Cause Marketing

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...

A new Internet browser plug-in will tell you if a product you’re looking at on an online retailer uses child labor in its production. Called aVOID , it currently works with the Safari and Chrome browsers and will soon be available for Firefox. The plugin, whose creation was made possible by the German company Earthlink, works with many of the major online retailers in Germany, France, the U.K and the United States, including Asos, Yoox, Amazon, Target, Macys, Zalando, Google Shopping, Frontlineshop and Otto. If your German is better than mine, you can also read here a list of companies and how they rank in terms of utilization of child labor in the manufacture of various product lines. The plugin draws on a database provided by the cause Active Against Child Labour. 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 with this blog and in other ways. ...

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...

In the March 2012 issue of Redbook magazine, writer Alison Storm lists seven things you can do to ‘Save a Child From Slavery.’ Back in November 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. "Half the Sky" brilliantly drives home the point that in too much of the world girls and women are abused, trafficked, mutilated, enslaved, and even murdered for largely cultural reasons. Every bit of this is immoral and wrong. It must not be allowed to continue and none of us can sit idly by while it happens. Here then is Alison Storm’s list: ‘ Face the Facts .’ By this she means that slavery and forced labor is more prevalent now than at any time in human history. Perhaps 5.7 million children worldwide are forced to work in factories, fields and brothels. The charity Love146 fights child sex slavery and exploitation specifically. ‘ Shop for Fair Trade Jewelery and Handbag...