Cause Marketing

Austin-based HelpAttack ! wants to help you use your Twitter superpowers for good. Sign up and pledge a certain amount per Tweet for a month to the charity of your choice. At the end of 30-days HelpAttack! tallies your Tweets and sends you a bill. Donations are processed and fulfilled through Network for Good . HelpAttack! has nearly 6,000 charities already in place. It’s a simple matter to add yours if it isn’t already on the list. At this writing, the average pledge per Tweet is $0.28 and the average monthly pledge is about $28. The idea for HelpAttack! germinated with Sarah Vela, the CEO who posed the classic entrepreneur’s question, what if? “The idea came to me during last year’s Movember pledge drive,” she says. “There was a lot of activity online in the form of passionate participants asking for support from their friends. I wondered, what if all that activity were the actual donation? What if the act of being online was generating dollars for Movember? What if every Tweet were ...

One question I am frequently asked is: "just what is the best amount to set the donation at in transactional cause marketing?" What percentage should the donation be in cause marketing? As a rule of thumb, academic studies have found that more is more when it comes to setting the amount. That is, the greater the donation the better the sales boost. But that’s not terribly helpful in this age when every Baby Boomer knows the exact number of his good and bad cholesterol.readings. People want a tidy little percentage. But that’s fraught with problems for some sponsors. If you set the number very high, doesn’t that suggest that your prices are too lofty? For LavishGiving.com , an online gift store, that number is 10 percent. When you make purchases totaling $100 or more, after 7 days LavishGiving.com will send 10 percent of the total to you as a gift card from Networkforgood.org , which you can then donate to the your charity of choice. The time lag is to allow for returns. Lavis...

Today’s post features a collection of all kinds of news relating to cause marketing, corporate giving and charitable donations. With my comments in italics. Stationary for the Troops For every $50 spent at FineStationary.com through the end of the year they will donate stationary, note cards and writing papers to members of the armed forces deployed overseas via Operation Gratitude . Hey, I appreciate businesses do what they can. But $50 is a pretty high threshold to trigger what amounts to an in-kind gift. Corporate Giving up in 2007 The Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy in New York released the results of a survey that found that corporations increased their giving in 2007 over the year prior when measured as median amount and when measured as a percentage of pre-tax profits. 2007 was a year of mixed economic news. Maybe this bodes well for 2008-9. A Holiday Card that Gives Network for Good offers a ‘ Good Card ’ this holiday season meant to serve as a client gift. You l...