Cause Marketing

On the Horns of a Dilemma The August issue of Costco’s member magazine, “The Costco Connection,” features a short story about the retailer’s longstanding commitment to children’s hospitals, with a special emphasis on Seattle Children’s Hospital and Medical Center. Since 1989, the article points out, Costco has raised more than $30 million for Seattle Children’s and an unstated amount for 24 other children’s hospitals in North America. Now for the rest of the story. Seattle Children’s Hospital is part of Children’s Miracle Network (CMN), which raises more than $225 million a year on behalf of its 170 affiliated hospitals in the United States and Canada. As CMN proudly points out, most of the best children’s hospitals in North America’s are affiliated with CMN. One of the things CMN asks of its participating hospitals is that when they land a sponsor which could become a regional or national sponsor that they share. A goodly number of CMN’s largest national sponsors were brought on in ...