Cause Marketing

As a part of my occasional series of posts on the results of cause marketing efforts, today we turn to a guest donation program in the national parks, which, a press account says , generated nearly $1 million in 2012. The money was used for “priority park programs.” The donations are generated basically when the 638 concessioners at the 401 national park areas… at their discretion… allow guests to add $1 to their lodging bill per night stayed. In other words, it’s an add-a-dollar effort. As I did some research to drill down on this effort I was astonished at what I learned. First of all, 279 million people visited the parks in 2011, suggesting something less that one out of every 279 visits led to a $1 donation. Not bad when you consider that not every one of those 279 million visitors stayed a night in a participating concessioner’s room. The next surprising thing is that the National Park Guest Donation Program was piloted at 12 national parks over the course of three years in the e...

If you’re like me, you loathe it when gas stations sell air for your vehicle’s tires. Air is free, right? But I saw a pay air pump on the Navajo Indian Reservation that used cause marketing to take some of the sting out of buying compressed air. Gap, Arizona is a tiny burg on US-89 on the western edge of the expansive Navajo Nation (the reservation is slightly larger than the state of West Virginia). US-89 is almost the mother road for National Parks in the American West. It is the main access artery for the Grand Canyon National Park, Zion National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, the Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. The population density of the Navajo Nation is very low, and the unemployment and poverty rates are high; 42 percent and 43 percent respectively . For comparison’s sake, the unemployment rate on the adjacent Hopi reservation is 55 percent. But the Navajo have a rich and amazing artistic heritage. Years ago I worked i...