Cause Marketing You Can Sew Believe In

Cecily Eastwood of Oxfordshire, England was teaching school in Kitwe, Zambia when, just a few months into her gap year, the 19-year-old was tragically killed in a road accident.

In her memory, her parents established Cecily’s Fund, a registered charity which works to support the education of children orphaned by AIDS in and around Kitwe.

In support of the nonprofit called American Friends of Cecily’s Fund, the February 2010 issue of the magazine Sew News invited readers to sew and embroider grocery-store style totes according to a pattern provided online, and then send them to the charity’s US operations to be sold as a fundraiser. (Sew News does a charitable campaign like this yearly. In 2011 they're asking readers to sew lap quilts to benefit the Alzheimer's Association.)

I can imagine buying a handmade tote like this for my wife or daughters.

The goal was to create 1,000 totes. I couldn’t find any word on whether or not they hit their mark.

My heart loves this simple grassroots cause marketing effort, so emblematic of what’s right in this world. The people that participate have talent, fabric, a sewing machine, and time, and they give of themselves in a way that that is genuine, earnest, and wonderfully noncommercial.

There’s hope for a world that has people who sit down at their sewing tables to sew little acts of love like these totes.

But my head swims at the thought of 1,000 or so people sewing and then spending $4-$5 to ship their totes so that it could sell for, what, $20? I can imagine some that won’t sell at all. For that matter I can’t imagine how they will sell any of them.

The website of American Friends of Cecily’s Fund doesn’t have the horsepower to describe and display pictures of 1,000 totes. You certainly wouldn’t want to commoditize the totes by treating them as though they were interchangeable. After all, the point of the exercise is that the totes are all handmade and hand-decorated. One of the things Sew News called on readers to do was sew or embroider by hand Cecily’s Fund's simple logo on the tote.

Does American Friends of Cecily’s Fund sell the bags at arts and crafts fairs? If so they’d almost certainly have to pay a fee along with a percentage of the gross sales, cutting into the donation amount. They might get the totes in retail, but they'd have to give up half the retail price to the store. Plus, outside of the context of the cause, people probably wouldn't pay as much.

Maybe they sell them at American Friends of Cecily’s Fund events. But 1,000 bags would be quite a few for a small cause to swallow and liquidate even over the course of a year.

My heart wants to love this authentic and heartfelt effort. My head just won’t let it. So I’ll have to be satisfied by saying thank God for the good and decent people of this people world who respond to appeals like this.

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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