Cause Marketing

The first two things I can remember doing for causes as a kid was to sell Scout-A-Rama tickets and walk in the March of Dimes’ WalkAmerica, now called March for Babies. (Back then, I kid you not, the walk was 20 miles!) Plenty of causes have borrowed liberally from the March of Dimes walk events. March of Dimes, in turn, owes a debt of gratitude to the German Volksmarsch . Now a group called KindWalk enables you to create a DIY… ‘do it yourself’… walk for the cause of your choice. Here’s how KindWalk works. You sign up for an individual membership at the website for $18 a year. You get a pedometer plus a raft of other benefits. They also have a second membership level for $51 that includes a pedometer with a USB port so you can download walk data directly to your account. Membership benefits include: Interactive Fitness and Nutrition Planner Weekly Recipes and Grocery Lists Monthly Wellness Newsletters Interactive Weight Tracker Smoking Cessation Resources Health Risk Assessm...

The Summer 2011 Outdoor Retailer Show attracts something close to 25,000 people… about the population of a small city… and puts them in a space about the size of 2 city blocks square. Several cause marketers realized it was also a good time to do a little cause marketing to a densely populated and captive audience. Gerber, the knife maker repeated a promotion in ran in January 2011 at the SHOT (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) Show in Las Vegas by selling a knife branded to TV adventurer Bear Grylls and benefiting the Boy Scouts of America. Buy the pocket knife for $10 and proceeds benefit the BSA. Columbia Sports Wear held six fashion shows during the 2011 show featuring willowy models and its tech-savvy outdoor wear. When you Tweeted a picture from one of the shows and included the hashtag #ORshowCA, they made a $5 donation to the Conservation Alliance . Almost any trade show could do similar cause marketing promotions. Here’s my good friend Scott Welch from Columbia exp...

Bear Grylls, the eat-anything host of the Discovery Channel’s hit show Man vs. Wild (called Born Survivor in the U.K.), recently endorsed a compact knife for Boy Scouts, sold by American knife maker Gerber. A special sale of the knife at the SHOT Show (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) in January 2011 in Las Vegas generated $22,000 for the Cascade Pacific Council in Northwest Oregon, where Gerber is headquartered. I saw the item in Outdoor USA Magazine ... seen in the upper right hand column... a trade publication for the outdoor retailing industry, and was just a little surprised. Not by Bear Grylls endorsing a product; the adventurer has been pitching stuff in the U.K for years. I’m not surprised by the Boy Scout connection; he’s the Chief Scout of The Scout Association in the U.K., the youngest person to ever hold that position. What surprised me was that Gerber did a cause marketing campaign for the Boy Scouts, which has been rather outré for more than a decade now. While 110 mill...