Cause Marketing

Share Our Strength reports that its one-day ‘Dine Out No Kid Hungry’ campaign at a number of the nation’s restaurants on Sept. 8, 2012 generated more than $5 million, more than twice last year’s total. Regular readers know that I like to report the results of campaigns when they’re available. No Kid Hungry is year-round anti-child hunger effort that concentrates on improving access to existing childhood nutrition programs, educating low-income families on how to stretch their food dollars, and raising public awareness on the issue of child hunger. Dine Out No Kid Hungry was a one-day effort at 292 restaurants across the spectrum and representing 8,200 locations nationwide. Notable chains included Arby’s, Bruegger’s Bagels, Denny’s, Fuddruckers, Corner Bakery Café, Romano’s Macaroni Grill, and others. By itself, the Arby’s chain generated $2.5 million for the effort. I remember Arby’s activated its sponsorship in its weekly fliers , see at left. Share Our Strength activated the campa...

Cause marketing sponsors might have several reasons for engaging in cause marketing  including boosting sales, building brand, and bolstering PR, among others. One of those goals might also be to give customers a good reason to come back after supporting a cause. Informally, it’s called a bounceback and you’ll see it commonly in retail settings for food and other consumables. At the left is a current cause marketing campaign from Arby’s on behalf of a fundraiser called Happy Not Hungry that benefits childhood hunger fighting efforts from the Arby’s Foundation . Make a donation to Happy Not Hungry during the month of September and you’ll get a coupon for a free item from Arby’s value menu, when you also purchase something else. Although the flyer doesn’t mention it, the money passes through the Arby’s Foundation to No Kid Hungry campaign from the anti-hunger cause Share Our Strength. There’s two elements to get right in a bounceback offer. The first is that it has to both move pe...

A post on the website Just Means from Akhila Vijayaraghavan is critical of cause marketing and it made me wonder, should the impious ever be permitted to pray? Should teachers wait until their students know the alphabet before allowing them to speak? Should I, as a father, wait until I’m emotionally available to my kids before I listen to what they're telling me? Is Nobel Laureate Al Gore the only person who can legitimately donate to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club? And, while we're on the topic, could any company ever be morally upright enough to make donations to a good cause via cause marketing? Of Kellogg’s Share You Breakfast effort, Vijayaraghavan writes: “Some of the products that Kellogg (sic) has been promoting as part of its campaign includes Frosted Flakes and Nutri-Grain bars. However both products have been criticized for the high levels of sugar that they contain. Frosted Flakes mascoted by Tony the Tiger contains 11gms of sugar per three-fourths cup serving...

On the heels of yesterday's post about rebranding the two big label campaigns benefiting education, in today's post I show how when one anti-hunger charity rebranded itself, it doubled in size, while another anti-hunger charity is also growing, if less impressively, under its old branding. The nation’s largest anti-hunger charity, Feeding America , has been knocking it out of the park in terms of its fundraising since its rebranding in September 2008. Here are the numbers: In 2008 it raised $577 million; in 2009 it raised $639 million; in 2010 $706 million; and for fiscal year 2011 it generated $1.2 billion. For those of you keeping score at home, Feeding America has doubled in size since its rebranding, and in the teeth of the worst recession in America in a generation. Share Our Strength , an anti-hunger charity that focuses on children, has also been quickly growing. In 2008 it raised around $14 million (not including results from its subsidiary called Community Wealth Vent...

I saw a recent post on Just Means critical of Kellogg’s new cause marketing campaign called ‘ Share Your Breakfast ’ and I wondered, should sinners or the impious be permitted to pray? Should teachers wait until their students know the alphabet before allowing them to speak? Should I, as a man, wait until I’m emotionally available to my wife before I listen to something she’s telling me? Is Nobelist Al Gore the only person who can legitimately donate to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club ? Or, while we're on the topic of charitable donations, could any company ever be morally upright enough to make donations to a good cause via cause marketing? The post in question was written by staff writer Akhila Vijayaraghavan, whose beat at Just Means is corporate social responsibility. She writes: “Some of the products that Kellogg has been promoting as part of its campaign includes Frosted Flakes and Nutri-Grain bars. However both products have been criticized for the high levels of sugar tha...

Clients ask me all the time: have the breast cancer charities sucked out all the oxygen out of the atmosphere for cause marketing during October? That is, can anyone else do cause marketing during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month? I can't give a categorical answer, but here are three quick takes on cause marketing campaigns going on in this month that aren’t about breast cancer, plus a forth that is about breast cancer, only with fewer pink ribbons than usual. Sigg Drop of Hope Water Bottle for the Jane Goodall Institute . When you buy the Drop of Hope water bottle from Sigg , the Swiss aluminum bottle makers, they’ll donate $5 to the Jane Goodall Institute to build rainwater tanks for schoolchildren in Africa. The campaign is well-timed coming, as it does the heels of news that Sigg used BPA as an element in the plastic liner of its water bottles after first denying doing so. Benihana/Fuji Water Co-Promotion for Best Buddies . Last night at dinner with the fam at Benihana ...

Blogger’s Note: On the right side of the site you’ll see an Amazon ad for books about marketing, cause-related marketing, an informal learning and education that I’ve read and can recommend. One of those books is Jocelyn Daw’s book Cause Marketing for Nonprofits, from John Wiley & Sons. I reviewed the book for the We Review section of CharityChannel.com , where you can also read this review. And special thanks to Steve Nill, CharityChannel’s founder, for his patience. I’ve been reading cause-related marketing books for almost 10 years now and can trace the arc of their development. They started out being highfalutin, even ethereal. Brand Spirit by Saatchi & Saatchi veterans Hamish Pringle and Marjorie Thomson which came out in 1999 and 2001’s The Cathedral Within by Bill Shore imbued cause-related marketing with an almost mystical power to save companies, causes and individuals. Shore, who founded the hunger charity Share Our Strength , compared the meaning businesspeople cou...

Half Baked ACH Foods, which owns food brands including Mazola cooking oils, Spice Islands spices, Fleischman’s Yeast, released on Sunday the FSI on the left in support of their campaign for Susan G. Komen called Bake for the Cure. In the campaign, when you buy any of a dozen or so participating ACH brands and submit proof of purchase at the Bake for the Cure website, the company will donate 25 cents per sku. The campaign's minimum donation is $250,000. ACH will also donate another 10 cents every time someone posts to the website or exchanges a recipe. The maximum donation is capped at $350,000. The agency for the campaign, Market Vision , has a multi-cultural marketing focus and to a degree Bake for the Cure targets the Hispanic market. Program materials are being distributed in Spanish and English and the website, while in English, could accept Spanish-language recipes. Komen also makes their breast cancer information available in Spanish. It’s a nice enough campaign, but has a ‘...

Elmo’s World of Slick Cause-Related Marketing I confess I don’t have the experience abroad to judge if it’s a good idea to take Sesame Street … the 38-year-old American children’s TV show… to places like Egypt, Bangladesh, and South Africa. And I’m not sure to what degree the shows “work” in those countries. (In fact, neither are Sesame Street ’s producers. Here’s what their president and CEO Gary E. Knell wrote in their 2005 annual report : “As we’ve said before, we don’t pretend that media can, by itself, solve the many problems of the world, but we do believe­­­—and research confirms—that they can contribute to the solutions.”) I do, however, have a background in cause-related marketing and this 2-part ad, which appeared in BabyTalk Magazine in May 2006, leaves me cold. As we’ll see, even though it has the veneer of cause-related marketing, it’s actually just an advertisement for one of Sesame Street ’s licensees. American Greetings … the greeting card giant… was a Sesam...