Cause Marketing

Wired magazine’s website has an intriguing story about the ways fanboys and girls of Dr. Who , Harry Potter , Star Wars , and others actively support charities. But how might your cause tap the support of these self-described geeks? Chapters of the 501st Legion, whose members dress as characters from Star Wars for events, donate their honorarium for their appearances to charities. The Harry Potter Alliance does work for children’s hospitals. Wordbuilders, an organization started and maintained by fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss, has raised $1.7 million for Heifer International over the last four years. Current Dr. Who star Matt Smith made an appearance in character on the UK’s Red Nose Day telethon. So how do seek and utilize the support of the geeks for your cause? Here’s three suggestions: If you don’t already speak the language of the target group, try immersion. A colleague hated NASCAR until her fundraising job at a children’s hospital in Tennessee forced to learn more abo...

First off the usual disclaimers. This is by no mean an exhaustive list. I don’t see much cause marketing from outside North America . I read and speak only English; and, well, a smattering of Esperanto ;). There may well be… and probably is… some brilliant cause marketing coming out of Senegal or Bengal or Finland or Vietnam or Rio de Janeiro that I just don’t know about. I certainly don’t even see all the cause marketing done in North America . I only post about cause marketing about twice a week. So needless to say, I don’t review all the cause marketing that comes over the transom. There can be no doubt but that I have blind spots. But I did review a lot of cause marketing in 2008… more than 135 posts… and I saw much more than that. So with that said, here’s the best 11 cause marketing efforts of 2008 (as far as I know). In January I was besotted by TOMS Shoes ‘buy one, give one’ (BOGO) campaign. Buy a pair of their alpergatas shoes and they give away a pair to a needy ch...