Cause Marketing

Grey Matter Research just released the findings of a survey that asked a representative segment of the public what charities they could name. Bad news is, unless your cause is in the first percent of the first percent of the first percent, your charity wasn’t one of them. But of the small number that were, most were active cause marketers. The top finisher was the Red Cross with 20 percent of respondents naming it. Number two with 11 percent was the Salvation Army. No other nonprofit garnered even five percent in unaided recall, but eight got between 2 and 4 percent of the ‘vote:’ United Way, Goodwill Industries, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, ASPCA, American Cancer Society, YMCA, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure. “Scores of individual organizations were named by just one or two people out of over a thousand in the study,” says the press release. But what about your donors, they know about you, right? “People who have actually given to a non-profit organiz...

A new study, released yesterday, finds that Americans would keep giving, even if the tax deduction for charitable gifts went away. However, they’re certain that charitable donations would decline as a result. As Congress and the President mull over how to make up ground against the burgeoning U.S. deficit, one idea that frequently comes up is eliminating tax deductibility for charitable donations. The demographically representative study found that most Americans think that would lead to fewer donations to charitable causes. The survey, from Grey Matter Research of Phoenix, found: 30% feel there would be no real change in giving in the U.S. Six percent believe charitable donations would rise. “Almost two-thirds of Americans say charitable giving in the U.S. would decrease, including 29% who believe it would decrease a little, and 36% who believe it would decrease a lot,” the survey found. Even though the issue has become a kind of political football (See picture above), how Americans ...

A new study out Monday, June 6, 2011 finds that contrary to conventional wisdom, religious people are more likely to donate to causes that aren’t strictly religious than to those that are. The study, conducted by Grey Matter Research and Consulting in Phoenix and commissioned by Russ Reid Company of Pasadena, shows that just 41 percent of donors who attend religious worship services regularly support a cause they described as “religious,” other than the contributions they make to their place of worship. Instead, religious donors are more likely to have given toward disaster relief (68 percent), domestic hunger or poverty relief (66 percent), helping people with disabilities (56 percent), health care or medical research (54 percent), and veterans’ causes (52 percent) than they are to have supported specifically religious causes. In short, religious people aren’t ‘lost causes’ for fundraisers and charity work that isn’t explicitly religious. “There tends to be a stereotype that relig...