Cause Marketing in Your Signature Line

MyContactCard, which builds web apps, has just launched CauseMail, a souped-up HTML signature line for your emails that includes contact information using branding from a select group of charities and generates a yearly $6.48 donation to the chosen charity.

The service costs an individual $12.95 a year. It is being marketed to both individuals and charities.

The pitch MyContactCard is making to charities goes like this: “100,000 supporters sending just 10 emails a day deliver over 365 million graphic, clickable impressions a year with the Cause branding, culture and donate now links.”

I like this idea and I like the execution. But frankly if that pitch represents their target market, they’re barking up the wrong tree. The number of nonprofits in the United States with 100,000 supporters who are online is a pretty small number.

Tens of millions of Americans gave more than $306 billion to charity in 2007. One third of that that goes to churches. The rest goes to literally millions of 501(c)(3)s.

I couldn’t find the actual number, but I’d be surprised if the average American donor gives to much fewer than a dozen charities a year. To put it directly, American give generously to charity, but their charitable giving is diluted among numerous entities.

Moreover, the charities that do have 100,000 supporters almost certainly have their own IT departments [and know how to rent services from Amazon S3, too]. The IT crew at St. Jude Child Research Hospital, to cite one, is certainly capable of putting together something just like MyContactCard.

But there are hundreds of thousands of charities with smaller lists and no IT department who could potentially benefit from MyContactCard. I’ll bet the people at MyContactCard figure that out pretty soon.

So should you subscribe to MyContactCard? That depends on you. Currently there are nine causes on board at MyContactCard:

ASPCA
Green Day
Lance Armstrong’s LiveSTRONG
One
Special Olympics
Sea Shepard Conservation Society
Stop Global Warming
Surfrider Foundation
Wounded Warrior.

If the Surfrider Foundation moves you, $12.95 a year isn’t terribly expensive. If all your emails carry the Surfrider Foundation’s branding, there’s probably a halo effect that redounds on you.

But if none of these causes move you but you like the idea of cause marketing on your signature line, consider doing what I do.

The final line in my email signature reads: “Support the Children’s Organ Transplant Association. Donate at COTA.org.”

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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