Cause Marketing

Help, a company that sells single-symptom remedies to things like headaches and cuts, has teamed up with DKMS Bone Marrow Donor Center to deliver a wonderfully-integrated cause marketing campaign at the bleeding-edge of innovation. When you buy a package of Help’s brand of adhesive bandages called ‘ Help I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Save a Life ’ you get their regular 16 bandages in two sizes. But you also get a kit to collect some of the blood that you’ve just spilt and register with the nonprofit’s bone marrow donor registry. Besides the bandages there are instructions, permissions, and the like. Help’s remedies are available at most Target and Walgreens stores, and elsewhere. Registering for such databases is a simple matter of giving a blood sample. But unless your consciousness has been raised to the need for bone marrow donors… probably due to personal experience… chances you haven’t made the effort to do so. Heaven knows I haven’t But ‘Help I’ve Cut Myself & I Want to Sa...

My birthday is in February and recently I got the notice at the left from Crowdrise, a free online platform and social media site that helps you raise money for causes you care about. It’s similar, in several respects, to the friends and family fundraising platform that comes your way when you sign up to participate in a race event on behalf of Komen, the American Diabetes Association or the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The difference is that with Crowdrise you decide what the cause is and how to make your case for it. You can also be sure that Susan G. Komen for the Cure spent a darn sight more on their back-end software than did Crowdrise. That’s not a dig on Crowdrise or Komen as much as it is recognition that in the Internet age a lot of software which used to cost a fortune no longer does. Because Crowdrise is independent of any single charity it feels more organic. You direct the effort, determine timelines, goals, messaging and the like. You’re not just another cog in a giant ...

We’ve all seen how causes recognize multiple sponsors for, say, races and events. If you got a t-shirt from participating in a Team in Training race for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to pick on just one, you know what I'm talking about; it’s logo-soup spilled all over the back of your t-shirt. But suppose your company supports multiple causes. How do you display that without doing the same thing to your ads? That’s the question I had when I pulled this ad for Cabot Cheese from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. Cabot Cheese , a co-op in Vermont, supports a handful of causes in different ways and in pretty different spaces; the arts, schools, women and children’s causes, environmental causes, even the Girl Scouts. How does Cabot pull it off? Quite admirably, I’d say. Each of the causes is assigned its own icon, even the Girl Scouts. One of problems of the logo-soup approach is that logos come in all sizes, colors, and orientations. If you regularize their size or go wit...

Plus 3 Network wants to turn your “sweat equity into social capital,” and they’re using a non transactional form of cause marketing to do it. Here’s what that means: You register at Plus 3, a kind of social media network, and then keep an online log of all your workouts. Each mile you train… mainly running, walking and biking… translates to a small donation paid for by sponsors to a select group of charities. Certain training activities are also awarded with prizes or rewards like chain lube or training socks. So you get fitter and maybe some new socks, the sponsor gets the usual benefits of cause marketing and the charity gets a donation. Of course, Plus 3 gets something out of it too. It’s a cause marketing triple play. The donations are higher when you upload the data from a GPS enabled device than if you make a hand entry. For instance, walking pays out $.05 a mile when uploaded from Garmin GPS device, but just $.0167 when you hand enter the data. Plus 3 says this is because the...