Cause Marketing

One of the first business categories to really adopt cause marketing was consumer packaged goods. Those early CPG promotions frequently went something like this: The sponsor would run an ad in a free-standing insert or FSI, which are those booklets of coupons that drop in local newspapers once a week or so. The donation was based on the number of coupons consumers redeemed. So the pitch was, 'get cents off your purchase while some more cents go to a cause.' Naturally, the FSIs served as the principal form of activation for the promotion Now Naked Juice, a consumer packaged goods company with a long history of cause marketing, is activating their current effort via social media. At left is their Twitter page. About every fifth tweet is one that features the #gooddeeds hashtag. They switch up the wording, but all the tweets with the #gooddeeds hashtag mention that you can get a coupon at nakedjuice.com/gooddeeds. Point your browser there and up pops a $1-off printable coupon....

Nowadays when every brand has a YouTube channel, and pages on Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook, it’s easy to think that when you activate your cause marketing on a social  network that you’re done. Not so fast, Twitter-breath. You still need to reach customers and prospects where they are and that can mean activating cause marketing on packaging, signage, and yes, placemats. Black Bear Diner, a franchise with 56 locations in nine western states, went old school to help activate its Dec 2012 effort for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Black Bear Diner is one of those places where the ample portion sizes seem just about right for NFL linemen. In the promotion Black Bear sold Make-A-Wish’s star-shaped paper icons (aka pinups) and donated $1 for each dessert sold from a select list. The total donation was capped at $50,000. Using paper placemats was the right approach for this cause marketing activation. After all, once a patron is in the restaurant, the best way to reach them isn’t via G...

Paper icons can be a license to print money if all the elements come together right. But there’s always been the challenge of how to display them. Paper icons, others call them ‘pinups,’ are small pieces of printed paper, oftentimes displaying the charity’s logo, sold for $1 or more, and benefiting a cause. Usually they’re displayed in-store, perhaps hung from fishing line, or taped to the store’s windows. Twenty CiCi’s Pizza Buffet locations in Georgia have come up with a fun idea of how to display the paper icons for their charity of choice, Special Olympics Georgia. Those Georgia CiCi’s locations began selling Special Olympics paper icons for $1 starting on July 16. On Monday, August 13, 2012 they had a kind of inflection point whereby they challenged their customers to buy enough paper icons on that day to cover a law enforcement vehicle. Fun idea! In addition, on Monday, August 13, CiCi’s donated 10 percent of sales to Special Olympics Georgia. "At CiCi's we care about o...

General Mills is back with it’s Win One Give One promotion, “with,” as I wrote about the promotion back on May 18, 2011, “the item in question being a XO laptop computer.” This post is part of an occasional series whereby I take a second look at notable cause marketing promotions. Here’s what I wrote back then: “Inside specially-marked packages of 6 varieties of Fruit Rollups are certificates for a free XO computer. A total of 2001 XO computers will be given away in the sweepstakes. A matching number will be donated to children in Africa. “From December 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011, General Mills will also donate one dollar to One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization behind the XO, for every Fruit Rollup coupon redeemed up to $4,000. “Winonegiveone.com, the promotion’s website, offers a third way for laptops to be donated to Africa. The site, which is targeted to kids and moms has a kind of Angry Birds-type game that allows you to propel a heroic action figure to Africa...

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by social media and public relations than by advertising. You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising, public relations and social media. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. Social media can have both frequency and credibility; Kony 2012 , for instance. But I think we can agree that Kony is the rarest sort of exception. So how do you activate your cause marketing story using social media and PR? One answer is that the story you tell the media has a boy and a puppy like the story that appeared in People magazine last year about then 7-year-old Evan Moss. Young Evan wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting...

The first two things I can remember doing for causes as a kid was to sell Scout-A-Rama tickets and walk in the March of Dimes’ WalkAmerica, now called March for Babies. (Back then, I kid you not, the walk was 20 miles!) Plenty of causes have borrowed liberally from the March of Dimes walk events. March of Dimes, in turn, owes a debt of gratitude to the German Volksmarsch . Now a group called KindWalk enables you to create a DIY… ‘do it yourself’… walk for the cause of your choice. Here’s how KindWalk works. You sign up for an individual membership at the website for $18 a year. You get a pedometer plus a raft of other benefits. They also have a second membership level for $51 that includes a pedometer with a USB port so you can download walk data directly to your account. Membership benefits include: Interactive Fitness and Nutrition Planner Weekly Recipes and Grocery Lists Monthly Wellness Newsletters Interactive Weight Tracker Smoking Cessation Resources Health Risk Assessm...

Got a potty mouth on Twitter combined with a yen to do good? You may want to sign up for Charity Swearbox. Here’s how it works: After you sign up every time you use a bad word on Twitter, Charity Swearbox takes note. At the end of the month they send you a notice along with a suggested donation. The default amount is $1 per word, but that’s a suggestion only. Charity Swearbox has whole host of tweets with naughty words. So don’t go there if you’re offended by profanity. Currently four causes benefit from Charity Swearbox: Eff Cancer, 50/50, an aid effort for famine victims in East Africa, BeatBullying, and Instrument Lenders Canada. Charity Swearbox is actively looking for other charity beneficiaries, too. So far Charity Swearbox has generated $38,147. This is the kind of grassroots cause marketing/fundraising that’s only possible with the advent of cheap social networks. And, of course, it’s way more accurate than the self-policing version like the picture at the left. Another differ...

The direct sales business… think Amway, Avon, and Shaklee… has a demographics problem, namely attracting the next generation of sales reps. Avon has addressed the challenge by launching Mark , which targets 18-30 year olds with bright, fun, less expensive products than Avon’s mainstream line and sold by youthful reps using a heavy dose of social media. Mark has proven to be a good extension for Avon. A January 2010 story in the New York Times on Mark put annual sales at $70 million and numbered sales reps at around 40,000 in North America. Like Avon, Mark has a cause attached to it. But, as I’ve demonstrated before in this space , in the United States breast cancer, Avon’s signature cause, is pretty rare for women under age 30. So Mark chose domestic violence instead. Its own charity, called m.powerment, donates to causes working to end domestic violence. In the iteration at the left, when you buy the necklace worn by Twilight star Ashley Greene, proceeds benefit m.powerment and its...

Activation in sponsorship, and by extension cause marketing, means the stuff you do to promote the sponsorship. Activation is an exceedingly broad idea. It could mean everything from jumping out of airplane with a banner attached to your feet, to advertising or earned media on radio and TV, to email, to social media like Facebook, to signage and out of home advertising. (The old sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati , which was about a radio station, once activated a promotion by dropping live turkeys from a helicopter at Thanksgiving. The results were comically tragic. Watch the classic episode from 1978 here .) At left is an activation of a cause campaign in front of a local Sizzler restaurant, at the intersection of two busy streets. The campaign itself… called Cops for Kids… is a tried and true fundraiser; cops from three local police departments will serve you and bus your tables during your visit to one of three local Sizzler restaurants on April 19, 2011. The money from tips will go to the ...

The 2010 Cone Nonprofit Marketing Trend Tracker has attracted a fair amount of attention, especially in the social media. But almost none of the blog or Facebook posts, or Tweets got much beyond the headline in Cone's release, which reads: "More than Three-Quarters of Americans say a Nonprofit-Corporate Partnership Makes a Cause Stand Out." This latest study confirms and... to a degree... builds on Cone's studies over the last 15-20 years. But it's Cause Marketing 101. Cause Marketing 201 is a couple of paragraphs down in the body of the release. The Cone study also found that 75 percent of Americans "Want to hear about the results of corporate/nonprofit partnerships." Few cause marketers, corporate or nonprofit, get this right. But it couldn't be more vital to giving successful cause marketing the transparency it requires. People want to know that progress is being made. Cone's release says this means that people want to know about "the po...

Get Your Chin off Your Chest It’s probably just superstition, but I have steadfastly avoided posting anything about the recession. After all, considering the amount of liquidity sloshing around after all the actions already taken by central bankers in Asia, Europe, and the United States, it’s plain that the real problem right now isn’t access to capital. The problem is one of confidence. This is just one small little blog on the semi-obscure topic of cause marketing, but I see little reason to pile on. So, assuming that the economy doesn’t turn into Oklahoma circa 1935 (Dustbowl deflation) or the Weimar Republic of 1923 (hyperinflation), this will be my first and last posting on the topic of the economy. In the States, economists are struggling with exactly which recession to compare this one to. Is it like the downturns of 2000, 1980 and 1974? Is it a second Great Depression? (Short answer: No. For one thing, unemployment was 25 percent in the States in 1933.) Could it be an analog to...