Cause Marketing

Smart Money magazine does a monthly feature called “10 Things X Won’t Tell You.” In May 2011 it was ‘10 Things Fund-Raisers Won’t Tell You.’ The point of the feature is that people and organizations have their own self interest that might not always coincide with yours. For instance, in this article number three was “It’s scary what we know about you.” It’s a great premise, but I won’t be as cynical. Instead, here’s five things that causes ought to ask of and about potential sponsors before they ink a deal. Do You Really Care About My Cause Or Is This Just a Business Deal? Causes naturally would prefer a sponsor’s money and heart, but they’re sophisticated enough to know that it might not always play out that way. So it’s better to know where the sponsor stands at the outset. What Do You Do That Could Embarrass Me? If you pollute the headwaters of the Yangtze or employ child labor, or bribe high government officials, as a cause I want to know that beforehand. It may mean that I’l...

Current theory from Professor Ronald K. Mitchell at Texas Tech suggests that the people most likely to be a success at entrepreneurship are those who understand that there is an ‘ entrepreneurship script .’ I contend that there is also a script in cause marketing. In entrepreneurship the script, says Mitchell (who like Bob McDonald , the CEO of Procter & Gamble, and yours truly is an alumnus of the University of Utah) is “commonly recognized sequences of events that permit rapid comprehension of expertise-specific information by experts; mental representations of the causality-connected actions, props, and participants that are involved in common activities.” I’ve cherry-picked from Professor Mitchell’s paper to come up with a list of attributes that I think characterize the best cause marketers: They have a great base of domain knowledge of cause marketing They are predisposed to action They are deliberate network builders They recognize changes and know how to exploit them They h...