Cause Marketing

Author and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki famously has his 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint . It goes like this: When you’re making a pitch, your Powerpoint should have no more than 10 slides, take less than 20 minutes to present, and no font should be smaller than 30 points. In homage to Kawasaki , I’m going to suggest that you be able to sum up your cause marketing campaign in just six words. Why six words? It’s enough to do the job, but not enough to obfuscate. Here’s proof. Last year this time Rachel Ferschleiser and Larry Smith released their book Not Quite What I was Planning : Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure . They lead with a tale about Ernest Hemingway who was once challenged to write a book in six words. He responded: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” There’s an awful lot of pathos in those six words. But then we’re talking about Papa Hemingway (seen above), a literary legend who specialized in compact fiction. Ferschleiser and Smith published many m...

Most charities that do a meaningful amount of cause-related marketing probably need an advisory board or group whose job is only to help the organization make contacts and expand its CRM footprint. At first blush you might think that all you need is Rolodex warriors willing to battle on your behalf. In fact, once corporate types reach a certain threshold they probably have a Rolodex that any competent cause marketer could effectively mine, to mix the metaphor. Instead, in homage to Guy Kawasaki , whose excellent book The Art of the Start I’m reading right now, I suggest that are actually five types of people you want on your cause-related marketing advisory board (CRMAB). Industry Heavy Hitters . If your cause-related marketing takes place in different settings, you need a representative number of people from each of those principal industries on your CRMAB. Captain Rolodex. This guy/gal has more than just a list of buddies from his/her rise in rank and power. This person could get t...

What do you do, as a cause marketer, to keep learning? How you answer the question of self-education determines things like: how successful your cause-related marketing campaigns are, indeed, how successful you are; your income ; your lifespan ; researchers have even shown a correlation between happiness and education . It’s almost axiomatic that more you know the more you want to know (and as Socrates pointed out, the more you realize how little you do know)! I hope this will be a conversation rather than a monologue or disquisition, so I invite you to comment on what you do to stay on top of your game. Business/General Interest I subscribe to and read a number of business magazines so as to understand current issues, trends, economics and the like, as well as several news magazines. Since I don’t have a business degree I feel like this reading has gone a long way in advancing my understanding of business. I also read newspapers, but mainly online. I especially admire the reporting in...

An Average Hour for Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, Seven Months for Me On Tuesday, October 17, 2006 I posted my first entry on this blog called Eyeballs vs Tears . According to Google Analytics, in the 202 days since the blog has received about 4380 visits and 7300 pageviews, for an average of 1.67 pageviews per visit. I confess I’m pretty proud of those numbers, although they probably represent at best an average hour’s worth of traffic at Guy Kawasaki’s or Seth Godin’s blogs. Nonetheless, I think it’s instructive to parse the data revealed in Google Analytics and try to turn it from ‘data into information,’ as the immortal Peter Drucker (seen above) used to say. Not surprisingly, the most common Google search terms were phrases like “cause-related marketing,” “cause related promotion,” or variations on a theme. More than 200 visits came courtesy of Newsweek magazine’s article on the Red campaign in which I’m quoted. Philanthopy.com’s roundup of nonprofit blogs called Give and Take ...