Cause Marketing

Cancer is a hairy beast that needs to be capped. And to help, Boston ad agency Small Army has put together a fun campaign that has potential lessons for nonprofit fundraisers. Called ‘ Be Bold, Be Bald! ’ here’s how it works. Order a $20 fundraising kit online ($25 after October 1, 2011) and Small Army will send you a bald cap and, a t-shirt to wear on Be Bold, Be Bald! Day October 21, 2011, along with a wealth of fundraising resources. Money raised goes to your choice of more than 20 cancer fighting organizations. Small Army wants you to seek out sponsors, like in one of those race events that nonprofits are so good at producing. But there’s no training involved so the only the only sweating will take place under the bald cap on October 21. (Not being hirsute myself I'm quite sure that wearing a bald cap all day for me would indeed be a sweaty affair!) Small Army has promoted the event widely and well. The ad above was in Time magazine. They’ve also put together a very complete f...

Feeding America , which generates donations of funds and food for affiliated food banks all over the country, wants you to spread the word to 10 other people about families in hunger in America, and when you do you could win the chance to present a check for $10,000 to your local food bank. The campaign is called Hunger Free Families and the spokespeople are Laila Ali and Curtis Conway. Curtis is a former NFL wide receiver and current color analyst for NFL radio broadcasts and Laila is a former boxing champion and the daughter of Muhammad Ali, who was something of a boxer himself. You go to the website , watch the videos, sign up and agree to send an email to 10 people… I choose the preformatted one, but I could have modified the language… to 10 people. This isn’t one of those deals that pulls out all your emails addresses out your Outlook or Yahoo account. That would be spam. I had to copy and paste them in one by one. After you send out the email, it takes you to a screen that allows...

A Business to Business Cause-Related Marketing Campaign that Brings Money & ROI... Part I I’ve written before about what we at Alden Keene & Associates call B2B Cause-Related Marketing ©. That is, cause marketing that takes place between businesses rather than between business and consumers. B2B Cause-Related Marketing can be more challenging because of the issue of money. It’s relatively easy for a cause marketer to put together a CRM campaign with a physical good that’s sold to a consumer. But where does the money come from in when the CRM exchange takes place between two businesses? Memphis-based St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is currently running a dynamite B2B Cause-Related Marketing campaign that turns the standard walk-a-thon on its ear. And it does so while building corporate teams and affinity between corporate America and St. Jude. It’s called the BG US Challenge . You may have seen the ad above for the Challenge in Fortune magazine. I spoke last week with Holl...