A Complicated Way to Give Customers a Choice in their Cause Marketing Donation

A developing trend in cause marketing is giving customers the choice of what cause their cause marketing and Peachy Airport Parking in Atlanta has an interesting, but complicated take on it.

Make a reservation and then redeem via it one of three custom links to Peachy’s website and a donation is made to one of three Atlanta-Area women’s charities: the Atlanta Women’s Foundation, the YWCA of Greater Atlanta, and the Commercial Real Estate Women of Atlanta, aka CREW.

Why women’s causes? “Since we opened our brand new facility in January 2012, we have found that over 60 percent of our customers were women,” says Alex M. Chaves, Peachy’s CEO. “We think the reason for this is that our facility is one of the most convenient, secure and comfortable parking for travelers in Atlanta.

Each charity has its own link.

http://www.peachyairportparking.com/partner/atlanta-womens-foundation/
http://www.peachyairportparking.com/partner/ywca/
http://www.peachyairportparking.com/partner/crew-atlanta/

Peachy serves Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the world’s busiest airport in terms of both passenger traffic and number of flights. The rates Peachy offers through this promotion are $0.49 cheaper than their normal daily parking rates.

Here’s the complicated part. For the first 200 reservations redeemed via the link, the charity gets $1,000. For the next 125 redeemed reservations, they get another $1,500. Each additional 125 redeemed reservations garners the charity another $1,500, up to a max donation of $10,000.

Cause marketing is about using leverage to motivate certain behavior, but I’m struggling to understand what specific behavior Peachy is trying to encourage with this two-stage effort.

Also, it isn’t clear from the press release whether the cap applied to all three charities or just one. That is, I can’t tell if Peachy’s total donation to all three charities is capped at $10,000 or $30,000. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find the directed reservation links on Peachy’s public website. The links above are from the press release dated Nov. 11, 2012.

No word on how they’re activating it, aside from PR. Since the reservation has to take place online in order to direct the donation properly, I assume that Peachy is activating this online and/or via email. It could be the three charities are driving the activation through their own networks. But you’d still expect to see Peachy mention it on its own website.

You try not complicate cause marketing campaigns because you can never count on people staying with you long enough to figure out the offer.

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