Reporting Back Cause Marketing Results Via Public Relations

This week is all about thanking supporters and reporting the results of cause marketing efforts. On Tuesday, the post was about using advertising to report back. Today’s post is about using public relations or PR.

We-Care.com is a shopping portal wherein some 2,500 merchants offer a percentage of your purchase to one of thousands of registered causes when you start at We-Care.com. The amount of the donation runs from one percent of your purchase to more than 10 percent depending on the merchant and the offer.

In turn, We-Care.com picks one cause every month to support, saying “a percentage of all purchases made through this site will help the current Cause of the Month.”

Ignore the weak percent of all purchases language for a minute. In Dec 2012, We-Care.com gave $38,255.17 to the AIDS Research Alliance. And what will the ARA do with the money? “It will be able to conduct the eight leukapheresis experiments necessary for the advancement of its promising HIV cure research,” says a press release issued by the ARA and dated Feb 28, 2013.

“Prostratin, ARA’s cure strategy,” the release continues, “is a promising drug candidate that could expose latent HIV in cell reservoirs. In an HIV-positive body, the virus hides in reservoirs, inhibiting the effectiveness of current drug therapies. A persistent obstacle in curing HIV/AIDS is drawing the virus out of these reservoirs to rid the body of the virus.”

This is a press release with real meat on the bone. It advances the cause of ARA’s approach to treating or even curing HIV/AIDS. It wasn’t just a picture of the giant check from We-Care.com and a bunch of smiling employees, although the release also featured exactly that.

This is how to thank someone and demonstrate that the money will be well spent.

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