Cause Marketing

Movers Specialty Service , which relocates things and people, including military families, has been doing a little cause marketing since 2012 on behalf of the Travis Manion Foundation and the Wounded Warrior Project. And such a deal they have for you! Whenever they relocate any member of the military or engage in a “third party assignment” they’ll donate $1 to be split in some percentage between those two causes, according to a press release issued March 23, 2013. Imagine that, one whole dollar. I have never engaged a service like Movers Specialty Service, but I did once rent a 32’ truck from an agency, filled it up with the help of friends and loved ones and drove it 1,800 miles cross-country with my esposa. Between gas and the rental fee, I spent right around $2,700, not including incidentals like hotel stays and meals. When I moved back, I had a different company drop off an empty trailer, which I loaded with the help of friends and family, and which the trucking company hauled bac...

Bought a book today at Overstock.com and there waiting for me in the checkout window was an invitation to donate $1 or more to the Wounded Warrior Project. Great idea. A pity Overstock did it so carelessly. Currently, consumers tell marketing researchers they are mostly likely to respond to cause marketing appeals from military veteran’s causes like the Wounded Warrior Project. Gallup says that the military is the most-confidence inspiring institution in modern American society, polling out 14 points higher than the second place finisher, small business. In other words, in picking a veteran’s cause like Wounded Warrior to partner with Overstock put its finger on the beating pulse of the American zeitgeist. They just didn’t quite get it right. Read the call to action and you’ll know what I mean: “Donate to a Good Cause,” it reads. Wounded Warrior’s evocative logo is there. So too are the words “Learn More” with a link to some explication. But the call to action is the bloodless, “Dona...

Three different cause marketing efforts worth calling your attention to. On Friday, Nov. 16 participating Menchies will donate 10 percent of sales to the American Red Cross for Hurricane Sandy relief. Menchies is a self-serve frozen yogurt chain with about 230 locations across the globe. “Like the rest of the nation, we are deeply moved and feel we have a responsibility to be supportive in helping those impacted by the devastation Hurricane Sandy caused,” said Amit Kleinberger, CEO of Menchie's Group Inc in a press release. The campaign is activated via in-store promotional materials and public relations. Somali-born fashion model Ubah Hassan (that’s her at the left) and a partner have launched a line of umbrellas called Maji that generate a donation sufficient to provide water for 20 people in the Horn of Africa, a drought-torn region that includes Somalia. The umbrellas, in silver/black and blue/gold, are $40 at the Maji website . The charity partner is Oxfam America. The ca...

I posted on B2B cause marketing last Friday and really didn’t expect to come back to the topic for a while to come. Then I came across an effort from Mischler Financial Group which, in conjunction with Veteran’s Day, announced that 10 percent of its November profits will be donated to the Wounded Warriors Project (WWP). Veteran’s Day in the United States was Sunday, Nov. 11. Mischler bills itself as the securities industry’s oldest and largest Service Disabled Veterans Business Enterprise. The firm’s founder and CEO, Walter Mischler, was disabled in the Vietnam War. Mischler is a West Point grad and the son of a career U.S. Army officer. He’s a patriot, in other words. Founded in 1994, Mischler’s business is back-office financial services for private and public institutions. They end up being the junior underwriter in a number of bond issuances. Mischler is not a consumer financial services firm like, say, Fidelity or Charles Schwab. I don’t know how big Mischler’s book of business ...

Earlier this month the Internet was in high dudgeon… in the way that only the Internet can be… because someone accused Etsy of pink washing. In its Daily Finds newsletter Etsy had bundled together several items with a pink hue in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month from its vast web of items. And, the story goes , some of the items had only the loosest sort of connection to breast cancer or breast cancer charities. I swear, sometimes the Internet is such a hothouse environment. It can be like the worst parts of high school. But this momentary blip in the Twitter feed did prompt this idea. Why doesn’t Etsy just bake cause marketing capability right into its API? That is, why doesn’t Etsy offer its shopkeepers the ability to trigger a transactional cause marketing promotion on demand according to terms they set? For example, if you sell flag-themed purses and you want to make $3 donation to the Wounded Warrior Project when people buy your stars and stripes purse in July, Etsy oughta...

In 2010 Kroger sold 24 packs of their house-brand water in ½ liter bottles benefiting their breast cancer effort, Giving Hope a Hand. The top was pink and the side panels featured stories of Kroger employees who’d successfully fought breast cancer. Now Brawny, the Georgia-Pacific brand of paper towels, has taken a page from Kroger and produced a limited-edition 8-roll pack co-branded with The Wounded Warrior Project that tells the charity’s story. The campaign also generates a donation for Wounded Warrior via an expanded Facebook ‘like’ effort. Sign a ‘thanks’ wall, like the Facebook page, or text ‘thanks’ to 272969 and Georgia-Pacific will back a $1 donation per action. The packaging also features QR codes that lead to a donation site for Wounded Warriors project. I haven’t seen Wounded Warriors messaging for the packaging yet so I can’t comment. But I hope they’re telling stories of injured service members and vets who were once in bad way, but are now better thanks to the help pr...