Cause Marketing

Dan Fink, editor of the Reading-Eagle Business Weekly in Pennsylvania, called me recently for some national perspective quotes on a story his staff was preparing on a local cause marketing effort . Many of his readers are small businesses, so I was especially happy to be able to reach out to that audience with the message about the power of cause marketing. Dan’s questions are in bold and my answers follow in italics. Do you have any numbers that show growth trends? The keeper of long-term cause marketing growth data is IEG, in Chicago. They track all sponsorship dollars, for instance the NFL and music festivals. IEG considers cause marketing to be a subset of sponsorship. This is a link to a projection they released in January . It lists only their projection for 2012, but they've been releasing this report for more than 20 years. So they can give a sense of long-term cause marketing trends. Who are the biggest users of cause marketing (in terms of dollars given to nonprofits)? Th...

I’m delighted to offer a guest post today by my friend and cause marketing colleague David Hessekiel, the founder and president of the Cause Marketing Forum and the co-author of the new book on cause marketing called Good Works , out as June 5, 2012. David co-wrote Good Works with marketing legend Phillip Kotler and Nancy Lee. Today David tackles the issue of just how big cause marketing is and how we can get to a more meaningful measure of its size and dimensions. For years the only calculation we’ve had is IEG’s annual projection of how much companies plan on spending on cause marketing in the year to comes. As a gauge of cause marketing it’s a little determining the health of your car by measuring how much air pressure is in the back right tire. It’s inadequate and not very telling.  One of the fabulous yet sometimes frustrating aspects of cause marketing is its diversity.   Some campaigns focus on raising funds (buy this and we’ll give a dime), others concentrate...

I began this blog four years ago this month. This is posting number 438. The cause marketing blog gets 5,000 visits and nearly 8,000 page views a month. In four years the blog has received nearly 150,000 visits and 225,000 page views. In those first few weeks, a good chunk of the traffic came from one or more people in Hyderabad, India. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to encourage me to keep going. In October 2006 I thought I was writing for U.S., Canadian and maybe U.K. audiences, since I write in English. I know a great number of people in India speak English, but that traffic from Hyderabad surprised and delighted me nonetheless. Now, while the bulk of the traffic still comes from Stateside readers, 30% comes from readers outside North America. The blog gets hundreds of readers from places like Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bulgaria and Kenya. I started the blog because in 2006 most of the available information on cause marketing was advocacy; i.e. here’s why you should undertak...

A few years back a colleague and I wangled a trip to northern Italy to speak on the topic of cause marketing. One of the other presenters was an American like us, but all of the attendees were European, predominantly Italian. We were there preaching the big, bold cause marketing of the type practiced at Children’s Miracle Network and it plainly made a few of the attendees uncomfortable. Some openly told us that they found the practice gauche. We finished our presentation with some Q&A, which lasted past our appointed time. So we took the discussion into the hallway. I remember in particular one fellow from Rome. He was the executive director of a children’s charity that he felt had potential popular appeal but which had fallen out of favor politically and had lost funding. Domestic charities in Italy and much of continental Europe are funded directly by local and national governments. He needed a new fundraising approach that could make up for some of the funding that was no longe...

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...

Choreographing a Digital Spark One of the cardinal principles of adult education theory is that the most meaningful learning frequently takes place between students, and the teacher’s role is to moderate more often than lecture. It’s true in cause-related marketing. Organizations like Children’s Miracle Network, the Muscular Dystrophy Association and St Jude Children’s Research Hospitals all hold periodic conventions for the people in the field that raise money. The conventions serve to unite disparate groups, provide a forum for unveiling new campaign elements, build camaraderie, spark ideas, etc. Any of that can happen in meeting rooms, but often as not it takes place in the hallways, over meals or drinks. David Hessekiel’s Cause Marketing Forum serves a similar purpose. Likewise, IEG’s annual Sponsorship Conference and the Business in the Community Annual Conference in the UK. But what if your need is more immediate? What if you’re from a distant part of the globe? What if you d...

Last September, at the request of San Francisco blogger Gayle Roberts, I posted my predictions on the future of cause-related marketing. With the coming of the New Year it makes sense to re-release this post. I have a spotty record predicting the future. I bought a Zip drive about a week before the first USB drive came out. And then, admiring the portability of said USB drives, I bought 2 of them with 56K of memory for about $50 a pop. I have two complete sets of the 1987 Topps baseball cards (which includes the rookie cards for Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire) still in the original shrink-wrap. They’re worth almost exactly what I paid for them. Or rather less, considering the ravages of inflation. (I also have a first edition of Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey in very fine condition that has more than doubled in value. So, I’m not always dead wrong.) So imagine my surprise to get a short missive from Bay-area fundraising consultant Gayle Roberts asking me to weigh in on the topic...

On Tuesday I posted the first half of an email I sent to Jessica Bennett, a reporter at Newsweek . The rest of her questions and my answers follow. Ms. Bennett quoted me in her article, which you can read here . Also, my email to her included several links which I neglected to include in Tuesday's post. I've revised Tuesday's post to include those links. Feel free to read it here . 4. Are we buying merely to clear our consciouses? You know, I'm not sure if I'm equipped to answer this question. I will say this, Americans are far and away the most generous donors to charity: in 2005 those donations exceeded $260 billion . Part of that is because we don't practice the social welfare state the way the Europeans do. Part of it is because we have very favorable tax laws. But assume for a second that IEG is right and something like $1.3 billion comes from cause marketing. That's a pittance compared to the total donations going to charities. If we are buying to assu...

Right now the monster RED campaign is drawing all kinds of fire for spending dollars to make pennies. The rhetoric is flowing hot and fast in the new media and the old. A reporter for Newsweek even approached me for my opinion. I hope she quotes me. In the event she doesn't, I’ll post half her questions and my responses today and the remainder on Thursday. On 3/9/07, Bennett, Jessica 1234@newsweek.com > wrote: hi paul, ok, feel free to pick and choose from these and contribute your own thoughts if you think there's anything i've overlooked. also let me know if you've got any suggestions of background info or studies i should look into. 1. what's the premise behind cause marketing, why does it work, and how pervasive is it today? A lot of things are called cause marketing that are probably mislabeled. As I think of it cause marketing is generally a promotional tactic meant draw on the appeal of a cause to help sell a product for a company. Like most promotions, th...

Barely a day goes by that I don't see some kind of cause-related marketing, some good and some not so good. With this blog I will examine in detail those cause marketing promotions, advertising and campaigns; when they get it right, and where it goes wrong. Cause-related marketing has been around for more than 20 years now. Even people who don't know the term, understand what it's all about; send in the Yoplait lid and 10 cents goes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. But, according to IEG , while cause-related marketing is growing faster than sponsorship as a whole, cause-related marketing currently represents less than 10 percent of the larger sponsorship market. That sounds like a positive, but cause-related marketing has been as high as 10 percent of sponsorship. For all its heart, cause-related marketing is still settling for the sloppy seconds left over from the NFL, NASCAR and the like. I think that's because while those big guys understand that spo...