Cause Marketing With Internet Games

It was my initial intent to shower praise on the cool The Bread Art Project, sponsored by The Grain Foods Foundation, a trade group, and benefiting the domestic anti-hunger charity Feeding America, (aka America's Second Harvest) But I can’t.

The Grain Foods Foundation will donate $50,000 and as much as another $50,000 based on the number of Bread Art submissions. When I visited the counter said 10,433 donations had been made.

It’s a fun promotion. When you go to breadartproject.com you can create a piece of bread that toasts a picture or an image of your design. As things load, there’s a stream of nutrition and hunger facts. When you save the Bread Art image, and enter your name and email address, a dollar goes to Feeding America.

A pity there’s was no way to forward your image to friends or post it to your Facebook page. At least I don’t think it had the capability. I created my Bread Art image easily enough. But so far as I know the image was never saved and the donation was never made because I kept getting IO error messages.

They have a gallery of the images that have been created by Food Network host Ted Allen and regular folks like us. No doubt there's some wonderfully stylish images there. But I never got that page to load either. I wondered if there was a gallery of celebrity Bread Art images. Alas, I never found out.

[The image above came from Feeding America's Flickr page.]

The press release says that The Bread Art Project has a Facebook page and that you can follow the project on Twitter. I hope so. Because on the day I checked The Bread Art Project, the website just didn’t like my Firefox browser. Internet Explorer worked only marginally better.

I’ve posted before about the use of Internet games to pass on information in non-transactional cause marketing. But here’s the sticking point; no matter how well conceived or promoted, the darn thing has to work. Could be the site didn't like my version of Macromedia Flash. But if so, the usual prompt never came up.

As with so many other things, if you’re going to conduct cause marketing using Internet games God is in the details!

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

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A Clever Cause Marketing Campaign from Snickers and Feeding America

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Cause-Related Marketing with Customer Receipts

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