Cause Marketing

In June I profiled Orkin's Fight the Bite campaign , which benefits the UN's effort called Nothing But Nets, a cause that purchases insecticide-treated mosquito nets for people in Africa so as to stave off malaria, a vicious killer on the continent. In the wake of that post, I asked Martha Craft, the VP of public relations and communications at Rollins, Inc., Orkin's parent company, to 'open the Kimono' on the campaign. Ms. Craft was kind enough to respond. 1. How did the campaign come about? Fight the Bite was a natural fit for Orkin because it directly relates to our business and our ongoing commitment to protect public health. This commitment is two-fold: 1) we have strategic partnerships with organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and 2) we educate our customers on the threats/risks that pests can pose. In 2007, we learned about the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign – a global, grassroots effort to save lives by preve...

If cause marketing is to really grow , I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that cause marketing needs the equivalent of an ‘open standard.’ When speaking of software especially, the term ‘open standards’ means an agreed-upon convention that is free and unconstrained in how it can be used. Open standards are enormously valuable to you and me. HTML and XHTML are open standards. PDF is an open standard and CD-ROMs will run in any computer with a CD-ROM drive because of open standards. That you’re reading this post is because of an open standard called TCP-IP, which is the way website data is divided up into packets, transmitted, and then reassembled by servers somewhere near your computer or phone. According to the entry on the topic in today’s (August 17, 2009) Wikipedia: Open Standards means “a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle.” Its more complete definition according to the Digital Standards Organization is: “The standard is...

Back in 2003 I was working for a company that was considering a relationship with Dr. Laura, the no-nonsense radio show host famous for kicking her listeners in the pants. Part of relationship was to be with her charitable foundation, which at the time was best known for handing out ‘My Stuff Bags,’ which were bags of essential items for kids being removed from homes and taken into shelters; blankets, stuffed animals and basic toiletries. While the effort was successful… they donated more than 250,000 bags in 6 years, with less than 10 percent overhead… Dr. Laura shut it down in December 2004. The press release issued at the time didn’t say so, but one of the sticking points was that the business warehouse, package and then transship all the donated stuff to participating shelters. I saw that warehouse in Southern California and it was packed to the rafters. The problem was that business model didn’t really scale. The more successful they got, the higher their expenses grew. The foun...