Cause Marketing

This week is all about thanking supporters and reporting the results of cause marketing efforts. On Tuesday, the post was about using advertising to report back. Today’s post is about using public relations or PR. We-Care.com is a shopping portal wherein some 2,500 merchants offer a percentage of your purchase to one of thousands of registered causes when you start at We-Care.com. The amount of the donation runs from one percent of your purchase to more than 10 percent depending on the merchant and the offer. In turn, We-Care.com picks one cause every month to support, saying “a percentage of all purchases made through this site will help the current Cause of the Month.” Ignore the weak percent of all purchases language for a minute. In Dec 2012, We-Care.com gave $38,255.17 to the AIDS Research Alliance. And what will the ARA do with the money? “It will be able to conduct the eight leukapheresis experiments necessary for the advancement of its promising HIV cure research,” says a press...

The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database… my proprietary library of cause marketing ‘activations’…has thousands of examples that go back more than 10 years. But the folder labeled ‘Thank You Ads’ is all but empty. I just don’t see many examples of sponsors or causes thanking supporters for their help after a campaign has ended. This is a major missed opportunity for both causes and sponsors. Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And a vital… if mostly ignored… part of transparency is to report back how it all went. Such reporting reassures supporters that whatever effort they took helped in some way. If in the future most cause marketing campaigns did no more than to announce how much money was raised, they will have done more than what 99 percent of cause marketing campaigns do today. A better approach would be to announce how the money that was raised was used. If you did a paper icon campaign for a children’s hospital and the campaign generated enough money to buy 50 hig...

Alden Keene & Associates got its annual renewable energy report the other day from our electric utility, Rocky Mountain Power. In December 2008 we signed up with ‘Blue Sky,’ a wind-energy offsets program, so as to help lessen the environmental impact of Causemarketing.biz. At left is the statement for the last 12 months. The back of the statement is below. Last time around the statement included a bulleted list of the positive effects of the program, customized to Alden Keene. This year Rocky Mountain Power gave the list a little extra graphical punch and with it more relevance in my view. I think there’s a lesson here for cause marketers. Even if such customization isn’t usually possible for most cause marketing campaigns, cause marketers need to report back campaign results. Such reporting builds transparency and as I posted earlier this month… “Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And part of transparency is to report back on how it all went. Such reporting reassures suppo...

Before Christmas I posted on the efforts of a local grocery chain benefiting local food banks and utilizing their proprietary paper icon . Yesterday, February 1, 2011, the chain, called Fresh Markets , reported their results in their weekly circular. In a small rectangle about mid-way down on the right side of the circular, Fresh Markets says it was able to donate $98,000 to local food banks. Whether this included any cash, matching, or in-kind donations from Fresh Markets isn’t clear from this page. The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has thousands of examples of cause marketing ‘activations,’ but the folder labeled ‘Thank You Ads’ is notably thin. I just don’t see many examples of sponsors or causes thanking supporters for their help. This is a major mistake for both causes and sponsors. Transparency is vital to cause marketing. And part of transparency is to report back how it all went. Such reporting reassures supporters that whatever effort they took helped in some way. (Fres...