS
(o.s.) (quietly)

Pennies from heaven.

Round-Up Some Change

Imagine if, like Richard Pryor’s character Gus Gorman in Superman III, that the charity you work with or for could get just a few pennies from each retail transaction. It wouldn’t necessarily mean an $85 million payday, but a bunch of pennies really adds up. (The excerpt is from scifiscripts.com. Superman III was written by David Newman and Leslie Newman).

If the charity you work for or with generates a lot of affinity and has a particularly strong relationship with a retailer or a banking institution, you may be a likely candidate for a super Web 2.0 version of the change round-up campaign.

Change round up campaigns have been around for decades now and probably much longer. What am I talking about? There’s a number of possible iterations:

There could be a jar next to the cash register with a little narrative story on it.
It could be a type of kinetic sculpture that bids you to watch the show for the price of a quarter and benefiting a charity.
When I was at Children’s Miracle Network, our Canadian office devised an ingenious campaign with Air Canada whereby international travelers were asked to disgorge their pockets of foreign currency when they arrived back home.
A more sophisticated version might involve a retailer programming a key in a cash register that rounds up the cost of purchase to the next Euro, Renminbi, Yen, Pound, Dollar or Rupee. So if the transaction comes to €22.67 Euros, the cashier would ask if you would like to round up the transaction to an even €23 Euros, with €0.33 Euros going to the cause.

Now there’s two new change round up efforts ready for the Web 2.0, one that’s already built and one that a tech-savvy charity would have to build on its own, probably in conjunction with a bank or other financial institution.

Already in place is a service called ChangeRoundUp.com, which allows online retailers to add a virtual coin jar to their shopping cart. Customers making an online purchase are asked to round up their change for a cause during the transaction. The software is free to retailers. Change Round Up extracts a 10 percent fee from each donation.

The second one is my own brainstorm. But feel free to steal it. Because that’s what I did.

Bank of America has a campaign for its customers called “Keep the Change” that has signed up more than 2.5 customers. When those Bank of America customers make a purchase using their debit card, it automatically rounds up the purchase to the nearest dollar and transfers those pennies into their savings account. It’s a form of enforced savings.

A shrewd charity with a lot of affinity could do much the same if they had a strong relationship with one or more financial institutions. It goes without saying (I hope) that you’d need to get a customer’s approval first. Also, this is probably more of a promotion than an on-going campaign. The charity better have a lot of affinity to make an ask like this and you’d need to market it effectively.

I’m not a geek, but building this change-round-up system doesn’t strike me as being technically complicated. The bank/financial institution would probably want survey its customers first. And while there would be up-front costs those costs would be largely sunk after the change round up software was developed.

What are the benefits to the bank or financial institution? They include:

Cause-related marketing can directly enhance sponsor sales and brand.
Cause-related marketing can heighten customer loyalty.
Cause-related marketing can boost a company’s public image and help distinguish it from competition. It also gives corporate PR officers a new story to tell.
Cause-related marketing can build employee morale and loyalty.
Cause-related marketing can improve employee productivity, skills and teamwork.

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...

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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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