Cause Marketing

Wikipedia says there’s at least 450 crowdfunding platforms out there including a substantial minority that exist to benefit nonprofits, notably Ed Norton’s Crowdsourcing.org , and microfinance giant Kiva.org . Both are fine organizations, if sometimes a little bit earnest. In the U.K. a charity called Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research built Pledgeit , a platform that puts the fun back in crowdfunding for causes. Here’s how it works: Suppose your friend Spencer has been nattering on for 15 years about his karaoke rendition of the old Bill Withers’ classic “Ain’t No Sunshine.” How he brought down the house at the oldest karaoke joint in Osaka, won the contest, made young women weep with the tenderness of his interpretation, and actually got the right number of “I know’s” in the chorus of the song. But is there an mp3 of Spencer's performance? A trophy from that glorious night? An Instagram of him actually singing anything? No. No. And no. Pledgeit helps you call out Spencer a...

In April 2012, Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock. The company had been shipping its product for less than 18 months when they accepted the offer. Even if, like me, you think that Instagram’s price was frothier than a berry smoothie at McDonald’s, you have to admit that the tech sector is building companies differently than everyone else, and this may hold some lessons for cause marketers. So, what’s different? Well, one of the tech sector’s most notable playbooks “The Startup Owner’s Manual,” suggests one approach that more cause marketers could adopt; super-fast prototyping and, short, simple and objective pass/fail tests of cause marketing concepts and ideas. When the authors, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, say super-fast prototyping them mean it. They advocate throwing up a website as quickly as possible. Whether you intend to sell an ephemeral service like Instagram or a physical product, Bank and Dorf recommend you prototype a version they call the Minim...

Paper icons can be a license to print money if all the elements come together right. But there’s always been the challenge of how to display them. Paper icons, others call them ‘pinups,’ are small pieces of printed paper, oftentimes displaying the charity’s logo, sold for $1 or more, and benefiting a cause. Usually they’re displayed in-store, perhaps hung from fishing line, or taped to the store’s windows. Twenty CiCi’s Pizza Buffet locations in Georgia have come up with a fun idea of how to display the paper icons for their charity of choice, Special Olympics Georgia. Those Georgia CiCi’s locations began selling Special Olympics paper icons for $1 starting on July 16. On Monday, August 13, 2012 they had a kind of inflection point whereby they challenged their customers to buy enough paper icons on that day to cover a law enforcement vehicle. Fun idea! In addition, on Monday, August 13, CiCi’s donated 10 percent of sales to Special Olympics Georgia. "At CiCi's we care about o...