Cause Marketing

GamesThatGive.net allows you to play common video games like Solitaire, Sudoku, and Blackjack for free, while making a sliver of a donation to one of 13 nonprofit charities. Here's how it works. Behind each of the games a static advertisement runs for sponsors like Domino's Pizza, Dial, Pepsi or others. GamesThatGive.net donates 70 percent of ad revenue to those charities, including the United Way, UNICEF, and the Wilderness Society. As of this writing on Sept. 22, 2009, the donations counter at the top of the home page read: "GamesThatGive has donated $2032.13 to charity." I put a handful of questions to Brian Reich, GamesThatGive's principal evangelist, about where the idea came from, how it works, and how it's been received by charities and sponsors. His responses follow. How did the idea come about for GamesthatGive.net? The idea came, mostly, from the experiences of our CEO, Adam Archer. He traveled the world a few years back and upon his return to th...

Hi Gang: What follows is my 9-15-2009 presentation to the Crossroads Conference, the annual conference of Utah state chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management. Warm regards, Paul How Corporate Citizenship Can Help HR Build a Better Workforce View more presentations from Alden Keene and Associates, Inc. .

Last night at dinner, a long-time reader and a new friend asked: 'How important is alignment between cause and sponsor? What about CEO passion? Here's how the discussion went. For years the best conventional wisdom in cause marketing has been that you choose a cause based on ‘strategic philanthropy.’ If you’re an oil company, you pick environmental causes. If you make ladies purses, you pick women’s causes. If you sell toys, you pick children’s causes. If you’re a restaurant, you pick hunger causes. If you sell organic foods, you support organic farmers. And indeed, academic researchers have consistently demonstrated that a clear alignment between cause and sponsors tend to pay off best. But it’s more complicated than that. For instance, an auto body shop might naturally align with, say, a high school that teaches auto body repair. But it would be an unusual for that ‘cause’ to have much affinity. On the other hand, if the owner of the body shop was a woman who had successfull...

Faithful readers: The following is from my periodic column in the business weekly, the Salt Lake Enterprise . In it I profile how a fast-growing company and a innovative charity connected five years ago in a way that has greatly benefited both parties. Warm regards, Paul Since its founding a little more than five years ago, Ragnar Events LLC , which produces the super-sized Ragnar Relay Series, has sprinted to become the nation’s premier overnight relay race. And almost from the day Ragnar strung out its first yellow finish line, the company has had a charity partner, Salt Lake City, Utah-based Operation Kids . Headquartered in Kaysville, Utah, Ragnar owns and operates 10 relay races around the country in Arizona, Boston, Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Washington, D.C., and Washington State. (The picture above comes from Ragnar's Relay Del Sol race, which takes place in Arizona.) The races typically cover 200 miles. Teams of 12, sometimes dressed in ...

In June I profiled Orkin's Fight the Bite campaign , which benefits the UN's effort called Nothing But Nets, a cause that purchases insecticide-treated mosquito nets for people in Africa so as to stave off malaria, a vicious killer on the continent. In the wake of that post, I asked Martha Craft, the VP of public relations and communications at Rollins, Inc., Orkin's parent company, to 'open the Kimono' on the campaign. Ms. Craft was kind enough to respond. 1. How did the campaign come about? Fight the Bite was a natural fit for Orkin because it directly relates to our business and our ongoing commitment to protect public health. This commitment is two-fold: 1) we have strategic partnerships with organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and 2) we educate our customers on the threats/risks that pests can pose. In 2007, we learned about the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign – a global, grassroots effort to save lives by preve...

If cause marketing is to really grow , I'm increasingly coming to the opinion that cause marketing needs the equivalent of an ‘open standard.’ When speaking of software especially, the term ‘open standards’ means an agreed-upon convention that is free and unconstrained in how it can be used. Open standards are enormously valuable to you and me. HTML and XHTML are open standards. PDF is an open standard and CD-ROMs will run in any computer with a CD-ROM drive because of open standards. That you’re reading this post is because of an open standard called TCP-IP, which is the way website data is divided up into packets, transmitted, and then reassembled by servers somewhere near your computer or phone. According to the entry on the topic in today’s (August 17, 2009) Wikipedia: Open Standards means “a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle.” Its more complete definition according to the Digital Standards Organization is: “The standard is...

Back in 2003 I was working for a company that was considering a relationship with Dr. Laura, the no-nonsense radio show host famous for kicking her listeners in the pants. Part of relationship was to be with her charitable foundation, which at the time was best known for handing out ‘My Stuff Bags,’ which were bags of essential items for kids being removed from homes and taken into shelters; blankets, stuffed animals and basic toiletries. While the effort was successful… they donated more than 250,000 bags in 6 years, with less than 10 percent overhead… Dr. Laura shut it down in December 2004. The press release issued at the time didn’t say so, but one of the sticking points was that the business warehouse, package and then transship all the donated stuff to participating shelters. I saw that warehouse in Southern California and it was packed to the rafters. The problem was that business model didn’t really scale. The more successful they got, the higher their expenses grew. The foun...