Cause Marketing

The growth of Crowdfunding in the United States seems likely to continue and, I suspect, it to be further cemented as a vital tool for cause marketers. Ethan Mollick, at the Wharton School, has a taken a first crack at some early learning about what works in crowdfunding that has application for both cause marketers and entrepreneurs. Mollick used Kickstarter as his dataset, with its 48,500+ projects and $237+ million in combined funding Here’s what Mollick’s analysis shows: Because the greater the size of the founder’s social network the more likely the project is to be funded, it pays to be popular… especially on Facebook. Polished pitches are the most likely to be funded. Relatively few succeed without a video, for instance. There seems to be a geo-cultural component to successful pitches. Films are more likely to be funded in Hollywood, while music projects are more likely to be funded in Nashville.   Sixty-day Kickstarters are less likely to be funded (29 percent) t...

A recent study finds that your Facebook posts are more memorable than individual sentences from books, or even human faces. One possible reason is that people remember Facebook posts is that they're more like dialogue and less like dry prose. The paper published in the January 2013 issue of Memory and Cognition and called Major Memories for Microblogs and it details several experiments involving how well people remember Facebook posts. The paper’s authors were Laura Mickes, Ryan S. Darby, Vivian Hwe, Daniel Bajic, Christine R. Harris, Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld of the University of California at San Diego, and Jill A Warker of the University of Scranton. Professor Mickes has a new appointment at the University of Warwick in Coventry. In the first, they tested for how well people remembered the status updates of strangers in Facebook. Study subjects were randomly assigned to see on a screen either Facebook posts or sentences from books for a brief flash. Immediately after...

It’s Valentine’s Day, a natural reminder that it's time to get rid of the evidence of someone you once 'liked.' After all, there's your ex in every other post on your Facebook wall and scattered all throughout your timeline. What do you do after you’ve moved on but the evidence of your past likes remain? Well, back in the day, Stalin had an army of skilled photo retouchers to call upon when someone fell out of favor. (See some of their handiwork at left) Today a cheeky New York digital agency named ClearHart launches a new mobile app that will remove all evidence of your ex from your Facebook page faster than you can say ‘Stalinist Purge.’ And 20 percent of the sales of the app benefit the American Heart Association of New York, up to $5,000 Called KillSwitch, the app deletes pictures, videos, and wall posts, and unlikes status updates. “KillSwitch is not a vindictive tool, so much as an answer to a very natural, pre-existing human behavior,” says ClearHart...

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 ...

You’ve got a big following on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google +… maybe even thousands of people. Isn’t it time your social network slipped into its spandex and buttoned on its superhero cape and did a little good in the world? That’s the premise of HopeMob , originally funded on Kickstarter, and about to enter its second year of business. Here’s how you and your social network can do good using HopeMob. Suppose, in honor of the UN’s recent International Day of the Girl, you decide to start a fundraiser to provide school uniforms for an all-girls school in Accra, Ghana. School uniforms bring many benefits, but if a family can’t afford the price of the uniforms, that would preclude their daughter from going. But you know that the education of girls helps inoculate them against child marriage, and is highly correlated with advancements in society and economic growth. Educated women have a lower infant mortality rate, higher skills, self-confidence, and the information to be bet...

With National Breast Cancer Awareness Month behind us, is not too soon to start talking about cause marketing and the next big holiday coming up, namely Super Bowl 2013. Rudolph Foods, which bills itself as the world’s largest manufacturer of pork rinds is celebrating Pork Rind Appreciation Day on Super Bowl Sunday, with a modest cause marketing campaign that features an oversized ambition. When you buy a package of Rudolph pork rinds, the company will make a $0.10 donation to Gridiron Greats, a nonprofit that provides medical and financial help to former NFL players and their families in dire need. The modest part is that the donation is capped at $10,000. That needs to be a bigger number. But I very much admire Rudolph Food’s ambition. Snack foods are a big part of the Super Bowl. But you could chew your way through a lot of advertising dollars trying to keep pace with the likes of Frito-Lay, the $13 billion snack foods division of PepsiCo. Heck, in its press releases Rudolph can’t...

In April 2012, Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock. The company had been shipping its product for less than 18 months when they accepted the offer. Even if, like me, you think that Instagram’s price was frothier than a berry smoothie at McDonald’s, you have to admit that the tech sector is building companies differently than everyone else, and this may hold some lessons for cause marketers. So, what’s different? Well, one of the tech sector’s most notable playbooks “The Startup Owner’s Manual,” suggests one approach that more cause marketers could adopt; super-fast prototyping and, short, simple and objective pass/fail tests of cause marketing concepts and ideas. When the authors, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, say super-fast prototyping them mean it. They advocate throwing up a website as quickly as possible. Whether you intend to sell an ephemeral service like Instagram or a physical product, Bank and Dorf recommend you prototype a version they call the Minim...

Paper icons can be a license to print money if all the elements come together right. But there’s always been the challenge of how to display them. Paper icons, others call them ‘pinups,’ are small pieces of printed paper, oftentimes displaying the charity’s logo, sold for $1 or more, and benefiting a cause. Usually they’re displayed in-store, perhaps hung from fishing line, or taped to the store’s windows. Twenty CiCi’s Pizza Buffet locations in Georgia have come up with a fun idea of how to display the paper icons for their charity of choice, Special Olympics Georgia. Those Georgia CiCi’s locations began selling Special Olympics paper icons for $1 starting on July 16. On Monday, August 13, 2012 they had a kind of inflection point whereby they challenged their customers to buy enough paper icons on that day to cover a law enforcement vehicle. Fun idea! In addition, on Monday, August 13, CiCi’s donated 10 percent of sales to Special Olympics Georgia. "At CiCi's we care about o...

General Mills is back with it’s Win One Give One promotion, “with,” as I wrote about the promotion back on May 18, 2011, “the item in question being a XO laptop computer.” This post is part of an occasional series whereby I take a second look at notable cause marketing promotions. Here’s what I wrote back then: “Inside specially-marked packages of 6 varieties of Fruit Rollups are certificates for a free XO computer. A total of 2001 XO computers will be given away in the sweepstakes. A matching number will be donated to children in Africa. “From December 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011, General Mills will also donate one dollar to One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization behind the XO, for every Fruit Rollup coupon redeemed up to $4,000. “Winonegiveone.com, the promotion’s website, offers a third way for laptops to be donated to Africa. The site, which is targeted to kids and moms has a kind of Angry Birds-type game that allows you to propel a heroic action figure to Africa...

Twice now I’ve written about cause marketing campaigns that can be summed up in six-words. Both times I heard back from readers inspired to pen their own cause marketing summation in six-words. Now I’m coming back to the topic because L.L. Bean, the Maine retailer and catalog company, is using a six-word statement as a tagline for its cause marketing effort called 'Million Moment Mission.' The six-word line is; “You Share. We Give. Kids Win.” Here’s how it works: any time you perform a qualifying action… a like on Facebook, a Tweet, submit a story and/or photo about your experience with L.L. Bean’s merchandise or in the great outdoors…the company will donate $1 to programs for kids from the National Park Foundation. The tagline, therefore, distills the campaign very well. The Million Moment Mission is a promotion in celebration of Bean’s 100th year in business. The campaign started on January 1, 2012 and wraps on December 31, 2012. The total donation is capped at $1 million. ...

The other day I bought a paper icon at national chain store. The icon has a bar code and the clerk scanned it and handed me a receipt when the transaction was finished. At the bottom of the receipt was an 800-number keyed to a customer satisfaction survey. Dial the number, or call up the website on my mobile device, answer some questions and I’m entered into a drawing for $10,000. As I left I thought, ‘they know I just bought a paper icon. Instead of offering me the chance to win $10,000, why not offer to donate $2 (or more!) to the cause in question whenever someone completes their customer satisfaction survey?’ Why haven’t I ever seen this kind of cause marketing? Cause marketing is all about encouraging certain behaviors in exchange for helping a cause. Framed that way customer satisfaction surveys are a natural fit for cause marketing. My purchase of the paper icon clearly demonstrates that I have some affinity for the cause in question. I’m not a code monkey, but I doubt that it’s...

An article in the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine makes it clear that I have another thing to feel inadequate about; my Klout score, which is a very modest 31. (Maybe it's time to take that Facebook thing seriously. Hmm.) For camparison's sake, Justin Bieber’s Klout score is a perfect 100. Robert Scoble’s is 85. But now I can use my inadequacy for good. Klout for Good is a promotion that asks you to support Charity: Water, the World Wildlife Fund, and the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women. Klout also promoted a Christmastime tweet drive that generated gifts for underprivileged kids. The Go Red and World Wildlife Fun efforts are primarily awareness-raisers, although they’ll certainly take your money. But the Charity: Water promotion is a fundraiser and a clever one at that. Charity: Water asks you to ‘donate your birthday;’ that is to ask your social networks to donate to the cause in your name on your birthday. As of this writing, 12,889 people had pledged...

The Generous Store was a pop-up store in Denmark, open for just one day, that didn’t take your money for its products. Instead, Anthon Berg the European chocolatier which operated The Generous Store, asked you to pledge to perform some specific good deed for a friend or loved one in return for which you got some of Berg’s chocolates. The promotion plays on Anthon Berg’s tagline which is “You Can Never Be Too Generous.” There were no cash registers in the store. Instead, Anthon Berg clerks wandered the store with iPads. You’d log onto your Facebook account, friend Anthon Berg and pledge to your friend/loved one whatever the required good deed was for the specific item. In the following days and weeks Facebook filled with the photos and accounts of good deeds done by those keeping their pledges. It’s a lovely idea. Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Shops do a free cone day every year, so they could certainly adopt something like this. It would be great to see a cause element added whereby you pledge...

Scarcely a week goes by that someone doesn’t release a study or survey about cause marketing. And yet there’s still some research I’d like to see. Since the New Year I’ve seen studies, findings or surveys related to cause marketing from the following: IEG projects cause marketing spending to grow in 2012 by 3.1 percent to $1.73 billion. Among other findings, the fourth Edelman Good Purpose Consumer Study found that the emerging markets of Mexico, Brazil, China and India were most willing to buy a brand that supports a cause. Landor Associates released its annual Global Corporate Reputation Index and highlighted the cause marketing work of Google and Ford. An outfit called Wide Angle surveyed its consumer panel and found them more willing to give $1 from a purchase rather than winning a meal at restaurant they’ve been wanting to try. Nielsen surveyed Vietnamese consumers and found that 80 percent prefer to do business with companies that seem to be giving back. That’s a reasonably broad...

Last Thursday, March 22, 2012 I took a call from a small businessperson I called Roberta who asked in effect, ‘how can my small company work with a cause to benefit us both?’ I posted about her call last Friday . She had contacted two breast cancer charities about cause marketing; a local one I called Athena Charity and a national one I identified as Artemis Charity. (All the names have been changed). Athena put Roberta off and Artemis tried to lock her into an existing event for a cool $5,000. In my post on Friday, I compared Artemis Charity’s offerings to those from a local TV station, which are similarly high-priced and inflexible. Neither option was well-suited to a small business like Roberta’s. Roberta has a generous impulse and she wants to help, but her ability to do so is severely limited by the size of her business. Moreover, Roberta was interested in cause marketing, in part, because she needed something more from the relationship besides good feelings. Imagine instead a cau...

This week is 'National Breakfast Week,' sponsored in part, as we shall see, by Kellogg’s. Why should we care? Because “1 in 5 children live in homes where breakfast is hard to come by.” What should we do? “Share Your Breakfast” on Kellogg’s corporate site or their Facebook page by saying what you had for breakfast this morning. I had a yogurt and oatmeal, so I entered that into the appropriate box. I was then invited to share that via Facebook or an email that included the following message: Help kids in need get off to their best starts. Share what you had for breakfast and Kellogg's will help provide a breakfast for a child in need. What happens? Kellogg’s donates one school breakfast, up to one million meals, each time you 'Share Your Breakfast.' Basically, Kellogg’s writes a check for up to $200,000. Kellogg’s cause partner is Action for Healthy Kids , a consortium of 70 or so organizations like the Whole Grains Council, the American Academy of Pediatrics an...

Curtis Jackson, aka rapper 50 Cent visited the horn of Africa in September 2011 hosted by the United Nations and committed to provide 1 billion meals to the World Food Programme over the next five years, funded in part by several cause marketing efforts. The Horn of Africa has a lot of problems right now, nonetheleast of which is that starvation there is rampant, long-term drought is endemic, and working institutions are few. Since the UN's World Food Programme can manage to deliver a meal for about $0.10, Jackson has basically committed to donating $100 million (or 200 million 50 cent pieces). That's a very big number. He gave his commitment a kick start with a donation of $350,000. Like him on Facebook , and when he reaches 1 million new likes, he’ll donate another $1 million. 50 Cent is also tying the sales of his Street King energy drink to the World Food Progamme (WFP). For every bottle sold, 50 Cent will donate one meal. Street King competes with 5-Hour Energy ...

Or, How to Make your Company’s Facebook ‘Like’ Campaign a Little Less Gratuitous. We all know how Facebook ‘Like’ campaigns go. Companies provide a little something-something, perhaps a donation to a cause, and people hit the ‘Like’ button and give up the crazy amount of data that Facebook collects on all of us. But such promotions have already become pedestrian. FlyBuys, Australia’s largest loyalty program with some 10 million cardholders and 5.5. million households, wanted to do something a little different. FlyBuys knew that half of its members were on Facebook and it wanted to engage them there. But how to do it without resorting to a garden-variety ‘Like’ campaign? FlyBuys created a promotion to ask members to donate 25 million points to Cancer Council Australia. That goal was met in 30 days. The reason why has to do with the FlyBuys’ history. Since its inception in 1994, members of FlyBuys have been able to donate their points to charity partners, notably to Cancer Council Austra...

Liberty Bottleworks, concluded a fun cause marketing contest at midnight last night that allows the winner a unique ‘canvas’ to express themselves on, as a well as donation to the cause of their choice. Here’s how the contest worked. People were invited to submit an original design for Liberty’s Earth Day bottle, it ended yesterday, President's Day in the United States. The contest took place on Liberty’s Facebook page . The winner will be determined based on who gets the most likes on Facebook. In addition, proceeds from the sale of the Earth Day bottle benefits the charity of the winner’s choosing. Liberty Botttleworks are the only metal water bottles currently made in the United States. All of Liberty’s bottles are made of recycled aluminum using American-made machinery. Moreover, Liberty has the ability to print on its bottles basically anything a designer can imagine. My Liberty bottle, whose sale benefits the charity called Big City Mountaineers, looks like urban graffiti. Th...

Leading up to its Feb. 11, 2012 Romp to Stomp tour event in Utah, Tubbs Snowshoes bought local advertising. The day after the event, it garnered some earned media, in this case a story in one of the Salt Lake City dailies. Both earned and bought media represent ways for a sponsor to activate or promote their cause marketing relationships. A third category, called owned media, is what General Mills has with its millions of box tops. Or what you have with your Facebook page and Twitter feed. So how do they differ? And which is best for cause marketing? As I’ve noted before, basically all cause marketing has a PR component whether or not there’s also any bought or owned media. And even in a digital age where newspapers in North America are basically ‘old media,’ getting a story in the paper nonetheless brings with it a measure of credibility that owned and bought media don’t have. That’s because when someone publishes or broadcasts a story about your cause marketing they are giving a kind...