Cause Marketing

Clients ask me all the time: have the breast cancer charities sucked out all the oxygen out of the atmosphere for cause marketing during October? That is, can anyone else do cause marketing during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month? I can't give a categorical answer, but here are three quick takes on cause marketing campaigns going on in this month that aren’t about breast cancer, plus a forth that is about breast cancer, only with fewer pink ribbons than usual. Sigg Drop of Hope Water Bottle for the Jane Goodall Institute . When you buy the Drop of Hope water bottle from Sigg , the Swiss aluminum bottle makers, they’ll donate $5 to the Jane Goodall Institute to build rainwater tanks for schoolchildren in Africa. The campaign is well-timed coming, as it does the heels of news that Sigg used BPA as an element in the plastic liner of its water bottles after first denying doing so. Benihana/Fuji Water Co-Promotion for Best Buddies . Last night at dinner with the fam at Benihana ...

Successful cause marketing appeals not only to your head, but to your heart as well. The head part comes easier for me and probably for many of you as well. So how do you inject heart into a cause marketing campaign? Ulta’s answer is to ask people to write their breast cancer stories in a letter and then post them in the front windows of their stores. They call it 'Windows of Love.' Ulta supports The Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Ulta is the largest discount cosmetics and fragrance retailer in the United States with more than 330 stores in some 38 States. There’s an Ulta store that I can almost coast down to from my house, so I went down there to check it out. The store devoted the better part of three of its four windows to the promotion. One of the window displays explained the promotion and the other two contained actual letters. The letters were unformatted. That is, so near as I could tell they were posted exactly as they were submitted. The challenge was that some of...

It has been my pleasure (and, occasionally, my displeasure) to work with celebrities in cause campaigns over the years. Shannon Miller , the most decorated US female gymnast ever, told me scary stalker stories on a long drive together on the Gulf Coast of Alabama. Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson was not quite lucid the night I escorted him through a charity cocktail party. I once put $5,000 on my credit card to pay for a dinner for 15 sponsor reps, Grammy-winner Amy Grant , and me. I walked into Kenny Loggins ’ dressing room one time when he had his hair up in curlers. One night when I was sitting with actor-singer John Schneider he held forth ( at length! ) on the topic of females calling themselves ‘actresses’ rather than ‘actors.’ In short, I’ve had a certain amount of experience with celebrities, especially the lower wattage variety. Which is why I’m a little surprised by the way the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline threw John McEnroe under the bus with this ad that...

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 ...