Cause Marketing

If you have a generous heart and more spare time than money Raise5.com is a way for you to monetize your expertise on behalf of a favored charity, $5 at a time. Here’s how it works: you post a small service or task you are willing to perform for $5. These are services provided online or over the phone. So no babysitting services or (yuck!) ‘massages.’ (The video at the left is their appeal for your vote in Virgin Unite's ' Screw Business as Usual ,' promotion.) ‘Mike’ offers to teach you five phrases in Mandarin, for instance. ‘Autumn’ will pray on your behalf and sing a song. ‘Kaleigh’ will edit your blog post. $4 of the total goes to the charity of choice for the service provider, Raise5.com peels off $1 for itself. In turn, the website says, $0.45 of that $1 goes to PayPal. The rest goes to operations and costs. I hope that doesn’t sound critical because I truly don’t begrudge them the $1. It’s crowdsourcing but it ain’t exactly Amazon's Mechanical Turk , where each...

In an interview yesterday a reporter asked me why the match between the cause and sponsor is so vital in cause marketing. After all, what if a local welding shop in a small town was doing some kind of cause marketing for the local school. Wouldn’t that be affinity enough? My response went something like this: If you live a place where everyone knows your name it’s OK if the match between your firm and the cause is imperfect. People know your heart and are willing to give you a pass, whether or not they understand your cause marketing promotion. But if you live in a population center where not everyone you do business with is an acquaintance, then the match between your company and the cause matters a lot. My theory is that people just aren’t willing to invest the psychic energy it takes to figure out a lose affiliation between your company and the cause. The ad at the left from Fortune magazine is a case in point. The daredevil billionaire Sir Richard Branson, whose net worth is an est...