Cause Marketing

A new Internet browser plug-in will tell you if a product you’re looking at on an online retailer uses child labor in its production. Called aVOID , it currently works with the Safari and Chrome browsers and will soon be available for Firefox. The plugin, whose creation was made possible by the German company Earthlink, works with many of the major online retailers in Germany, France, the U.K and the United States, including Asos, Yoox, Amazon, Target, Macys, Zalando, Google Shopping, Frontlineshop and Otto. If your German is better than mine, you can also read here a list of companies and how they rank in terms of utilization of child labor in the manufacture of various product lines. The plugin draws on a database provided by the cause Active Against Child Labour. Back in November 2011, after reading the horrifying book “Half the Sky” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, I committed to help the plight of girls and women in the developing world with this blog and in other ways. ...

There's just a few more donation days before Christmas for your local food bank... or Toys for Tots, or Sub for Santa, or the Salvation Army’s Giving Tree... and this ad that appeared in a Walgreen sales flyer in late November made me wonder about the business value to a retailer or firm of serving as a drop-off point. Here’s what I came up with: Publicity Walgreens got a little positive publicity from the Ellen DeGeneres Show. You might get something similar in your local market if your local Giving Tree or Sub for Santa effort has media sponsorship. New Sales Walgreens put the ad on the same page as a spread of fairly inexpensive toys, the subconscious message being that if you’re of the mind to do so, you could just buy one or more of these toys and deposit it in the collection barrel. Likewise, if you’re outlet is a grocery store, someone could certainly add a couple extra cans of tuna or chili con carne to their shopping cart and drop them off in the food bank’s bin on your wa...

Been going through my voluminous electronic files of studies about cause marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and I came across again a 2008 poll of corporate communicators that found they want their companies to engage in more CSR; they just can’t come up with a good business reason for doing so or decide who should drive it. The poll, from Ragan Communications and Pollstream follows a 2008 study from IBM ( covered in this space ), that reported that corporate executives want to see more CSR, too, and were devoting resources to it. The poll was part of a series from Ragan that regularly queries some 425+ corporate communicators in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. The communicators split almost evenly over the issue of who should run a company’s CSR efforts. Just about 50 percent said it should be a standalone department that reports directly to the CEO. The other 50 percent said CSR should fall under either media relations, internal communi...

Starting today you can use the We&Co smartphone app to thank firefighters, police officers and other first responders who distinguished themselves by their bravery, sacrifice and service during the attacks of 9/11 ten years ago in partnership with The New York Says Thank You Foundation . The goal is to generate 10,000 ‘thanks’ through the We&Co app . We&Co is a location-based mobile app in the vein of Foursquare or Yelp. Only instead of rallying to sites to collect badges or grade meals, We&Co helps you to rate favorite service providers: a barista, stylist, bartender, waitress, and the like. We&Co takes the emphasis off the place and puts it on the people. It’s the anti-Groupon, We&Co co-founder Jared Malan told Good, because instead of being drawn by discount prices people will come to establishments for outstanding service. Service providers end up with their own ratings, which has the potential to become a kind of social currency. For that reason We...

This post is about teen sex (or abstinence therefrom), although this blogger is not talking about the sketchy MTV drama series Skins . Instead this post is about an advocacy cause marketing campaign from The Candies Foundation , “a non-profit organization that works to shape the way youth in America think about teen pregnancy and parenthood.” Candies , for whom the Foundation is named, is a teen fashion brand. The Foundation is against teen pregnancy and advocates for both sexual abstinence and protected sex among teens, which is usually set as a dichotomy in the American culture. You can see how that plays out in this PSA from the Foundation featuring teen mom Bristol Palin, who campaigns for abstinence and Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino who says he is all about protected sex. The Foundation’s campaigns run in teen magazines and youth electronic media. The ad above, from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, ran in the May 31, 2010 issue of J14 magazine. That's Bristol Pali...