Cause Marketing

Cause marketing, like all forms of sponsorship, requires activation, or promotion of the campaign in some form. Imagine, then, how sweet it is when you sign one or more members of the media as a campaign sponsor. It’s a little like coming home every night to Giselle Bundchen (or, if you prefer, Tom Brady). Too bad the media sponsor in an effort benefiting the Red Dress campaign didn’t take a few extra steps to ensure that the campaign had a second life. The Red Dress Awards have been sponsored for the last 10 years by Woman’s Day magazine, the Hachette Filipacci title with a circulation of almost 4 million readers. The Red Dress campaign is a sprawling effort held each February to raise awareness of heart disease among woman. Heart disease is far and away the deadliest killer of women in the United States. Red Dress efforts are spearheaded jointly, but separately by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. In 2010 the Red Dress Awards benefited the L...

An ad in the May 2010 issue of the 'Yoga Journal' offered an unspecified donation to a yoga charity when you bought a pair of yoga pants from Lucy.com. The donation went to Off the Mat, Into the World, a nonprofit co-founded by the model in the ad, Seane Corn. The ad now resides in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. ‘Off the Mat’ is a fun name, suggesting that there’s other things in life that reward the participant in addition to yoga. So what does Off the Mat do? The ad says OTM’s mission is “inspiring conscious, sustainable community service through the power of yoga.” I know what community service is and I understand the words conscious and sustainable in a broad way. But when they’re all combined in that sentence it seems like nonsense. It’s hard to imagine 'unconscious community service,' for instance. In this sentence it’s as though plain English got tied up like a pretzel. I suspect that for many of the readers of Yoga Journal words like conscious and sus...

Although I surely come off as a homme du monde and maybe even a bon vivant, I confess that I spent the first nine years of my life at the edge of a tiny desert hamlet in the American Southwest where I lived across a dirt road from a large cotton field. I lived so close to the field and far enough from town that many’s the morning I was awoken by crop duster airplanes. My family had been city-folk for three generations before me. Still, as a boy I envied the handsome blue corduroy jackets worn by the members of the Future Farmer’s of America (FFA). I missed this campaign from Campbell’s in 2009 and 2010 benefiting the FFA. But I came across it while working on the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. And though Campbell’s hasn’t renewed the campaign, it’s one of my favorite cause marketing efforts of all time. Called Help Grow Your Soup, in 2010 the campaign restored five barns… chosen by popular vote by people inputting Campbell's Soup UPC codes… in Michigan, Indiana, Maryland and...

One of the first business categories to really adopt cause marketing was consumer packaged goods. Those early CPG promotions frequently went something like this: The sponsor would run an ad in a free-standing insert or FSI, which are those booklets of coupons that drop in local newspapers once a week or so. The donation was based on the number of coupons consumers redeemed. So the pitch was, 'get cents off your purchase while some more cents go to a cause.' Naturally, the FSIs served as the principal form of activation for the promotion Now Naked Juice, a consumer packaged goods company with a long history of cause marketing, is activating their current effort via social media. At left is their Twitter page. About every fifth tweet is one that features the #gooddeeds hashtag. They switch up the wording, but all the tweets with the #gooddeeds hashtag mention that you can get a coupon at nakedjuice.com/gooddeeds. Point your browser there and up pops a $1-off printable coupon....

Imagine that a sponsor and a cause engage in a sincere and well-meant cause marketing activity and out of carelessness they word the offer poorly in the activation materials. Perhaps the amount being donated is really oblique or seems to suggest something that isn’t true. And then some enterprising attorney launches lawsuit and he or she finds a sympathetic judge to certify it as a class-action. This very scenario came up in a discussion group at the Cause Academy convocation last week in Scottsdale, Arizona. On this topic, we concluded two things as a group: That it will probably happen in the near future That it will have the effect of ensuring that cause marketers everywhere make their campaigns more transparent In my view, it will also have a chilling effect on cause marketing as a whole. Here’s why: Some of the biggest charities, names we all know, are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve. There are many legitimate reasons why nonprofits keep money in reser...

This week is all about thanking supporters and reporting the results of cause marketing efforts. On Tuesday, the post was about using advertising to report back. Today’s post is about using public relations or PR. We-Care.com is a shopping portal wherein some 2,500 merchants offer a percentage of your purchase to one of thousands of registered causes when you start at We-Care.com. The amount of the donation runs from one percent of your purchase to more than 10 percent depending on the merchant and the offer. In turn, We-Care.com picks one cause every month to support, saying “a percentage of all purchases made through this site will help the current Cause of the Month.” Ignore the weak percent of all purchases language for a minute. In Dec 2012, We-Care.com gave $38,255.17 to the AIDS Research Alliance. And what will the ARA do with the money? “It will be able to conduct the eight leukapheresis experiments necessary for the advancement of its promising HIV cure research,” says a press...

On Monday’s post I touched on the topic of telling people what your cause marketing campaign accomplished when completed. I’ve recommended this approach to clients as a way to keep open the lines of communication with customers and clients and to get extra value from the campaign. In other words, you’ll want to hold back some of the promotion’s budget to continue to activate the effort until the very end. But what if that really cuts across the grain in your organization? What if it’s just not in your corporate DNA to do anything but to frontload your cause marketing activation? Well, then, add the report back to the activation of your next cause marketing effort. New Belgium Brewing of Ft. Collins, Colorado, said to be the seventh largest brewery in the United States, did just that with this ad in Sunset magazine. I found this ad in the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. New Belgium donates $1 for every barrel it brews and sells. It’s a BOGO cause marketing effort, Buy One Give On...

Nowadays when every brand has a YouTube channel, and pages on Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook, it’s easy to think that when you activate your cause marketing on a social  network that you’re done. Not so fast, Twitter-breath. You still need to reach customers and prospects where they are and that can mean activating cause marketing on packaging, signage, and yes, placemats. Black Bear Diner, a franchise with 56 locations in nine western states, went old school to help activate its Dec 2012 effort for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Black Bear Diner is one of those places where the ample portion sizes seem just about right for NFL linemen. In the promotion Black Bear sold Make-A-Wish’s star-shaped paper icons (aka pinups) and donated $1 for each dessert sold from a select list. The total donation was capped at $50,000. Using paper placemats was the right approach for this cause marketing activation. After all, once a patron is in the restaurant, the best way to reach them isn’t via G...

The most common way to activate or promote your cause marketing campaign is via public relations. If your firm has complications like multiple locations doing the same cause marketing promotion at the same time then your PR crew has a responsibility to step up their game. Here’s what happened instead from the franchisor of SIGNARAMA, the world’s largest sign franchise with nearly 900 locations in 50 countries. Some number of SIGNARAMA stores do a cause marketing style promotion called Signs of Support whereby they make in-kind donations worth as much as $10,000 to local causes in their service area. So how does SIGNARAMA corporate parent activate this effort? With the same press release in each market, released on the same date over the same PR wire. At left is proof. There are three press releases for SIGNARAMA stores in Edmonton, Alberta, Peterborough, Ontario, and Louisville, Kentucky all with exactly the same leads or first paragraphs. They differ in the second paragraph, but the...

Back in December I took note of a grocery chain circular that had aggregated several cause marketing efforts onto one page and asked, rhetorically, whether it was a good idea or not. Further, I asked where are the marketing theories to give some guidance on whether a company that does multiple and coinciding cause marketing promotions, as this chain did, was right to combine them or was better to keep them separate and distinct. I’m here now with own crackpot theory, borrowed from the field of education and informed by octogenarian educator and literary critic E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch is perhaps best known as the author of the book Cultural Literacy and a founder of the Core Knowledge movement. In a recent essay called ‘A Wealth of Words,’ Hirsch makes the case that receding economic equality in the United States can be laid at the feet of declining student vocabulary size. “Vocabulary size,” writes Hirsch in the City Journal, “is a convenient proxy for a whole range of education...

At SXSW in 2012, an ad agency with both cheek and enterprise turned Austin-area homeless people into 4G hotspots. The homeless people made $20 a day, plus tips. The stunt generated tons of publicity, much of it mixed. I suspect/hope some of the homeless folks made bank during the run of SXSW. Too bad they didn’t end their time at SXSW with something more lasting. Now Wavespot, a provider of Wi-Fi solutions for small business, is offering your nonprofit a free Wi-Fi hotspot, a $1200 value, just for signing up . And this offer does leave nonprofits with something more lasting. Wavespot makes its money selling its ‘marketing router,’ as they put it, to small and medium sized businesses. To access the Wi-Fi, you have to like the provider’s Facebook page or Follow it on Twitter. So you can get free Wi-Fi in that indie coffee shop you like so much, so long as you connect with it via one of the two most prominent social networks. The same rules apply nonprofits that offer free Wi-Fi via a ...

In this season of the year, it’s easy for a retailer to be involved in two or three or even more cause promotions at the same time. But when you activate these promotions should you aggregate them together, or spread them around? Case in point is this recent weekly flyer from a local grocery chain with 24 outlets called Fresh Market. On the top left is their paper icon campaign, which is meant to deliver a holiday meal to families in need. To its right is an announcement that Fresh Market stores serve as a drop-off point for Toys for Tots. Below that is a vendor program from Kraft that Fresh Market participates in and which benefits local food banks. Now, plainly, someone from Fresh Market decided to group all these cause promotions together on one page, since the full flyer was six pages long. But is aggregating them the right approach? So much of what this blog is about is activating cause marketing promotions. But I confess that I have no idea whether Fresh Market got this right o...

Share Our Strength reports that its one-day ‘Dine Out No Kid Hungry’ campaign at a number of the nation’s restaurants on Sept. 8, 2012 generated more than $5 million, more than twice last year’s total. Regular readers know that I like to report the results of campaigns when they’re available. No Kid Hungry is year-round anti-child hunger effort that concentrates on improving access to existing childhood nutrition programs, educating low-income families on how to stretch their food dollars, and raising public awareness on the issue of child hunger. Dine Out No Kid Hungry was a one-day effort at 292 restaurants across the spectrum and representing 8,200 locations nationwide. Notable chains included Arby’s, Bruegger’s Bagels, Denny’s, Fuddruckers, Corner Bakery Café, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, and others. By itself, the Arby’s chain generated $2.5 million for the effort. I remember Arby’s activated its sponsorship in its weekly fliers , see at left. Share Our Strength activated the campa...

The image you choose to illustrate a cause marketing campaign matters. A lot. That’s because very few people in the United State from ages 25-45 really read anymore. But a cause marketing activation in print requires literacy. So the job of the illustration... along with the headline... is to draw people in for the explanation. The images are no less important in cause marketing activations online or on video. In general terms cause marketing activation refers to how you promote the campaign. Witness then the illustration in this effort from Massage Envy for their Healing Hands for Arthritis promotion coming up on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012. On that day, Massage Envy will give $10 from every massage and facial to the Arthritis Foundation. In addition, on Sept. 19 Murad will donate 10 percent of sales of its skincare products sold at Massage Envy locations. Massage Envy is a franchise with more than 700 locations in 43 states. Its business model is like that of a health club. Membershi...

Back in the day, one of the things I put in proposals to potential sponsors was that cause marketing helped you stand out from competitors. Nowadays, in certain competitive industries like consumer packaged goods (CPG) one way to emerge from the clutter is to NOT do cause marketing. That is to say, cause marketing has become such a pervasive way of doing business that consumers expect it. So if you don't do cause marketing in competitive sectors like CPG, it becomes very noticeable, and not in a good way. So corporate marketers might rightly ask, as one did Tuesday night, “with so many of my competitors doing cause marketing, how can I make my brands emerge from the clutter?” Three quick thoughts: Do it right . There’s still much more bad cause marketing than good. Either it’s overly complicated, not very transparent, the match with the cause(s) is hard to fathom, the donation amount is wrong, the campaign is activated inadequately, the MacGuffin is missing, etc. The first t...

On July 20, 2012 in a post on cause marketing activated on packaging I wrote this: “Regular readers know how much I like activating cause marketing on packaging. That’s because once someone is in the store, the last opportunity you have to reach them with a cause marketing appeal is when they see it on the packaging.” That was rational reasoning and long experience talking. Now a new study I came across from POPAI, the global association for marketing at retail, confirms my rationale. Called, the 2012 Shopper Engagement Study , the research finds that 76 percent of Americans make their decisions about what they’ll buy once they’re in the store. That’s up from 70 percent in 1995. What to conclude from that tidbit? Here’s what POPAI writes in their topline report : “When we look at the data from POPAI’s series of long running shopper research projects aimed at providing new information on how shoppers behave when they are in different types of stores deciding which categories and ...

If you’re a restaurant, even in the quick-service category, it’s hard to imagine a transactional cause marketing campaign you could launch more easily or quickly than a dessert promotion. When a customer buys a slice of cake, pie, a baked Alaska (see at left), or some other dessert, you make a donation of some amount to your cause partner; $1 is a nice round number. In most cases you wouldn’t want to promote a salad or a main course. At a sit-down restaurant most customers come into your establishment to order an entrée and in many cases you probably give them a salad with the entrée. If the goal is to increase you average ticket price, cause marketing the entrée probably isn't the ticket. But with an appetizer, drink or dessert promotion you could quite possibly raise the average ticket price by several dollars. Drinks have very high margins, of course, and consequently they are often featured in cause marketing promotions. Most of the cause marketing around mixed drinks that I’...

In 2010 Kroger sold 24 packs of their house-brand water in ½ liter bottles benefiting their breast cancer effort, Giving Hope a Hand. The top was pink and the side panels featured stories of Kroger employees who’d successfully fought breast cancer. Now Brawny, the Georgia-Pacific brand of paper towels, has taken a page from Kroger and produced a limited-edition 8-roll pack co-branded with The Wounded Warrior Project that tells the charity’s story. The campaign also generates a donation for Wounded Warrior via an expanded Facebook ‘like’ effort. Sign a ‘thanks’ wall, like the Facebook page, or text ‘thanks’ to 272969 and Georgia-Pacific will back a $1 donation per action. The packaging also features QR codes that lead to a donation site for Wounded Warriors project. I haven’t seen Wounded Warriors messaging for the packaging yet so I can’t comment. But I hope they’re telling stories of injured service members and vets who were once in bad way, but are now better thanks to the help pr...

Communities Take Root is an effort from Dreyer’s Fruit Bars brand, started in 2010, that plants fruit tree orchards in deserving neighborhoods across the country. Dreyer’s, owned by Swiss food giant Nestle, partners with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation to fulfill the backend of the promotion. There’s a nomination procedure at www.communitiestakeroot.com . Nominated communities then seek votes online at the same website. Top vote getters receive a fruit orchard planted by locals with the Tree Planting Foundation’s help and advice. The promotion is activated via PR and on Dreyer’s packaging (see at left). The YouTube video that explains the promotion has a scant 383 views, two of them mine, since it was posted back on Feb. 21, 2011.  I have just enough Jeffersonian Ideal of a Democratic agrarianism in me to admire and appreciate when the American economy was based mainly on agriculture that one of the first things settlers would do was plant a fruit tree orchard. Even today, t...

A post on the website Just Means from Akhila Vijayaraghavan is critical of cause marketing and it made me wonder, should the impious ever be permitted to pray? Should teachers wait until their students know the alphabet before allowing them to speak? Should I, as a father, wait until I’m emotionally available to my kids before I listen to what they're telling me? Is Nobel Laureate Al Gore the only person who can legitimately donate to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club? And, while we're on the topic, could any company ever be morally upright enough to make donations to a good cause via cause marketing? Of Kellogg’s Share You Breakfast effort, Vijayaraghavan writes: “Some of the products that Kellogg (sic) has been promoting as part of its campaign includes Frosted Flakes and Nutri-Grain bars. However both products have been criticized for the high levels of sugar that they contain. Frosted Flakes mascoted by Tony the Tiger contains 11gms of sugar per three-fourths cup serving...