Cause Marketing

Faithful readers: The following is from my periodic column in the business weekly, the Salt Lake Enterprise . In it I profile how a fast-growing company and a innovative charity connected five years ago in a way that has greatly benefited both parties. Warm regards, Paul Since its founding a little more than five years ago, Ragnar Events LLC , which produces the super-sized Ragnar Relay Series, has sprinted to become the nation’s premier overnight relay race. And almost from the day Ragnar strung out its first yellow finish line, the company has had a charity partner, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Operation Kids . Headquartered in Kaysville, Utah, Ragnar owns and operates 10 relay races around the country in Arizona, Boston, Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Washington, D.C., and Washington State. (The picture above comes from Ragnar's Relay Del Sol race, which takes place in Arizona.) The races typically cover 200 miles. Teams of 12, sometimes dressed in ...

Blogger's Note: What follows is a profile and interview I wrote of Children's Miracle Network co-founder Joe Lake, who was recently installed as the CEO of the Starfish Television Network . This originally appeared in the Salt Lake Enterprise on Monday, May 11. Lining the walls of the office of Joe Lake, the new CEO of the Starfish Television Network, a 501(c) (3) public charity and television network founded in 2006 and headquartered in Midvale, are pictures of the many celebrities he has worked with. There are pictures of Joe with Goldie Hawn, Sidney Poitier, Jeff Bridges, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rob Lowe and Walter Cronkite, and affectionately-autographed publicity stills from Bob Hope and Rich Little. It’s something you’d expect in the office of a Hollywood agent, or at a celebrity hangout in Manhattan, or Chicago or Vegas. But the Starfish Television Network, whose mission is to tell the stories of nation’s nonprofits in a way that educates, entertains and inspires its ...

Faithful readers: Waiting for your computer to return from the shop after a motherboard-ectomy is a little like waiting at the hospital for a baby to come…it can’t get here soon enough! But the computer doctors are telling me no later than Saturday! In the meantime, I’m reprinting a column I wrote for the Salt Lake Enterprise, the local weekly business newspaper, and which was published Monday, March 16, 2009. The headlines tell the story in brief: “American Red Cross running low on corporate donations” –ABC4, Feb. 16, 2009 “Donations way down at charitable organizations” –KSL, Nov. 23, 2008 “Big players scale back charitable donations” –Wall Street Journal, Nov. 25, 2008 “Donations down; need up” –The Intelligencer, Nov. 30, 2008 The recession has been a perfect storm for nonprofits, battering them with great service needs at a time when donations are markedly lower. And corporate donations, which most years range from 4-6 percent of the total U.S. charitable giving according to Givin...