Cause Marketing

On Nov 26, 2012 I posted the results of a survey that measured Canadian opinion on cause marketing. One of the findings was the 67 percent of Canadians would be willing to donate to a cause at checkout if the company matched their donation, thus reinforcing what almost any gray-haired nonprofit fundraiser could have told you. Namely, that when it comes to philanthropy people love playing with house money. Tripadvisor , the big travel website that aggregates opinions and reviews is offering a little house money for you to use at Kiva, the lender that provides microloans primarily in the developing world. For the next year, when you submit a review of a hotel, restaurant, attraction, etc. in one of the countries where Kiva.org is active, Tripadvisor will send you email that allows you to direct a $25 microloan in that or any other Kiva.org country. That $25 costs the reviewer nothing. No word on what happens if TripAdvisor meets the $250,000 cap before the year is up. The idea was inspi...

Since the start of the year I’ve been beating the drum pretty hard for sponsors and causes to utilize QR codes in their cause marketing campaigns. Read previous posts on the topic here , here , here and here . QR codes are like barcodes, only because they’re in 2D they can hold much more data. You can use QR codes to launch a website or Facebook, display augmented reality, launch a picture or a video, plus many other tactical variations. Here’s tactical implementation that I just proposed to a prospective client that has a physical storefront: put a QR code on a vinyl cling on the clients windows and doors that would launch a sweepstakes entry form. Since basically every smartphone with a camera can read QR codes… and their expense is relatively low…adding them to all your cause marketing collateral makes a lot of sense. The QR code at the left is for me and my company, Alden Keene & Associates, Inc. Point your smartphone at it and it will launch a profile page on a new website ca...

Pictured at left is a circular for Designerchecks.com from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. The circular, circa 2007, features two cause-related marketing efforts; one for the New York City police officers and firefighters who performed so bravely during 9-11, and the other for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Ignore for the moment the weak and confusing “portion of the proceeds” language on the firefighter check and concentrate instead on what else is in play besides the transaction-based cause marketing. Everyone that buys either of those checks is identifying themselves as someone who has so much affinity for the New York City firefighters and police officers of 9-11, or for breast cancer research that they’re willing to put a ‘bumper sticker’ on their checks saying as much! Imagine the value to those two nonprofits to have the list of people who bought those checks. It would be the hottest kind of list. While for-profits commonly approach non-profits for their lists,...

I joined LinkedIn way back in 2005. I started this blog in October 2006. I was on Twitter early enough that the handle ‘ paulrjones ’ was still available. In fact, it was so soon after it went live that the early adopters… tip of the hat to Jason Alba … who turned me onto it were using Twitter to enable lunchtime meetups. My LinkedIn account was half-finished for years before I could imagine any value in completing it. The blog paid off right away, but the value of Twitter puzzled me for months after I started using it. I’ve known about Facebook since the time when it was still limited to college-aged students. I joined Facebook pretty early, too. But I doubt if there’s anyone with the reach of these words that uses Facebook less than me. Simply put, Facebook leaves me cold. And that’s a problem for a marketer, because Facebook is close to being a marketer’s… and a cause marketer’s… dream. That’s why I was so glad when the friendly folks at O’Reilly , the tech publishers (et al), sen...

The day was March 9, 1967 and NBC had a challenging ratings failure on its hands called ‘Star Trek.’ The conundrum for network executives was that bad ratings notwithstanding, the people who loved the polarizing series loved it with the fire of a 1000 Vulcan suns. And so after threatening to cancel the series after the first season, NBC executives felt obliged at the end of the show that March 9, to make an odd live announcement. “‘Star Trek’ will be back in the fall,” it went. “And please don’t write any more letters.” Fans had in engaged in an adhoc letter writing campaign that buoyed the series through that first season and through three more. In total, just 79 Star Trek episodes had aired. But to the degree that Star Trek has become a science fiction franchise it’s because in 1974 a group of 10,000 like-minded geeks gathered in at the Americana Hotel in New York City to dress up like their favorite Trek characters, screen individual shows and extol all things Trek. People with sing...