Cause Marketing

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...

We’ve all seen how causes recognize multiple sponsors for, say, races and events. If you got a t-shirt from participating in a Team in Training race for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, to pick on just one, you know what I'm talking about; it’s logo-soup spilled all over the back of your t-shirt. But suppose your company supports multiple causes. How do you display that without doing the same thing to your ads? That’s the question I had when I pulled this ad for Cabot Cheese from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database. Cabot Cheese , a co-op in Vermont, supports a handful of causes in different ways and in pretty different spaces; the arts, schools, women and children’s causes, environmental causes, even the Girl Scouts. How does Cabot pull it off? Quite admirably, I’d say. Each of the causes is assigned its own icon, even the Girl Scouts. One of problems of the logo-soup approach is that logos come in all sizes, colors, and orientations. If you regularize their size or go wit...

I have ranted often about the hazards of cause marketing without transparency. But the fact is, there are plenty of campaigns that manage to be successful without much transparency. Plenty still cling to the obsolete language, “a portion of the proceeds,’ and do just fine. Get Away Today , a family vacation travel agency uses just that language when describing its donations to Children’s Miracle Network How does that work? Am I wrong about the necessity of transparency? Maybe it’s more of a nicety than a requirement, like Skull Candy earbuds with your new iPhone or stopping by in Maui after staying in Kaua’i. Case in point is the back page of a small brochure that came stuffed in my credit union statement earlier this month from Get Away Today (GAT). GAT is a privately-owned travel agency with billings of about $50 million a year which built its business booking Disneyland vacation packages for families, although it now books to all kinds of non-Disney destinations as well. Only Disne...

The smartest charities have a rule that they must thank their donors in at least 5 ways. For good reason, too. Gratitude is a powerful inducement to future gifts. But how should sponsors thank customers/participants in cause campaigns? To site just the last couple of posts; how should Chipotle thank the customers that pay $2 for a Boorito and thereby benefit Jaime Oliver’s charity? How might the hoteler Kimpton thank customers who buy their specialty drinks and help make a donation to local AIDS/HIV charities? At left is how a local grocer thanked participants in making a donation to the American Heart Association. Because there’s no context in the blurb it’s hard to know what customers are being thanked for. Sans that context the blurb is merely a nice gesture, but less than helpful to Maceys or the American Heart Association. Transparency is chronically missing in cause marketing. And its absence means cause marketing campaigns are less effective than they could be. What would be be...

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...

It has been my pleasure (and, occasionally, my displeasure) to work with celebrities in cause campaigns over the years. Shannon Miller , the most decorated US female gymnast ever, told me scary stalker stories on a long drive together on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was not quite lucid the night I escorted him through a charity cocktail party. I once put $5,000 on my credit card to pay for a dinner for 15 sponsor reps, Grammy-winner Amy Grant , and me. I walked into Kenny Loggins ’ dressing room one time when he had his hair up in curlers. One night when I was sitting with actor-singer John Schneider he held forth ( at length! ) on the topic of females calling themselves ‘actresses’ rather than ‘actors.’ In short, I’ve had a certain amount of experience with celebrities, especially the lower wattage variety. Which is why I’m a little surprised by the way the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline threw John McEnroe under the bus with this ad that...

CA, the $4.3 billion (sales) software company has an interesting cause marketing campaign going right now benefiting the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) that is kind of a head scratcher.  The campaign… which features celebrity crime fighter John Walsh … centers around CA’s Internet Security Suite Plus 2009 and Internet Security Suite 2009, both of which carry a premium price in a competitive market . When you buy either product CA makes a $1 donation to NCMEC. Customers may also elect to donate all or part of the rebate they receive to NCMEC when they buy the product. The pertinent CA webpage also runs a ‘ crawl ’ of the names of people who have donated their rebate to NCMEC. It’s an interesting tactic, borrowed from telethons . I’d love to hear what feedback they get on this. At the top of the page they also list the amount of money generated for NCMEC. The amount listed when I visited on Jan 2, 2009 was $462,586, which includes $375,000 in in-kin...

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...

Dear Kind Readers: Last week I got the most inventive word of mouth marketing approach that has crossed my desk in some time. It’s for a new green enterprise and it includes a $40,000 ‘green’ kitchen giveaway and a $1,000 bribe…er... incentive . Intrigued? So was I. Here’s what it’s about. Foodservicewarehouse.com is giving away a $40,000 green commercial kitchen in order to promote its new green certification process, its green kitchen consulting services, and the green kitchen products it sells. Enter the contest here . Here’s the inducement. To the website or blog that refers the winner, they are offering $1,000. Sort of like the referral fee that goes to stores that sell a winning lottery ticket. I’m going to play along and encourage you to enter if you qualify . You’ll notice that I’ve also added a little URL snippet to the column at the right that will be there until they notify the winner in December 2008. If I win the $1,000 referral fee I’ll give it to an environmental cause,...

I saw the Anne Klein ad to the left in the October 2008 Elle magazine and intended to question the unnecessarily abstruse language at the bottom that refers to “translational research,” whatever that means. And then I came across this remarkable document on The Breast Cancer Research Foundation website . Remarkable because there in one PDF is all you need to know about the various jewelry items being sold this breast cancer season benefiting the BCRF. It includes the jewelry price, where it’s being sold, how much of a donation is generated, press contacts, product descriptions, etc. [The design of the document is rather blasé and the PDF itself could be more crisp. But I’m picking nits here.] I've often written in this space about the necessity of transparency in cause-related marketing. (Click here for more.) Transparency is vital in cause-related marketing and far too rare. Vital because more than almost anything else you can name, cause-related marketing trades on trust. BTW...

Dear Pampers: Just a quick note of thanks for your 1 pack = 1 vaccine campaign benefiting UNICEF. You may know that I love these ‘buy one, give one’ campaigns. They’re the best thing to come along in cause-related marketing in a long time. Consumers respond to them. They understand them. They feel good about participating in them. And they can generate crazy word-of-mouth. Your execution has been dynamite, including the follow-up FSI page in the August 31 Proctor & Gamble brandSAVER. Consumers want to know what happens after all the talk and promotion. I appreciate the transparency on your website as well that describes the exact donations made. Smart! I have to say something about the TV ad , too. It gives me a visceral reaction every time I see it. The moment when the Asian toddler waddles over for a hug and kiss is pure magic. Normally that would be a cheap visual cliché, but by gad it nearly reduces me to tears every time. And I’m not exactly your target market. The track… ‘D...

I Detect Hints of Hickory with Subtle Notes of Rosin and Glove Leather Late in May three star players from the Atlanta Braves baseball team debuted their latest charitable endeavors, table wines from Chile and Spain with the bottles featuring their images and with proceeds from the sales benefiting the charities of their choice. The players … Chipper Jones, Brian McCann and Tom Glavine… unveiled Chipper Chardonnay, McCann Merlot, and ( wait for it ) Cabernet Glavignon. They sell for around for $14 at retail outlets like Kroger and Wal-Mart and proceeds benefit the Miracle League, the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research and CURE Childhood Cancer respectively. The Atlanta trio join professional baseball players from the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds and several legends of the game with their own labels . There are two former NFL players...Dan Marino and Bobby Herbert... with labels, and two players from the National Hockey League. Two special labels for ...

How to Raise $1 Million for Charity Without Transparency I have ranted frequently about the hazards of cause marketing without transparency. But the fact is, there are plenty of campaigns that manage to be successful without much transparency. Plenty that still cling to the obsolete language, “a portion of the proceeds,’ and do just fine. How does that work? Am I wrong about the necessity of transparency? Maybe it’s more of a nicety than a requirement, like chives with your baked potato or seeing the Musee d’Orsay after touring Le Louvre . Case in point is the back page of a small brochure that came stuffed in my credit union statement a few months back from Get Away Today Vacations (GATV). GATV is a privately-held travel agency with billings of about $50 million a year which built its business booking Disneyland vacation packages for families. It’s a nice little niche. Chuck and Julie Smith, the husband and wife who own the agency, say, “We’ve been able to make our vacation our voc...