Cause Marketing

My father’s brother died in Belgium fighting in the infamous Battle of the Bulge in 1945, one of the 19,000 or so Americans that died . His remains were initially interred in Belgium, but my grandparents requested that his body be brought back home to the United States. Even though he died decades before I was born I feel great kinship with Uncle Walter. He died childless, so every Memorial Day my family and I lay flowers on his grave and I tell my kids about his heroism. All told about 16 million American served during WWII and every day about 1,000 veterans die. To commemorate those who sacrificed so much and to remember America’s role in WWII, historian-author Stephen Ambrose championed the National World War II Museum. The first phase of the Museum opened in New Orleans in 2001. Now the museum is in the midst of a $300 million capital campaign that will enable it to triple in size, and you, my friends can help. For $200 you can buy a brick to memorialize a grandfather, uncle, aunt...

SupporterWall.com is an interactive grid wall that displays pictures and links to your website that you could use for fundraising for you nonprofit or crowd funding your business idea. Presently in beta, the individual grids sell for $100, $20 and $10. The donations from the beta wall go to SupporterWall. But when it comes out of beta the app will be released in three rounds, first to $100 donors, then $20 donors, then $10 donors. In effect, SupporterWall is crowd funding its own startup with the sale of an app that helps you crowd fund. It’s sorta like looking at your reflection in an infinity mirror. The money deposits into your PayPal account. SupporterWall is customizable and can be installed on your website. There’s no deadlines or timelines. Leave it up as long as you see fit. SupporterWall also has teeny-tiny little grids that it gives away for free. If you look really closely, you can see my photo on the top row of the freebies section in the 45th square from the left. That’s...

Today I got a call from an entrepreneur who had tried to do a deal with a prominent children’s charity that does a notable amount of cause-related marketing. He loved the cause… still does … but after two years time spent on the project it didn’t pan out, mainly because the minimums and the upfront fees the charity required to participate were two high for the entrepreneur’s budget. I understand why cause-related marketing charities have participation minimums or up-front fees. It’s a management issue. How do you manage a bunch of $10,000 (more or less) cause marketing campaigns? To a lesser degree it’s about keeping the cause's image in the main channels of the branding river. But I’ve taken a lot of calls like this over the last 15 years, as a consultant and as a nonprofit executive and staffer, and it’s been frustrating almost every time. I think it’s time for the big cause-related marketing charities to rethink their policies on participation minimums. And the thought-model I p...