Cause Marketing

In April 2012 the Boston Consulting Group released its study called “ The Millennial Consumer: Debunking Stereotypes ” which found that for many in this generation causes and cause marketing is an important and animating force. In the United States Millennials…aka Generation Y… now number 79 million. Compare that to the 76 million Boomers still alive. Millennials are defined as the generation between the ages of 16 and 34. BCG subtitled the report ‘Debunking Stereotypes’ because Millennials are often portrayed as being shiftless, lazy and spoiled. The word cloud at the left from BCG's report gives you a sense of that. But BCG instead finds a generation that… while it has a healthy self-regard… is nonetheless responsive to the needs of causes as they fulfill their missions and to the practice of cause marketing. Here’s some key findings: Of the 34 percent of Millennials who make direct donations to causes, almost half donate using their mobile device. That’s three times the numb...

The current issue of Fortune magazine, modestly called 'The Future Issue,' examines what the world and the world of business will be like ten years hence in 2022. Fortune’s prognosticators see video projected on every window surface, 3-D printers on every desktop, smart holographic table tops as in the movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol , real-time subtitles for teleconferences, and apps that help you put together your ideal office work group. (That's an Eden 3D printer on the left, although it's not exactly a desktop model.) Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of nonprofits, although Fortune does see people working later in life thanks to new miracle drugs and treatments for chronic conditions like arthritis. Great, I get to work for years to come! But it set me to thinking; what’s the 10-year future of cause marketing, nonprofit fundraising and corporate social responsibility? I put on my Merlin cap and came up with these three ideas: Big Data and Cause Ma...

I have a spotty record predicting the future. I bought a Zip drive about a week before the first USB drive came out. And then, admiring the portability of said USB drives I bought 2 of them with 56K of memory for about $50 a pop. I have two sets of the 1987 Topps baseball cards (which includes the rookie cards for Barry Bonds and Mark McGuire) still in the original shrink-wrap. They’re worth almost exactly what I paid for them. Or rather less, considering the ravages of inflation. (I also have a first edition of Hayduke Lives by Edward Abbey that has doubled in value. So, I’m not always dead wrong.) So imagine my surprise to get a short missive from Bay-area fundraising consultant Gayle Roberts asking me to weigh in on the topic of “Predicting the Future of Fundraising” for the September Giving Carnival. But like all pundits, I’ve got an opinion no matter my history of accuracy! That said, to paraphrase Abbey’s ‘warning’ at the front of Hayduke “Anyone who takes these predictions seri...