Cause Marketing

Last Thursday, March 22, 2012 I took a call from a small businessperson I called Roberta who asked in effect, ‘how can my small company work with a cause to benefit us both?’ I posted about her call last Friday . She had contacted two breast cancer charities about cause marketing; a local one I called Athena Charity and a national one I identified as Artemis Charity. (All the names have been changed). Athena put Roberta off and Artemis tried to lock her into an existing event for a cool $5,000. In my post on Friday, I compared Artemis Charity’s offerings to those from a local TV station, which are similarly high-priced and inflexible. Neither option was well-suited to a small business like Roberta’s. Roberta has a generous impulse and she wants to help, but her ability to do so is severely limited by the size of her business. Moreover, Roberta was interested in cause marketing, in part, because she needed something more from the relationship besides good feelings. Imagine instead a cau...

Years ago Junior Achievement had one of the most cleared-eyed policy manuals on cause marketing I’ve ever come across. It was insightful, strictly ethical, thorough, and filled with good ideas. And you’re going to have to take my word on all that because I can’t find it in my files or on the Junior Achievement website. If anybody has a copy, I’d love to see it again. But I wonder what that Junior Achievement policy manual would have said about this modest campaign from an AlphaGraphics store in Salt Lake City? In celebration of the store’s founding and the owner’s birthday, they’re hosting a BBQ benefiting Junior Achievement next Wednesday. Proceeds from the sale of the meal benefit the nonprofit charity whose three-part mission is youth development, education development, and economic development. The programs and materials at Junior Achievement (JA) are strong. It calls on more than 375,000 volunteers worldwide who serve tens of millions of kids. It has a clean operating record, a ...

We’ve all seen how causes recognize multiple sponsors for, say, races and events. If you got a t-shirt from participating in a Team in Training race for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to pick on just one, you know what I'm talking about; it’s logo-soup spilled all over the back of your t-shirt. But suppose your company supports multiple causes. How do you display that without doing the same thing to your ads? That’s the question I had when I pulled this ad for Cabot Cheese from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. Cabot Cheese , a co-op in Vermont, supports a handful of causes in different ways and in pretty different spaces; the arts, schools, women and children’s causes, environmental causes, even the Girl Scouts. How does Cabot pull it off? Quite admirably, I’d say. Each of the causes is assigned its own icon, even the Girl Scouts. One of problems of the logo-soup approach is that logos come in all sizes, colors, and orientations. If you regularize their size or go wit...

Buried well into a recent Pew Research Center survey was the graph to the left which illustrated that while the American public has deep distrust of government, there are institutions they still do trust. And that has resonance for nonprofit cause marketers. That most-trusted institution is small business. At 71 percent favorable ratings , small business has higher positives than Congress (24%), labor unions (32%), the President (45%), colleges and universities (61%), and churches and religious organizations (63%). What does this mean to nonprofit cause marketers? We’ve long known that the cause marketing between causes and sponsors that are both highly regarded tend to have the best results. Likewise, if the sponsor is more highly regarded than the cause, the cause tends to benefit more from the relationship than the sponsor. And vice versa. Of course small business is not all positives for nonprofit cause marketers. Small businesses are diffuse, often underfunded, and usually very l...

In today’s rocky economy it may be small businesses that have may have the most to gain from integrating cause marketing into their marketing efforts. For purposes of definition, cause marketing is a relationship that bridges commerce and cause in a way that benefits both parties.   Cause marketing has been shown to improve sales, brand and increase customer loyalty. It can help a company stand out from competitors and improve employee recruiting and retention. And it does several and sometimes all these things while helping a cause. Cause marketing is like red wine. It feels good and it’s good for you. Here then are ‘7 Tips to Turbocharge Your Small Business Marketing With Cause Marketing.’ Pick an appropriate cause. Consider not only a cause’s appeal, but its capacity to support your effort. It may be that the best cause marketing fit for your small business may be a small charity. Weigh the option of weaving cause marketing into your overall business strategy. General Mills’...

Today I got a call from an entrepreneur who had tried to do a deal with a prominent children’s charity that does a notable amount of cause-related marketing. He loved the cause… still does … but after two years time spent on the project it didn’t pan out, mainly because the minimums and the upfront fees the charity required to participate were two high for the entrepreneur’s budget. I understand why cause-related marketing charities have participation minimums or up-front fees. It’s a management issue. How do you manage a bunch of $10,000 (more or less) cause marketing campaigns? To a lesser degree it’s about keeping the cause's image in the main channels of the branding river. But I’ve taken a lot of calls like this over the last 15 years, as a consultant and as a nonprofit executive and staffer, and it’s been frustrating almost every time. I think it’s time for the big cause-related marketing charities to rethink their policies on participation minimums. And the thought-model I p...

Got an email on Tuesday, July 8 from Cyndia Zwahlen a contributing columnist to the Small Business Report at the Los Angeles Times (that's their building on the left) who asked about "about small business and the mistakes they make when it comes to cause-related marketing, in particular developing and sustaining a relationship with a charity." Here's how I responded: I'd say that small businesses make 4 basic mistakes when it comes to cause-related marketing: They pick a charity that's a poor strategic fit. There's a lot of potential reasons for why a small business might undertake a cause-related marketing campaign for a cause. Maybe their customers are school-age kids so they pick a local school. A restaurant might choose a hunger cause. But if you're a local welding shop, you better have a pretty good reason to support the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Research Foundations; a reason your customers will easily and quickly understand. That's beca...