Cause Marketing

One of the most confounding charitable endeavors I was ever involved in was figuring out how to fund a startup charity that made grants to other charities. HelpUsAdopt.org, founded in 2007, is in a similar boat. The 501(c)(3) foundation grants would-be adoptive parents up to $15,000 for adoption expenses. In short, they raise money to give it away. Included in their fundraising mix are gala-type events, annual donor solicitation, and a small catalog of products including the necklace and bracelets modeled in the ad at the left by actress Nia Vardalos, of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame. The necklace Nia is wearing in this ad from the June 2011 Redbook magazine goes for $225 and the bracelets for $35 each. The HelpUsAdopt.org store also currently sells a brown wooden bead necklace for $95 and a tote bag for $20. The nonprofit fundraising world is set up to favor established charities, and with good reason. IRS figures show that 16 percent of nonprofit charities that filed a 990 tax re...

Through May 9, 2010 each bucket of specially-marked KFC chicken sold generates a $.50 donation to Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The KFC bucket also invites you to visit bucketsforthecure.com to make an additional donation. As the website URL suggests, the campaign sports the unwieldy name of 'Buckets for the Cure." The redoubtable Scotty Henderson , and many others, have raised the issue of "cause-nitive dissonance,' to coin a term. That is whether fried food should be supporting breast cancer research, since research has shown obesity be a risk-factor for breast cancer and since fried chicken is high in fat. Many, many others, including the Wall Street Journal , have weighed in. This issue of 'tainted money' is one I've raised more than once and can appreciate. Back in 2007 Newsweek reporter Jessica Bennett asked me, "Advertising is obviously not about morals. But isn't there a moral conflict in the idea that cause marketing is tapping into consu...

One of the defining characteristics of many of the very best cause marketers is that they have a basic cause marketing schema that can be modified and used again and again in multiple contexts. Susan G. Komen for the Cure, for instance, does walks and runs very well. They’re very good at branded products, too. Proctor & Gamble’s ‘ Buy One, Give One ’ approach to cause marketing is well-honed across that behemoth company’s many divisions. St. Jude’s radiothon... Country Cares for Kids ... is terrific example of that fundraising approach. In addition, St. Jude is exceptional at all the back-office elements of cause marketing campaigns, much the way that Wal-Mart excels at logistics. Children’s Miracle Network raises tens of millions a year using their Miracle Balloon paper icon, which they can customize for almost any retail setting. Such schema’s form the backbone of the cause marketing efforts for those entities. For charities the power of having a basic cause marketing schema is ...

Research shows that when there is asymmetry in cause marketing between the sponsors and the cause, the entity that gains the most from the relationship is the smaller brand. But there’s an asymmetry continuum of sorts. For instance, when Yoplait yogurt and Susan G. Komen for the Cure link up, the brands which are arguably equivalent in their respective spheres, the benefits confer symmetrically. Same when Weight Watchers and Share Our Strength tie in together. So what happens when l’Oreal hooks up with the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund , as it did earlier this year with a cosmetics bag campaign? Or like Jiffy Lube does in my home state of Utah, when it does a holiday season cause marketing campaign benefiting the Utah Food Bank ? In such cases, the causes benefit disproportionately thanks to their association with the better known brands. Does the obverse hold true? That is, can a sponsor benefit asymmetrically from an association with a better-known nonprofit brand? Yes it can. F...

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 ...

Last night at dinner, a long-time reader and a new friend asked: 'How important is alignment between cause and sponsor? What about CEO passion? Here's how the discussion went. For years the best conventional wisdom in cause marketing has been that you choose a cause based on ‘strategic philanthropy.’ If you’re an oil company, you pick environmental causes. If you make ladies purses, you pick women’s causes. If you sell toys, you pick children’s causes. If you’re a restaurant, you pick hunger causes. If you sell organic foods, you support organic farmers. And indeed, academic researchers have consistently demonstrated that a clear alignment between cause and sponsors tend to pay off best. But it’s more complicated than that. For instance, an auto body shop might naturally align with, say, a high school that teaches auto body repair. But it would be an unusual for that ‘cause’ to have much affinity. On the other hand, if the owner of the body shop was a woman who had successfull...

A few years back a colleague and I wangled a trip to northern Italy to speak on the topic of cause marketing. One of the other presenters was an American like us, but all of the attendees were European, predominantly Italian. We were there preaching the big, bold cause marketing of the type practiced at Children’s Miracle Network and it plainly made a few of the attendees uncomfortable. Some openly told us that they found the practice gauche. We finished our presentation with some Q&A, which lasted past our appointed time. So we took the discussion into the hallway. I remember in particular one fellow from Rome. He was the executive director of a children’s charity that he felt had potential popular appeal but which had fallen out of favor politically and had lost funding. Domestic charities in Italy and much of continental Europe are funded directly by local and national governments. He needed a new fundraising approach that could make up for some of the funding that was no longe...

Author and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki famously has his 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint . It goes like this: When you’re making a pitch, your Powerpoint should have no more than 10 slides, take less than 20 minutes to present, and no font should be smaller than 30 points. In homage to Kawasaki , I’m going to suggest that you be able to sum up your cause marketing campaign in just six words. Why six words? It’s enough to do the job, but not enough to obfuscate. Here’s proof. Last year this time Rachel Ferschleiser and Larry Smith released their book Not Quite What I was Planning : Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure . They lead with a tale about Ernest Hemingway who was once challenged to write a book in six words. He responded: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” There’s an awful lot of pathos in those six words. But then we’re talking about Papa Hemingway (seen above), a literary legend who specialized in compact fiction. Ferschleiser and Smith published many m...

Assorted miscellanea today from the intersection of causes and commerce, marketing and business. Out today Trendwatching.com’s Eco Bounty report . Because trendwatching.com casts such a broad net, I find it must reading when I need to inspire my own ideas and thinking. Also released today were the results of the third annual Nonprofit Employment Trends Survey which finds that 26 percent of the nonprofits surveyed expect to cut staff in 2009. Here’s a shocking thought; laid off nonprofit employees on the other side of the breadline. Adult contemporary/ jazz musician Anders Holst has a new charity single out called All About Soul . During March all proceeds for the sales of the single will benefit the New York affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.  Along a similar vein, a host of Brazilian musicians have put out a compilation called Dark Was the Night benefiting the Red Hot Organization, a HIV/AIDS charity. Huggable American Idol runner-up David Archuleta is fronting an effort...

Plus 3 Network wants to turn your “sweat equity into social capital,” and they’re using a non transactional form of cause marketing to do it. Here’s what that means: You register at Plus 3, a kind of social media network, and then keep an online log of all your workouts. Each mile you train… mainly running, walking and biking… translates to a small donation paid for by sponsors to a select group of charities. Certain training activities are also awarded with prizes or rewards like chain lube or training socks. So you get fitter and maybe some new socks, the sponsor gets the usual benefits of cause marketing and the charity gets a donation. Of course, Plus 3 gets something out of it too. It’s a cause marketing triple play. The donations are higher when you upload the data from a GPS enabled device than if you make a hand entry. For instance, walking pays out $.05 a mile when uploaded from Garmin GPS device, but just $.0167 when you hand enter the data. Plus 3 says this is because the...

Mae West famously said that “too much of a good thing is... wonderful.” But is it? A female friend forwarded me a recent ‘moms’ e-newsletter she got about a week ago. It had the expected content but the bottom was lined with four products ‘for the cure;’ shower gel for the cure, a CD with Amy Grant for the cure, fantasy bubble bath for the cure, and a sketchbook for the cure. All offering ‘100 percent of the net proceeds’ for breast cancer research. She made the point that now, near the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she’s a little ‘pinked out.’ I can see her point. In magazines, with their long calendars, the editorial and the advertising for Breast Cancer Awareness Month might start in September or even August. The last notices of breast cancer awareness might appear in November. It’s less true of the electronic media like TV or the Internet, but still that’s as many as four months of pink ribbons. In that time there’s hundreds of events, thousands of pink themed cause-markete...

Repeat after me: cause-related marketing is not always about the money. You know what I mean. We tend to think of cause marketing as a transaction. You buy a carton of Yoplait yogurt, lick the lid, send it in and a dime goes to the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. But cause marketing is really about incentivizing certain kinds of human behavior, and not all of it has to do with buying something. About once a quarter I see a really dynamite non-transactional cause-related marketing campaign and It’s Time to Feel Better from Cigna Corporation, the health and life insurance company, is a terrific example. It’s Time to Feel Better is an educational website with an interactive knowledge game. You reach the game by clicking on ‘Test Your Knowledge Here.’ The game is a series of questions… more than 250 in all… that tests your knowledge of health, health insurance, disease and the like. On the left side of the screen is a water spigot. As you answer the questions correctly, the water...

Does it feel like cause-related marketing is too sincere, too earnest, too sober? Too many soft piano chords and not enough wailing guitar licks? In the last couple of weeks I’ve come across two cause-related marketing efforts… largely targeted to women… with a decidedly mischievous approach. The first is from an outfit called ta-tas Brand Clothing , which produces T-shirts, other wearables, bumper stickers, and special soap meant to enable early breast cancer detection called ‘boob lube.’ Their signature T-shirt reads: “save the ta-tas,” but they offer a number of other cheeky variations like “caught you looking at my ta-tas.” “A portion of every sale is given to breast cancer research,” through the company’s foundation, The Save the ta-tas Foundation. To date, the website reports, sales of ta-tas merchandise has generated more than $185,000 in donations. The second is more shocking still. The ‘Eff’ Cancer Cross stitch Kit from Subversive Cross Stitch, generates a donation to Susan G...

Lately one of the great things about the Cause-Related Marketing blog for me is that I don’t have to go out and ‘enterprise’ my blog posts the way I did in the early days. People have started to pitch me ideas to post on. We have a name for these people. When they send helpful pitches that are pertinent to this blog I call them PR angels. When they pitch me ideas that are off-topic, over-long, just plain dumb, or addressed to “Dear Alden,” I just call them idiots. (I think it’s clear from reading the blog that my name is Paul Jones. My company’s name is Alden Keene.) And I’m not talking about spam here either. Everybody on earth with an email account gets spam. Editors and reporters have started to out the idiots. Heck, even PR people are outing the idiots. It's very chic to complain about PR idiots right now, and who am I to resist a trend? I’m not going to out any idiot PR people by name. Although I reserve all rights to do so in the future. But to prove my point, here is a sho...

I don’t remember the last time I saw a cause-related marketing campaign for which the donation was predicated on consumers redeeming a coupon. But right now for every $1 off coupon you redeem for Bausch & Lomb’s ReNu multipurpose contact lens solution, they’ll give a $1 donation to Susan G. Komen For the Cure. The donation is capped at $400,000 and $300,000 is guaranteed. Back in the day, here in the United States, a plurality of cause-related marketing campaigns for packaged goods were based on coupon redemption. Now I’d say they’re the exception. But here’s the Web 2.0 twist. The coupon isn’t in this ad from the May 2008 Cookie Magazine , a parenting magazine for mothers. Instead the ad directs you to the campaign website renucares.com . To print the coupon you’re required to enter your name and email address. If you've already bought ReNu you can enter a code from the bottle to make the $1 donation. The website also has three short videos of people affected by breast cancer ...

Comments I made to the Los Angeles Times small business reporter Cyndia Zwahlen about cause-related marketing and small business were published in yesterday's paper. My experience with the LA Times online edition is that articles don't stay around for very long, so I'm going to excerpt a part of it below. For as long as it's up, you can read it here . Finally, tip of the hat to Jennifer Staplelton at Bread for the World, a member of the cause-releated marketing GoogleGroup . How can you make sure that your good intentions lead to good results?" They have to do the same thing they do with their cash flow; they have to manage it," said Paul Jones, a cause-related marketing consultant and principal at Alden Keene & Associates in Sandy, Utah. He also writes a blog on the subject. As with any business strategy, skimping on planning or the tactical steps probably will result in disappointment for the small business and the charity. To avoid that, here are tip...

On May 16 Oliver’s Artisan Breads in Los Angeles announced that it will donate 10 percent of net profits from their store line of breads to the Bread for the World Institute , the first case of a CRM campaign benefiting an advocacy and public policy charity I can think of. Oliver’s Artisan Breads sells a line of organic bread in stores like Whole Foods and Wild Oats ( which have merged ) in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, southwestern Nevada and Washington state. The term of the agreement is for one year with an option to renew. Oliver’s has guaranteed an undisclosed minimum donation. The money will go to support the Bread for the World Institute, a 501(c)(3) public charity division of Bread for the World. Bread for the World is an advocacy group, a “nationwide Christian movement that seeks justice for the world’s hungry people by the lobbying our nation’s decision-makers.” The Bread for the World Institute has more of public policy bent, engaging “in research and education on ...

Hamburger Helper and Pink for the Cure Not all cause-related marketing is about raising money, per se. Sometimes it’s about the charity's messaging. Pictured are images from a box of Hamburger Helper, purchased within the last six months. Prominently featured on the front and back of the box is Susan G. Komen’s ‘Pink for the Cure’ campaign. And while the front makes it clear that General Mills is donating $2 million to Susan G. Komen, there’s no mention that this package of Hamburger Helper has any role in that donation. It’s on the back of the box that it becomes clear that this is about raising awareness more than raising money. At the bottom Komen lists “3 ways to help protect yourself.” Get a mammogram. Get a clinical breast exam. Learn how to do a self-examination. Nothing earth-shattering there, but like the saying goes, sometimes it’s better to be reminded of something we already know than to learn something new. For that matter, while these recommendations may be old hat fo...

Anup Malani and M. Todd Henderson , two professors at the University of Chicago Law School, proposed in the March 10, 2008 issue of Forbes magazine that individuals be allowed tax deductions for the donations made when they buy products that generate a donation to a charitable cause. Here’s what they say: “We think the tax law should be changed to equalize the deduction shareholders get for corporate and personal contribution. Individuals should also be allowed to deduct donations embedded in consumer products. Firms are increasingly doing good because shareholders and consumers want them to, and taxes should not favor one form of doing good over another.” Why? “Consumer charity is inefficient under our present tax code. If you pay $15 for a pound of fair-trade coffee instead of $10 for regular coffee, you can’t claim a deduction for the $5 difference. The additional cost is a nondeductible donation. Let me be perfectly upfront and say that I owe both these lawyers a wet, sloppy kiss. ...

I have put off this post for a very long time, mostly because when I’ll tell clients and others the Secret Sauce of breakout cause-related marketing I’m more likely to get a look of doubt than a nod of understanding. Kinda like the look on my face when I read that Disney’s High School Musical brand has passed the $1 billion mark in operating profits . Here’s what prompts this post. People approach me all the time asking, “how is it that Children’s Miracle Network manages to raise more than $30 million every year with something as simple as a paper icon campaign . Or, “how does Susan G. Komen keep finding new sponsors when we can’t seem to find even one? Or, “explain to me how St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital raised more than $8 million from Chilis and their customers when fundraising campaigns at the casual dining chains have traditionally been death for other charities? I tell them the Secret Sauce to breakout cause-related marketing and then I get the look. Most people just don...