Cause Marketing

In its April 2013 issue, Fast Company reviews the numbers at the alpha crowdfunding site Kickstarter and they’re crazy: 86 million unique visitors, 2.2 million of which actually backed at least one project to the tune of $274 million in 2012 alone. That’s almost twice as much money as the National Endowment for the Arts spent in the same year. But as the number of projects have gone up it’s gotten harder to be conspicuous in the crowd. And everyone’s pretty well gotten the memo that you need to use video. Fast Company says that in 2012, 82 percent of the projects used video to tell their story. So how do you stand out before a crowd of would be funders? One option is use cause marketing. That’s what Shethinx did for its Kickstarter project. Shethinx makes women’s underwear treads that narrow middle-ground between functional but dull granny underwear, and pretty but impractical fashion underwear. Shehinx used Kickstarter to launch the company. And aside from the technology of t...

Bruktawit Tigabu is a 30-year-old teacher in Ethiopia who despaired over the number of orphan children in her country. More than 5 million of the country’s 42 million children are orphans; mainly due to AIDS and abandonment. When you consider also that at the same time 60 percent of Ethiopian children grow up illiterate you can understand Tigabu’s despair. As in much of the world, these tragedies fall hardest on girls. In response she and her husband Shane Etzenhouser, an American software engineer, co-founded the for-profit social enterprise Whiz Kids Workshop, a television production company that uses puppets and animation to help lead Ethiopian orphans through tough topics like AIDS, malaria, and the child sex-slave trade in Africa. All while also teaching kids the challenging Amharic alphabet. Back in November 2011, after reading the horrifying book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, I committed to help the plight of girls and women in the developing world. This...

April 25. 2012 is End Malaria Day and to help purchase insecticide-treated nets more than 60 (mainly) A-list business and personal development writers are publishing a book by the same name, ‘End Malaria Day.’ Buy it on Kindle for $20 and all $20 goes to purchase anti-malarial nets that will drape over someone’s bed, probably in Africa where malaria is endemic. The paperback version is $25 and in that case net profits go to buy nets like the one at the left. It’s a terrific cause and a cool roster of business thinkers. I hope you’ll join me in buying the book/download. But as I was mousing around the EndMalariaDay.com site I came across a comment from “Tkharris” who asks, “Can we just contribute without buying the book?” I don’t know whether or not the site allows direct donations, but it certainly ought to. But TK’s comment set me to thinking. What he or she seems to be doing is repudiating one of the small handful of a cause marketing campaigns I’ve even seen wherein every single pen...

The cause marketing world is all a-Twitter with the news that Coke is retracting its first-ever mostly-white cans meant to call attention to the plight of ursas maritimus . (Collector alert!) Apparently, too many consumers took the special packaging of polar bears gamboling across the tundra for Diet Coke, which, in fact, comes in silver cans. I don’t have the energy to assign blame, ask if Coke over-reacted, wonder about the institutional competence of Coke’s marketing team, or worry about what this means to the future of cause marketing’s place on packaging. That’s because cause marketing’s place on packaging is long since ensured, as the ad at the left from Fast Company helps demonstrate. Buy a specially-marked bottle of Belvedere vodka and LVMH, the brand’s owner, will donate 50% of profits to RED’s Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. LVMH is the acronym for the French luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, (whose CEO is Bernard Arnault, Europe’s richest person, FYI....

The New York office of design firm Beattie McGuinness Bungay has designed and is now selling an infant blanket meant to help new parents in the developing world to understand things like vaccinations, average infant growth, breast-feeding, illness-warning signs and the like, and they’re taking a BOGO approach to marketing the blankets. ‘The Information Blanket’ is made of double-knit cotton…loomed in North Carolina and screen printed and lock-stitched in New York City… and features bold info-graphics screen-printed in water-based dyes. You can see the blanket at the left from this article in the June issue of Fast Company magazine. The BOGO (Buy One, Give One) price is $40 and the donation-only price is $25. Plainly BMB wants you to buy two. The first batch of Information Blankets are headed for Uganda, where, the website says , the infant mortality rate is 76.9 deaths per 100,000 births. The comparable rate in the United States is 6.3. In Japan it’s almost half again lower at 3.2 de...

What do you do when you're a 98-year-old institution and you think your logo doesn't quite work anymore? Girls Scouts of the USA , the world's largest organization for girls, recently updated theirs in a very subtle way. (The photo illustration comes from Fast Company magazine). I understand the pressures to change organizational logos having been through the process myself. But looking back on that experience I'm sure we made a mistake. Nonprofits just don't spend that much time in front of their constituent's eyes for them to make changes in how they present themselves. Few nonprofits can afford to advertise to reinforce their brand. Even when they utilize the miracles of new media to become their own media channnel, it just isn't enough to allow them to change looks, taglines, or missions in a way that resonates with people. The acid test for the Girl Scouts would be to ask people in a year which logo is the new one. I'll bet no more than 25% could d...

Recessionary Advertising Opportunity for Nonprofits You don’t have to look at the official figures from Magazine Publisher’s Association (MPA) to see that magazines are in a recession right now in the United States. And that may mean opportunity for your nonprofit. I just got a renewal offer from Fast Company for a $5 subscription, for instance. As in dollars, not Euros. Another unnamed business magazine kept sending me issues months after my subscription had lapsed. And while it’s hardly scientific, I’m certain I’ve recently seen more ‘space available’ ads going to nonprofits than in the past. The official numbers bear out the gloom for the industry. While individual titles vary, overall the magazine business is in a funk. Among the hundreds of titles tracked by the MPA’s Publisher Information Bureau, overall revenue was down 1.2 percent in the first quarter of 2008 versus the first quarter of 2007. Overall circulation was down 6.4 from first quarter 2008 versus first quarter 2007. ...

The Times they are A-Changing The bottled water industry generated $15 billion in revenue in America in 2006. It will top $16 billion this year. That’s more than Americans spent on movie tickets or iPods. And while 50 percent of Fijians don’t have access to clean, reliable water, millions of gallons Fiji Water is shipped most of the way across the Pacific and then trucked from the coast to chi-chi hotels or otherwise sold at a premium across the country. This even though almost every American could walk to the closest tap and draw out clean, safe and often good-tasting water. These and other choice facts come out in Charles Fishman’s well-wrought 6,000-word piece on water in the July Fast Company . At a time when the bottle watered business has never been better, I predict that the only direction it can go from here is down. The times they are a-changing. Fishman concludes: Packing bottled water in lunch boxes, grabbing a half-liter from the fridge as we dash out the door, piling up ha...

Cute Ad. And Not Terribly Useful. Austin Minis are so doggone cute, when I see one in a parking lot I just want to pinch its little bottom. I feel much the same way about their ad for Meals on Wheels that runs in the November 2006 issue of Fast Company . We’re giving over some ad space for a needy cause, “to red light hunger,” the ad says, and that's good. The Meals on Wheels Association of America in Alexandria, Va., helps enable meals to the nation’s elderly in local cities and towns, and can make good use your donation. No doubt any of the nation’s dozens of Meals on Wheels affiliates, where the rubber actually hits the road, would say the same. But the ad strikes me as a one-off, and... if so... that would be too bad. I couldn’t find anything about a deeper relationship on either the miniusa.com website or at moaa.org. God bless Mini USA and their ad agency Sausalito, California-based Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners for thinking of a charity to support in this way, but I’d be...