Cause Marketing Circa 2022

The current issue of Fortune magazine, modestly called 'The Future Issue,' examines what the world and the world of business will be like ten years hence in 2022.

Fortune’s prognosticators see video projected on every window surface, 3-D printers on every desktop, smart holographic table tops as in the movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, real-time subtitles for teleconferences, and apps that help you put together your ideal office work group. (That's an Eden 3D printer on the left, although it's not exactly a desktop model.)

Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of nonprofits, although Fortune does see people working later in life thanks to new miracle drugs and treatments for chronic conditions like arthritis. Great, I get to work for years to come!

But it set me to thinking; what’s the 10-year future of cause marketing, nonprofit fundraising and corporate social responsibility?

I put on my Merlin cap and came up with these three ideas:

Big Data and Cause Marketing. Fortune raises the idea of ‘big data,’ which means making sense out of all the data points that your mobile devices generate. Your phone collects tons of data having to do with time and place. In the near future when your phone is also your digital wallet, it will generate even more data. Part of that data will be records of you buying Campbell’s soup instead of Lipton, buying a bracelet at Starbucks that supports some cause. In 2022 a new kind of mathematician/marketer will parse all this data and deliver to your phone cause marketing offers customized distinctly to your behavior and preferences.

Honesty Machines. In the near future competitors, advocacy groups, government agencies and others will be able to deploy mobile machines able to accurately and remotely monitor smokestack emissions. Or the amount of CO2 released at airport taxi stands by idling taxis. Or the amount of offal generated by factory farms. Think of them as lie detectors for your business. By 2022 corporate social responsibility won’t be a matter of self-reporting any more. Independent groups and agencies will do the reporting and they will catch the liars and the fibbers.

Crowd-Sourcing Your Idle Hours for a Cause. Crowd-sourcing has been going on in nonprofits for several years now. Think about how amateur birders, for instance, currently help to complete population counts for university researchers, the Audubon Society or the state fish and game services. But by 2022 it will all the more convenient. Imagine, for example, that you’re jetting off to Seattle for a meeting and your smart phone knows that you... an amateur astronomer... have time to help The Royal Astronomical Society identify potential planets in distant star systems while you’re on the plane. It will route to your mobile device screens of space for you to review and analyze.

What do you see in 10 years for cause marketing? Please comment below.

Top Eight Cause-Related Marketing Campaigns of 2007

Yeah, You Read it Right. It's a Top 8 List.

More cause-related marketing campaigns are unveiled every day across the world than I review in a year at the cause-related marketing blog. And, frankly, I don’t see very many campaigns from outside North America. So I won’t pretend that my annual list of the top cause-related marketing campaigns is exhaustive.

But, like any other self-respecting blogger, I won’t let my superficial purview stop me from drawing my own tortured conclusions!

So… cue the drumroll (and the dismissive snickers)… without further ado, here is my list of the eight best cause-related marketing campaigns of 2007.

My list of the worst cause-related marketing campaigns of 2007 follows on Thursday.

Chilis and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
I was delighted by the scope of Chilis’ campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As you walked in you saw the servers adorned in black co-branded shirts. Other elements included message points on the Chilis beverage coas…

Cause-Related Marketing Meets Microfinance

Kiva.org and Advanta.com Mix it Up

You’d have had to have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia the last year or so to have missed the run up of microfinance. Between 2004 and 2006 more than $4 billion of capital flowed into microfinance institutions. All told experts say the total loan microfinance loan portfolio may be as much as $12.5 billion. And of course the father of microfinance, Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Microfinance is now so respectable, so effective, (so profitable!) that it’s already enjoying its first global backlash.

Actually that first sentence is hyperbole. Because even in Ulaanbaatar… far from almost anywhere on the vast, frigid steppes of Mongolia… microfinance is thriving such that the earliest recipients of micro loans there are now complaining about taxes and government bureaucracy! And May 29-31, 2008 the Conference of Microfinance Institutions will convene in Ulaanbaatar, the eleventh such annual conference.
Now Advanta, a credit card issuer to small…

Cause Marketing Beer with BOGO, Brew One Give One

On Monday’s post I touched on the topic of telling people what your cause marketing campaign accomplished when completed. I’ve recommended this approach to clients as a way to keep open the lines of communication with customers and clients and to get extra value from the campaign.

In other words, you’ll want to hold back some of the promotion’s budget to continue to activate the effort until the very end.

But what if that really cuts across the grain in your organization? What if it’s just not in your corporate DNA to do anything but to frontload your cause marketing activation? Well, then, add the report back to the activation of your next cause marketing effort.

New Belgium Brewing of Ft. Collins, Colorado, said to be the seventh largest brewery in the United States, did just that with this ad in Sunset magazine. I found this ad in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database.

New Belgium donates $1 for every barrel it brews and sells. It’s a BOGO cause marketing effort, Buy One Give One. …

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