Cause Marketing

Little Mac, an Asian elephant at the Santa Barbara Zoo, had dental problems and wasn’t able to chew her food properly. In fixing her teeth, the zoo’s dental bill quickly ballooned past an elephantine $100,000, which wasn’t easy for the zoo to swallow. That's her and her dentist at the left. But if you have a cell phone and special place in your heart for pachyderms you can help the zoo meet its obligations. Simply text ‘MAC’ to 20222 and $10 will be added to your cell phone bill. Proceeds will specifically benefit Little Mac’s dental care. Little Mac’s tale of dental woe makes for a good story, but it raises the thorny issue of whether or not to use a cause marketing promotion for just a single issue. On the one hand, you can see why the zoo was keen to use cell phone fundraising to cover an unexpected bill. Moreover, for donors, fixing the teeth of an animal that eats hundreds of pounds a day is immediate, concrete, and easy to understand. But, on the other hand, one of the appe...

Keep a Child Alive Featuring Alicia Keys On May 20 I wrote about how for the first time in the United States it was possible for nonprofits to use cell phones to raise money, $5 at a time. For the last three months the Brooklyn, New York-based nonprofit charity called Keep a Child Alive , has been using cell phone fundraising to generate nearly $40,000 from some 7,800 people. Keep a Child Alive provides antiretroviral drugs to children and adults with HIV/AIDS in Africa. Antiretroviral drugs are what keep people with HIV/AIDS like Magic Johnson from dying. In Africa there are 2.3 million children with HIV/AIDS, and many times that many adults (read ‘parents’). Keep a Child Alive cell phone fundraising approach is to use a film produced for the charity called Alicia in Africa , featuring the impossibly lovely and talented R and B artist Alicia Keys , who is the organization’s official ambassador. In effect, they ask you to pay $5 for the pleasure of watching the film by texting “Alive...