Cause Marketing

One of the pretenses of reality TV in the United States is doing whatever you do in the name of charity. It seems like half the bikes built on the show American Chopper , for instance, are made to be donated to or otherwise auctioned off on behalf of charity. Likewise, basically every episode of The Celebrity Apprentice turns on one kind of charity fundraiser or another. It sorta has to be that way. The Donald really doesn’t want to turn loose on his empire a bunch of half-competent 20-watt celebrities. Before Arsenio Hall’s win on The Celebrity Apprentice May 20, 2012, Walgreens, the mega drugstore chain, developed and began selling a bracelet for $3, with $2 of that going to the Magic Johnson Foundation. The Foundation also received $250,000 thanks to Hall’s Apprentice win. The card that holds the bracelet says that Walgreens was “inspired by Arsenio Hall’s work to support the Magic Johnson Foundation and created this bracelet to symbolize our joint commitment.” Walgreen...

Keep a Child Alive Featuring Alicia Keys On May 20 I wrote about how for the first time in the United States it was possible for nonprofits to use cell phones to raise money, $5 at a time. For the last three months the Brooklyn, New York-based nonprofit charity called Keep a Child Alive , has been using cell phone fundraising to generate nearly $40,000 from some 7,800 people. Keep a Child Alive provides antiretroviral drugs to children and adults with HIV/AIDS in Africa. Antiretroviral drugs are what keep people with HIV/AIDS like Magic Johnson from dying. In Africa there are 2.3 million children with HIV/AIDS, and many times that many adults (read ‘parents’). Keep a Child Alive cell phone fundraising approach is to use a film produced for the charity called Alicia in Africa , featuring the impossibly lovely and talented R and B artist Alicia Keys , who is the organization’s official ambassador. In effect, they ask you to pay $5 for the pleasure of watching the film by texting “Alive...