Cause Marketing

Wired magazine’s website has an intriguing story about the ways fanboys and girls of Dr. Who , Harry Potter , Star Wars , and others actively support charities. But how might your cause tap the support of these self-described geeks? Chapters of the 501st Legion, whose members dress as characters from Star Wars for events, donate their honorarium for their appearances to charities. The Harry Potter Alliance does work for children’s hospitals. Wordbuilders, an organization started and maintained by fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss, has raised $1.7 million for Heifer International over the last four years. Current Dr. Who star Matt Smith made an appearance in character on the UK’s Red Nose Day telethon. So how do seek and utilize the support of the geeks for your cause? Here’s three suggestions: If you don’t already speak the language of the target group, try immersion. A colleague hated NASCAR until her fundraising job at a children’s hospital in Tennessee forced to learn more abo...

Kind Readers: Gwen D. from the Northumberland region of the U.K. (home to Hogwarts!) is the latest to join the Cause Marketing Google Newsgroup. It’s super-easy to subscribe. Simply send me your name and your email address to aldenkeene at gmail dot com. Like the Accio spell on Harry Potter which brings desirable objects to you, when you subscribe each new post comes directly to your email, usually every business day. It's like Muggle magic! And like Gwen, when you subscribe I’ll also send you a PDF copy of the "Five Flavors of Cause Marketing" which explains Cause Marketing in an easy-to-follow matrix that includes examples. It's a great brainstorming tool and helps ensure that your campaign has all the components appropriate for that flavor of Cause Marketing. Rest assured that I will never sell your name or email address. So join today. Warm regards, Paul Aldenkeene at gmail dot com

Been going through my voluminous electronic files of studies about cause marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and I came across again a 2008 poll of corporate communicators that found they want their companies to engage in more CSR; they just can’t come up with a good business reason for doing so or decide who should drive it. The poll, from Ragan Communications and Pollstream follows a 2008 study from IBM ( covered in this space ), that reported that corporate executives want to see more CSR, too, and were devoting resources to it. The poll was part of a series from Ragan that regularly queries some 425+ corporate communicators in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. The communicators split almost evenly over the issue of who should run a company’s CSR efforts. Just about 50 percent said it should be a standalone department that reports directly to the CEO. The other 50 percent said CSR should fall under either media relations, internal communi...