Skip to main content

Cause Marketing Your Athletic Performance

In the 1926 World Series Babe Ruth heard about 11-year-old Johnny Sylvester, a New York boy who had been hurt in an accident and was in the hospital desperately ill. The Babe rushed to the hospital to visit Sylvester and promised to hit a home run on his behalf. The next day the Sultan of Swat hit not one but three home runs for the youngster. Sylvester rallied, went to Princeton, served in World War II, had a successful business career, and died in 1990 at the age of 74, a lifelong Yankee fan.

(That's Johnny and the Babe at the left).

Good causes, it seems to the founders of New York City-based company Charity Bets, can be a terrific performance enhancers.

Now Charity Bets is betting that people are willing to wager their athleticism against their friends' scepticism!

Here’s how it works: You set a performance goal for a race event; triathlon, marathon, bike race, 10K, etc. Then you solicit pledges from your network of friends that you’re willing to bet them that you’ll hit some performance measure; finish in the top three, say.

Charity Bets calls that a progressive donation.

After you certify the results, Charity Bets duns the people who made a pledge and pays the charity. They currently work with more than 50 charities.

Charity Bets also takes over/under donations, and rep-based donations. A rep-based donation is based on the number of reps you do; say bench presses. An over/under donation pays more if you achieve some high mark. For instance, an over/under donation might generate $100 if you break the 3-hour mark in a marathon but only $5 if you run it in more than 3 hours.

In a sense, this is a more democratized version of one those promotions your local pro sports team does whereby a local sponsor offers $50 to the children’s hospital for every three-pointer hit during the season. Or $100 to the Ronald McDonald House for every touchdown scored during a game after the first 30 points.

Except that it’s hard to imagine that when Tom Brady is slinging touchdown passes that he cares whether or not the local State Farm Insurance agents group has to pony up a few hundred extra bucks to the Jimmy Fund.

But if you’re running along in a marathon and you hit the wall, the knowledge that if you can beat your performance goal that your buddies will have to pay a steeper price to your favorite charity might just be enough to help you power through.

Performance incentives really do work.

Tom Brady almost certainly has performance incentives of his own: games won; number of touchdown passes versus interceptions; fourth-quarter comebacks; number of times he and his wife model Gisele Bundchen show up in GQ magazine; etc.

One thing glaringly missing from Charity Bets is an easy way to contact and solicit your network. You could cobble together something with Crowdrise, the focus of yesterday’s post.

But Charity Bets’ business model would be greatly enhanced by the addition of social networking platform.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Batting Your Eyelashes at Prescription Drug Cause Marketing

I’m a little chary about making sweeping pronouncements, but I believe I've just seen the first cause marketing promotion in the U.S. involving a prescription drug. The drug is from Allergan and it’s called Latisse , “the first and only FDA-approved prescription treatment for inadequate or not enough eyelashes.” The medical name for this condition is hypotrichosis. Latisse is lifestyle drug the way Viagra or Propecia are. That is, no one’s going to die (except, perhaps, of embarrassment) if their erectile dysfunction or male pattern baldness or thin eyelashes go untreated. Which means the positioning for a product like Latisse is a little tricky. Allergan could have gone with the sexy route as with Viagra or Cialis and showed lovely women batting their new longer, thicker, darker eyelashes. But I’ll bet that approach didn’t test well with women. (I’m reminded of a joke about the Cialis ads from a comedian whose name I can’t recall. He said, “Hey if my erection lasts longer than ...
4 comments
Read more

Cause Marketing: The All Packaging Edition

One way to activate a cause marketing campaign when the sponsor sells a physical product is on the packaging. I started my career in cause marketing on the charity side and I can tell you that back in the day we were thrilled to get a logo on pack of a consumer packaged good (CPG) or even just a mention. Since then, there’s been a welcome evolution of what sponsors are willing and able to do with their packaging in order to activate their cause sponsorships. That said, even today some sponsors don’t seem to have gotten the memo that when it comes to explaining your cause campaign, more really is more, even on something as small as a can or bottle. The savviest sponsors realize that their only guaranteed means of reaching actual customers with a cause marketing message is by putting it on packaging. And the reach and frequency of the media on packaging for certain high-volume CPG items is almost certainly greater than radio, print or outdoor advertising, and, in many cases, TV. More to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chili’s and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

I was in Chili’s today and I ordered their “Triple-Dipper,” a three appetizer combo. While I waited for the food, I noticed another kind of combo. Chili’s is doing a full-featured cause-related marketing campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. There was a four-sided laminated table tent outlining the campaign on the table. When the waitress brought the drinks she slapped down Chili’s trademark square paper beverage coasters and on them was a call to action for an element of the campaign called ‘Create-A-Pepper,’ a kind of paper icon campaign. The wait staff was all attired in black shirts co-branded with Chili’s and St. Jude. The Create-A-Pepper paper icon could be found in a stack behind the hostess area. The Peppers are outlines of Chili’s iconic logo meant to be colored. I paid $1 for mine, but they would have taken $5, $10, or more. The crayons, too, were co-branded with the ‘Create-A-Pepper’ and St. Jude’s logos. There’s also creatapepper.com, a microsite, but again wi...
11 comments
Read more