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...

As a part of my occasional series of posts on the results of cause marketing efforts, today we turn to a guest donation program in the national parks, which, a press account says , generated nearly $1 million in 2012. The money was used for “priority park programs.” The donations are generated basically when the 638 concessioners at the 401 national park areas… at their discretion… allow guests to add $1 to their lodging bill per night stayed. In other words, it’s an add-a-dollar effort. As I did some research to drill down on this effort I was astonished at what I learned. First of all, 279 million people visited the parks in 2011, suggesting something less that one out of every 279 visits led to a $1 donation. Not bad when you consider that not every one of those 279 million visitors stayed a night in a participating concessioner’s room. The next surprising thing is that the National Park Guest Donation Program was piloted at 12 national parks over the course of three years in the e...

Ever wonder why so much cause marketing ends up supporting children's causes, even when the sponsor's business has little to do with children? Part of the answer lies with a topic of psychology called generativity. People who score high on tests of generativity are much more generous donors to causes and charities than those who score low. Generativity means, “the concern in establishing and guiding the next generation,” according to an academic named Erik Erikson, who coined the term and gave it that definition in a 1963 paper. Knowing how people express their level of generativity could certainly help cause marketers better target their campaigns and audiences. Dan McAdams and Ed de St. Aubin theorized that cultural demand and inner desire are the two ultimate motivations behind generativity, promoting a conscious concern for the generations behind them. These motivations are supported by a belief in the goodness of the human species. Combined they generate a commitment to g...

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...

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...

King’s Hawaiian, which makes those fat loaves of pillowy-sweet bread is doing one of those democratized cause marketing efforts that I love to hate. Only I don’t exactly hate this one from my Hawaiian ‘ohana’ as much. You know what I mean when I say democratized cause marketing; the cause that gets the most votes takes home the biggest check. A second characteristic is that much of activation occurs via the standard social networks. American Express did it with its Members Project. Pepsi infamously did it with Pepsi Refresh. Redwood Creek, a wine brand, does one as well . And there are more. What I hate about these efforts is that they pit charities against each other in ways that I find unseemly. All of us want to see charities cooperating for the greater good, not elbowing out their perceived competitors at the trough.These kinds of promotions can bring out the worst in causes. Also, there’s a frequently a strong Matthew Effect at work in these efforts; the rich get richer and ...

If you ask a regular marketer what his KPIs are he may have a handful. But ask a digital marketer what her key performance indicators and she may have 100 or more. The reason, said Jeff A. Allen, a product marketer at Adobe Marketing Cloud at an American Marketing Association meeting yesterday is that digital marketing generates a huge pile of data that can be efficiently cross-tabulated in countless ways. Consequently, all marketing is becoming ever more analytical and more scientific since you can easily and quickly test hypotheses about what works and what doesn’t. Which prompts the question for cause marketers, what are your KPIs? Ignore, for the moment, the fact that your cause marketing campaigns may not currently be digital; how do you measure its success? You can start with the obvious; dollars raised, sales, impressions generated, media value of said impressions, and number of participants. But you can and should go deeper. Because, as Allen put it, if you can’t docume...