Cause Marketing

With the 2004 publication of his landmark book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid in 2004 , C.K. Prahalad laid out the case for how technology… and new ways of thinking about customers and business models… could enable companies to deliver products and services of value to the four billion people across the globe who live on less than $2 a day. Companies like Hindustan Unilever are doing just that with great success. But is there a way that technology could do the same for cause marketing and philanthropic giving? A startup funded on Indigogo called CentUp is trying to do just that with a microgiving approach targeted at content developers and the people who support them. Here’s how it works: Producers, like me for instance, put the CentUp button in proximity to their content. The button acts as a like button. The user preloads some sum into their CentUp account and each CentUp like is releases a few pennies. Half goes to the provider, half to so-far unnamed charities. This i...

There are a handful of big ‘single-element' cause marketing campaigns that have been around for decades, and in their longevity they hold lessons for cause marketers everywhere. Today I'll review four of the very best and discuss what we can learn from them. First some caveats. I'm going to list four campaigns not because there are only four, but because any more than that would make this post unwieldy. Three-fourths of them are North American because frankly, I'm most familiar with them. The fourth... Red Nose Day... is from the UK. That's some of their publicity material on the left If you have examples from somewhere else that should be on this list, by all means leave a comment or email me at aldenkeene @ gmail dot com. I'd love to feature campaigns from other places. Here's how I determined my list. I looked at large-scale campaigns that have been around for at least 10 years, have broad appeal and have raised at least $50 million over their term. I eli...

In the UK a tombala is a revolving drum typically turned by hand and used in lotteries or raffles. Tombala also describes a small-scale lottery, like at a community event. Today we have two things in our tombala. The first is a campaign from Denmark that uses glass bottle recycling to raise money for nonprofits. The second is from Cox Communications in the United States that is part Yelp.com, part AngiesList.com and a fundraiser for charities at the same time. The Fortune at the Bottom of the Bottle As a kid growing up I earned money by taking glass bottles back to stores for the $.o5 cent deposit. The beverage bottling companies put the kibosh on bottle deposits in most of the 50 states (and worldwide, for that matter). Still 11 states have bottle deposits. Worldwide bottle deposit laws are in force in parts of Canada, parts of Australia, in Germany, Scandinavia and Denmark. Now in Denmark when you return bottles to the retailer Coop Denmark’s 14 Kvickly xtra stores, you can choose ...

We turn again to the icon campaign only this time an all-electronic version. It’s the season of St. Patrick’s Day in the United States and the Muscular Dystrophy Association is selling their paper Shamrocks in stores and other retail locations. I saw them advertised as a top banner ad on the website of my local newspaper. I clicked on the ad and it took me to a secure page on the MDA website . It took forever to download, but in time a video appeared featuring a short performance from by singer Ace Young from their telethon. Young, a former American Idol finalist, then made a call to action to support the MDA by buying an electronic version of their Shamrock in $5 or $10 amounts, or more. Some of the traffic comes from Young’s Myspace page and he addresses those fans directly in the script. MDA also has a Myspace page and counts Young as a friend. Like all icon campaigns this is “ fortune at the bottom of the pyramid ” type fundraising, but for MDA an 'e-Shamrock' is vastl...

Go Bulldogs! After my interview with Jessica Bennett of Newsweek several weeks back, I was astonished when another journalist approached me for an interview, this time a student from the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia in lovely Athens. Having trained as a journalist myself, I could hardly turn down the request from Cathryn McIntosh. This time I've redacted the interview a little. Ms. McIntosh asked several personal questions which I can't believe too many of my readers are interested in. What follows are the first half of Ms. McIntosh's questions in italics and my answers. I'll post the remaining half on Thursday. How do you think cause marketing is affecting social/political activism in America today? I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer this question. There are certainly people who think of cause marketing as shilling for immoral and faceless corporations. Others see cause marketing as a bald attempt to increase consumerism and there...

Fortunes at the Bottom of the Pyramid The four campaigns we talked about in Thursday’s post are all classic examples of ‘the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid’ thinking. The book of the same name by University of Michigan scholar C.K. Prahalad , lays out how technology… and new ways of thinking about customers… can enable companies to deliver products and services of value to the four billion people across the globe who live on less than $2 a day. In a similar way, these four single-element campaigns raise big money, not by asking for large donations, but by asking for small ones. The US Postal Service Breast Cancer Semipostal Stamp generates just six pennies at a pop! The BoxTops for Education campaign from General Mills just 10 cents. Needless to say, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom in fundraising which goes something like this: ‘it’s just as much work to ask for a modest donation as a big one, so you might as well ask for a big one.’ In other words, focus on the to...