Cause Marketing

The growth of Crowdfunding in the United States seems likely to continue and, I suspect, it to be further cemented as a vital tool for cause marketers. Ethan Mollick, at the Wharton School, has a taken a first crack at some early learning about what works in crowdfunding that has application for both cause marketers and entrepreneurs. Mollick used Kickstarter as his dataset, with its 48,500+ projects and $237+ million in combined funding Here’s what Mollick’s analysis shows: Because the greater the size of the founder’s social network the more likely the project is to be funded, it pays to be popular… especially on Facebook. Polished pitches are the most likely to be funded. Relatively few succeed without a video, for instance. There seems to be a geo-cultural component to successful pitches. Films are more likely to be funded in Hollywood, while music projects are more likely to be funded in Nashville.   Sixty-day Kickstarters are less likely to be funded (29 percent) t...

In its April 2013 issue, Fast Company reviews the numbers at the alpha crowdfunding site Kickstarter and they’re crazy: 86 million unique visitors, 2.2 million of which actually backed at least one project to the tune of $274 million in 2012 alone. That’s almost twice as much money as the National Endowment for the Arts spent in the same year. But as the number of projects have gone up it’s gotten harder to be conspicuous in the crowd. And everyone’s pretty well gotten the memo that you need to use video. Fast Company says that in 2012, 82 percent of the projects used video to tell their story. So how do you stand out before a crowd of would be funders? One option is use cause marketing. That’s what Shethinx did for its Kickstarter project. Shethinx makes women’s underwear treads that narrow middle-ground between functional but dull granny underwear, and pretty but impractical fashion underwear. Shehinx used Kickstarter to launch the company. And aside from the technology of t...

Wikipedia says there’s at least 450 crowdfunding platforms out there including a substantial minority that exist to benefit nonprofits, notably Ed Norton’s Crowdsourcing.org , and microfinance giant Kiva.org . Both are fine organizations, if sometimes a little bit earnest. In the U.K. a charity called Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research built Pledgeit , a platform that puts the fun back in crowdfunding for causes. Here’s how it works: Suppose your friend Spencer has been nattering on for 15 years about his karaoke rendition of the old Bill Withers’ classic “Ain’t No Sunshine.” How he brought down the house at the oldest karaoke joint in Osaka, won the contest, made young women weep with the tenderness of his interpretation, and actually got the right number of “I know’s” in the chorus of the song. But is there an mp3 of Spencer's performance? A trophy from that glorious night? An Instagram of him actually singing anything? No. No. And no. Pledgeit helps you call out Spencer a...

Now on Indiegogo is a fundraiser to help rural beekeepers in Kenya fend off honey badgers and otherwise improve their operations. The charity involved sports the wonderful name, ‘Bees Without Borders,’ which was founded by New York father and son beekeepers Norm and Andrew Cote. Bees Without Borders is trying to raise $20,000 by Christmas Day for their Kenya project. Honey badgers, whose habitat is found in Africa, India and Southeast Asia, sport a wide skunk-like stripe, are more fearless than badgers, but are most closely related to weasels. And, true to their names, they love honey, making them “the bane of the existence of the East African beekeeper,” say the Cotes on the Indiegogo site. That's a honey badger on the left. But while vicious, the honey badger's honey-seeking ways can be defeated by careful fencing. Volunteers will travel on their own dime to Kenya and stay in the villages of the Sambura and Haita peoples. They will build the fencing, provide beekeeping cl...