Cause Marketing

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...

FSIs or Free-Standing Inserts are those booklets of coupons mailed to your address or stuffed into your Sunday newspaper. They’ve been a hallmark of cause marketing almost from the very earliest days when much of cause marketing involved consumer packaged goods (CPG). For a time the use of FSIs to distribute coupons was declining, but they’ve surged again during the Great Recession, as has the average value of coupons. The cover of FSI at the left, sponsored by the British-Dutch CPG company Unilever, features the cause Boy’s and Girls Clubs of America. It dropped on May 17. My FSI had eight pages of Unilever coupons not counting the cover, along with at least that many more pages from non-Unilever products. Unilever, the body copy on the cover tells us, is donating $250,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of America. But that’s the full extent of the co-branding. Where’s the paragraph or two of explanation of all the valuable things Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) do for school-age ...

Smith’s Food and Drug is in the middle of its annual campaign for Primary Children’s Medical Center , a key part of which is this paper icon. I purchased mine for $1 on Saturday, May 7, 2011. Since 1992 Smith’s, a 130-store unit of the grocery giant Kroger , has donated more than $7.6 million to Primary, one of only a handful of Trauma One pediatric hospitals in the country, and the only such hospital in its service area, which includes parts of Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana. Smith’s donation to Primary in 2010 was $1 million and $837,000 in 2009 , signaling the regard with which Primary is held in the local community as well as Smith’s skill at fundraising, even in the face of an economic downturn. The paper icon is large, more than 6½” in diameter, and in full color. The back is blank except for a black and white UPC code. The clerk dutifully asked me if I wanted to buy the icon. The credit card machine had a coordinated paper surround that also promoted the campaign. ...

Early in my career a grizzled old veteran of marketing and communications for nonprofits said in a meeting “its all comes down to the T-shirts.” He meant that when it came to marketing and communications campaigns the biggest battles were often over the smallest things, like the T-shirt. Because when it comes to marketing and communications while almost nobody knows anything of the marcom concepts of ‘return of customer investment’ or, ‘share of requirement’ everybody from the CEO to the janitor understands T-shirts. I’m now a grizzled old veteran and I beg to differ. Everybody seems to want input on T-shirts, that’s true enough. But it’s not all about the T-shirt. No, in cause marketing one of the details you should obsess over is the picture… or pictures… that illustrates the cause. Among other talents, these days an effective cause marketer better be a good photo editor. The classic example is Special Olympics. As soon as you see the kids racing in a pool, getting a medal, or reachi...

If you go to a charity gala in the United States the price of the tickets is tax deductible after the cost of the meal and other benefits is subtracted. If you donate used household items or a used car to a 501(c)(3), you get a tax receipt from the charity equal to the fair market value of the donation. Donations of bonds or stock or art or gold or real property are all likewise tax deductible. But currently cause marketing donations are not tax deductible. The paper icon at the left benefiting my state's Special Olympics chapter from a local grocery chain made my wonder… again … why Americans can’t get a tax deduction for charitable donations generated through cause marketing efforts? When you buy the paper icon… available in $1, $3 and $5 versions… the clerk tears off the bottom portion, scans it, and hands it back to you to sign. After you’ve done so, you keep the top portion and bottom half gets displayed in the store, a chain called Harmons . It would be a simple matter for t...

When actress-singer Vanessa Williams mounted the stage at the People’s Choice Awards January 5, 2011 it was on behalf of Special Olympics, the official charitable partner of the 2011 awards show. The main benefit of the partnership for Special Olympics is that the People's Choice Awards gave up some of their precious airtime to ask for donations for the cause. According to press reports , at 10:51 PM (eastern) Ms. Williams asked viewers to use their cell phones to donate $10 to Special Olympics. See the video footage above. Donations were processed by mobilecause.com. The ad at the left promoting the appearance came from Proctor & Gamble's annual FSI on behalf of Special Olympics, which dropped on December 26, 2010. I didn’t see Ms. Williams' appearance. Aside from the presidential debates and occasional viewings of the show ' Nature ' on PBS, we don’t watch television at Chez Jones. But this represents another high-profile use of using television to adverti...

In the early days of the practice the cause marketing you were most likely to see involved consumer packaged goods with donations predicated on coupon redemption. Cause marketing has gone 100 different directions in the since and CPG promotions no longer dominate the cause marketing landscape. Nonetheless I see at least four lessons for today’s cause marketers from Proct er & Gamble’s current CPG promotion at the left for Special Olympics . The first is longevity. P&G and Special Olympics have a 28-year relationship. I have no inside knowledge of this partnership, but I’d bet that in those three decades there’s been dozens of personnel changes. I’ll bet there’s been strong personal relationships and weak ones and plenty that fell in between. I’ll bet either party has thought about walking away from the partnership. What P&G and Special Olympics have is something like a long and happy marriage that is stronger in part because there’s been some push and pull between the par...

Car sales in September 2010 were up 18 percent over September 2009, a hopeful sign for the economy. But among the various segments, luxury cars sales were up only 10.2 percent for the corresponding period. So what do you do if you sell Cadillacs? Brotherton Cadillac in Metro Seattle has launched a low cost, high-gloss promotion that makes terrific use of Twitter, generates donations for five charities in Seattle and offers you and I a chance to win a new 2010 Cadillac CTS like the one at left. Here’s how it works: Brotherton invites you to donate to five well-regarded charities in the Seattle area: the Arthritis Foundation chapter, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, The Moyer Foundation, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and Special Olympics Washington. The Moyer Foundation raises money for a local ‘bereavement camp’ for children ages 6-17. The suggested donation is $25. The moment one of the charities reach $140,000 in donations, the promotion ends and the sweepstakes portion of the...

MyContactCard, which builds web apps, has just launched CauseMail, a souped-up HTML signature line for your emails that includes contact information using branding from a select group of charities and generates a yearly $6.48 donation to the chosen charity. The service costs an individual $12.95 a year. It is being marketed to both individuals and charities. The pitch MyContactCard is making to charities goes like this: “100,000 supporters sending just 10 emails a day deliver over 365 million graphic, clickable impressions a year with the Cause branding, culture and donate now links.” I like this idea and I like the execution. But frankly if that pitch represents their target market, they’re barking up the wrong tree. The number of nonprofits in the United States with 100,000 supporters who are online is a pretty small number. Tens of millions of Americans gave more than $306 billion to charity in 2007. One third of that that goes to churches. The rest goes to literally mill...

An open letter to my friends in the nonprofit world. Dear Nonprofit Cause Marketer: The September 27 Forbes listed the value of the world’s top sponsored sports events, by the amount of money they generate per day. They are: 1. Super Bowl… $336 million 2. Summer Olympics…$176 million 3. Fifa World Cup…$103 million 4. NCAA Men’s Final Four…$90 million 5. Winter Olympics…$82 million 6. Rose Bowl…$72 million 7. MLB World Series…$61 million 8. Kentucky Derby…$59 million 9. NBA Finals…$58 million I notice that your nonprofit isn’t on the list. Indeed, no nonprofit is. There’s two reasons for that. Forbes compiled a list of the top sports event sponsorships. I’ll get to the second reason in a second. But cause-related marketing is… in the main… just a form of sponsorship. Why isn’t your cause making a $103 million per day like the World Cup? Think of all the advantages you enjoy. You have tremendous heart. You have a list of supporters who literally open their wallets for you several times ...

Best Buy and Fisher House Early in my career a grizzled old veteran of marketing and communications for nonprofits said in a meeting “it’s all about the T-shirts.” He meant that when it came to marketing and communications campaigns the biggest battles were often over the smallest things, like the T-shirt. Because when it comes to marketing and communications even if few people know the marcom concepts of ‘return of customer investment’ or, ‘share of requirement’ everybody from the CEO to the janitor understands T-shirts. I’m now a grizzled old veteran and I beg to differ. Everybody seems to want input on T-shirts, that’s true enough. But it’s not all about the T-shirt. No, in cause-related marketing campaigns one of the details you should obsess over is the picture… or pictures… that illustrates the cause. Among other talents, these days an effective cause marketer better be a very good photo editor. The classic example is Special Olympics . As soon as you see the kids racing in a po...