Cause Marketing

If cause marketing is to really grow , I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that cause marketing needs the equivalent of an ‘open standard.’ When speaking of software especially, the term ‘open standards’ means an agreed-upon convention that is free and unconstrained in how it can be used. Open standards are enormously valuable to you and me. HTML and XHTML are open standards. PDF is an open standard and CD-ROMs will run in any computer with a CD-ROM drive because of open standards. That you’re reading this post is because of an open standard called TCP-IP, which is the way website data is divided up into packets, transmitted, and then reassembled by servers somewhere near your computer or phone. According to the entry on the topic in today’s (August 17, 2009) Wikipedia: Open Standards means “a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle.” Its more complete definition according to the Digital Standards Organization is: “The standard is...