Better Media Sponsorship in Cause Marketing

Cause marketing, like all forms of sponsorship, requires activation, or promotion of the campaign in some form. Imagine, then, how sweet it is when you sign one or more members of the media as a campaign sponsor. It’s a little like coming home every night to Giselle Bundchen (or, if you prefer, Tom Brady).

Too bad the media sponsor in this effort benefiting the Red Dress campaign didn’t take a few extra steps to ensure that the campaign had a second life.

The Red Dress Awards have been sponsored for the last eight years by Woman’s Day magazine, the Hachette Filipacci title with a circulation of almost 4 million readers. The Red Dress campaign is a sprawling effort held each February to raise awareness of heart disease among woman. Heart disease is far and away the deadliest killer of women in the United States.

Red Dress efforts are spearheaded jointly, but separately by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association. In 2010 the Red Dress Awards benefited the Larry King Cardiac Foundation. In 2011, the beneficiary was the American Heart Association.

The Woman’s Day ad at the left from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database gives you all the highlights. The host was Sherri Shepherd of the TV show The View. Mary J. Blige performed. Celebrity stylemaker Tim Gunn sanctioned the event. Dancers from the hit TV show Dancing With the Stars performed a spicy cha-cha. Other sponsors like Campbell’s and Swarovski were recognized. Honorees were awarded.

It was a fancy New York City gala, in other words.

If your heart disease charity was the beneficiary, you’d feel pretty good about what you got from Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards. But if Woman’s Day were willing, the show could be better still and generate even more money.

• Imagine, for example, if instead of a standard gala fare the show was packaged so that it could air, with commercials, on television. I suspect Oprah’s OWN network is looking for a lot of good programming.
• Or think about clearing the rights to the songs that Mary J. Blige sang at the show and selling them as a benefit on iTunes.
• What if you conducted a pre-auction for the right to be coached by and perform with the Dancing With the Stars dancers that night?
• What if Tim Gunn designed a limited-edition broach or ring or bracelet or outfit with red Swarovski crystals, that was unveiled at the show and then sold first-come, first served online?
• What if Campbell’s offered a sweepstakes on package of select soups for a chance to attend next year’s show at a celebrity-studded table if you raised more than $5,000 for the American Heart Association?

If you did those things, or better ones, the Woman’s Day Red Dress Awards would have a second life, more money would be raised, and Woman’s Day would win awards at the 2012 Cause Marketing Forum.

Finally, mark your calendar for a free Q&A call with me on Friday, June 10, 2011 for you to ask any and all questions about cause marketing. The call takes place at 12 noon Eastern, 11am Central, 10 am Mountain and 9am Pacific.

Free Cause Marketing Q&A Call With Paul Jones Friday, June 10

Faithful Readers:

The other day Mrs. Alden Keene asked what the Cause Marketing Blog has done to help the world of nonprofits that have done so much for our world (and my livelihood). I pointed out that the blog is coming up on 600 posts, each indexed with helpful keywords and easily searched. It’s the longest-tenured blog on cause marketing, says author and fellow cause marketing blogger Joe Waters. In almost five years of posting, people from better than 99 percent of the countries in the world have found and read the Cause Marketing Blog.

The whole Cause Marketing Blog is a public service, I said.

“Yes,” she replied, “and don’t pull any muscles patting yourself on the back. But what have you done for individual nonprofits and sponsors?”

I continued to pointlessly make my case before conceding that, of course, she was right. So with Mrs. Alden Keene’s encouragement I have decided that I need offer a direct public service to you, my faithful readers.

I am therefore offering a free Q&A call with me on Friday, June 10, 2011 to ask any and all questions you have about cause marketing. I’ll take questions from both nonprofits and sponsors completely free of charge.

As a marketer I know that I need a promotional hook, so I casted about for a holiday in June that isn't Father's Day and found National Donut Day which falls in June. National Donut Day succeeds the Salvation Army’s National Doughnut Day, says Wikipedia, which started in 1938 in Chicago as fundraiser and to honor of the Salvation Army ‘Lassies’ who had served soldiers donuts during World War I. That's a Salvation Army Lassie at the top of the post.

No free donuts from me. Just sweet, tasty bits of free advice on cause marketing.

I’ll post call-in information in all the posts for the next two weeks. Until then, think on the idea of Lassies serving donuts.

Warm regards,
Paul Jones

Pepsi and Lowe's Co-Brand to Support the Troops

On monday, May 23, 2011 the post was about the current American zeitgeist for supporting the troops. The post on Thursday May 19, 2011 was about how cause marketing is a form of co-branding. Too bad I didn’t wait until today to post on those separate subjects because I could have killed two birds with one post.

Yesterday I got the Lowe’s circular at left that features co-branded cause marketing with PepsiCo benefiting the troops.

Called Summer Salute Program, here’s how it works: PepsiCo and Lowe’s will donate $1 million to unnamed charity or charities that support the troops and their families. Part of Pepsi’s piece of this includes their NASCAR drivers Jimmie Johnson (Gatorade), Jeff Gordon (Pepsi Max) and Dale Earnhardt Jr. (AMP Energy/Mountain Dew), all of whom will run their cars with Summer Salute paint schemes. All are affiliated with the famed Hendrick Motorsports team. Johnson, of course, drives the Lowe’s car.

To give the campaign a little more emotional depth, Lowe’s and PepsiCo invite people to post messages of support to the military both on videotape at YouTube and Facebook and through a messaging system.

On Memorial Day weekend, Lowe’s will also offer a 10 percent discount to all active, reserve, retired, and honorably discharged U.S. military personnel, VA benefits recipients, and their immediate family members. Certain restrictions, as they say, apply.

The only place I could find reference to any of this was at lowesracing.com. But even the press release there was unfortunately vague, leaving me with several questions. Who gets the money for instance and how will it be spent? The USO logo appears on the Lowesracing.com, but the press release doesn’t explicitly mention the USO. Is it a straight donation or is it transactional cause marketing triggered by a PepsiCo product purchase? The circular says the former, the press release says nothing.

Finally, is it just me or is NASCAR still in trouble?

Charity Caue Marketers, Take Heart!

A press release yesterday announced that Rite Aid, the $25.2 billion (sales) retail drug chain has passed the $50 million mark in donations to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, the sixth company among CMNH’s stable of sponsors to do so. This is good news for small, ambitious charities everywhere.

Since 1983 CMNH has generated more than $4.3 billion, or on average, about $153 million a year. While CMNH has a successful direct giving effort, it’s only about 10 years old. And the cause does little if any major gifts fundraising or planned giving. All but a very small percentage of that $4.3 billion total was generated through cause marketing, grassroots fundraising, or some variation thereof. (The photo at the left of Rite Aid’s President and CEO, John Standley is therefore instructive. He's at a fundraising car wash benefiting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.)

The reason that’s so is because of the interesting dynamic that exists between CMNH and the 170 hospitals affiliated with Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. It goes almost without saying that in 1983 the hospitals did all the traditional kinds of fundraising available to them. So at CMNH’s founding it couldn’t bring much value to the relationship if all it tried to do was compete for the same dollars with the hospitals it hoped to help.

Consequently CMNH... which started out as a telethon charity... stumbled upon the jessant form of fundraising called cause marketing and found its niche.

Once it started down the path of doing all cause marketing all the time, CMN had no way to grow other than to innovate. And they’ve done so reliably for a generation now.

As a result, while there are larger charities than CMNH doing cause marketing, I don’t believe there’s another one that has raised more money via cause marketing only.

All this from a little charity not in New York or Los Angeles (or for that matter London or Tokyo) but in tiny Salt Lake City, Utah, founded and staffed largely by people from a state better known for its abundant natural beauty than abundant corporate sharpies.

For cause marketers the story of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals is the story of David and Goliath and the little engine that could.

The story of CMNH’s success should have the same effect on other charity cause marketers that the story Roger Banister’s breaking the 4-minute mile has had on middle distance runners. Ten years after Sir Roger ran a sub 4-minute mile in 1954 on the Iffley Road Track at Oxford University, a high school kid from Kansas named Jim Ryan ran the mile in 3:59. So have 40-year-olds. Some runners have bested it dozens of times. Fifty-seven years after Bannister broke the psychological barrier of the 4-minute mile, it is the "standard for professional middle distance male runners," according to Wikipedia.

Children's Miracle Network Hospitals raising $4.3 billion in 28 years is the story charity cause marketers should tell themselves when they're feeling down. Because if in the earliest days of cause marketing someone from Utah could sell a kind of sponsorship no one had ever heard of benefiting a charity that even now flies under the radar, you can probably figure it out, too.

Research-Driven Cause Marketing

Huggies brand of disposable diapers conducted a survey in 2010 of mothers and their ‘diaper needs.’ The study, called ‘Every Little Bottom’ was released in June 2010. Now, a year later, the Kimberly-Clark brand has a diaper cause marketing campaign… also called Every Little Bottom… meant to generate donations of diapers to diaper banks and food banks in the United States and Canada, as well as call attention to the company’s own pledge to donate as many as 22.5 million diapers.

The study of more than 2,500 mothers included questions like “Keeping your child in a clean diaper is one of the most important things you can do for them as a mother.” And, “Changing you child’s diaper is a wonderful way of showing how much you love them.” And, “Have you ever done any of the following to ensure you could afford enough diapers for your child?” followed by a list of economizing measures mothers might make to keep diapers in their budget.

Mothers overwhelming said yes to all three questions.

Needless to say, certain findings in the study represent something of a razor’s edge for Huggies, which carry a premium price. If disposable diapers are taking too big a chunk out of the family budget, why not shift to cloth diapers or cheaper competing brands?

Other questions in the survey address those very issues.

Not surprisingly, rather than dwell on any potential negatives for Huggies, the survey instead turns up the following facts that in turn inform the cause marketing campaign as it stands.

1 in 3 American moms have to “choose between diapers and other basic needs like food.”

Moms struggling with diaper need are more likely to miss school or work.

Babies that aren’t changed regularly “are more likely to experience signs of irritation and discomfort, cry more, and suffer from worse diaper rash.”

The Every Little Bottom cause marketing campaign features the return of the limited edition denim-colored diapers. Buy the jeans diapers or wipes and a donation will be made to fulfill the 22.5 million diaper pledge. Donations are also keyed to the number of likes on Facebook, and the number of downloads of your baby’s image in the jean Huggies on the website.

We can’t always see the research that leads to a specific cause marketing campaign. But in this case, we can.

Support for the Troops a Cause Marketing Winner

Earlier this month the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University published a study that found that the cause that most resonates with Americans right now is supporting the troops, something several sponsors seem to have already understood.

Outback Steakhouse has long made cause marketing with a military theme a key piece of its promotional mix and community support. On Veteran’s Day, November 11, veterans and active duty military get a free Bloomin’ Onion appetizer and non-alcoholic drink. Going back to 2002 Outback has also sent employee volunteers to the Middle East to feed the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010 Outback also had a special menu called “Red, White and Bloomin.’” When you ordered from that menu, Outback would make a donation to Operation Homefront. Outback’s donation to Operation Homefront came to $1 million in 2010.

The Georgetown study, called the Dynamics of Cause Engagement, found that 71 percent of American were very or somewhat knowledgeable about the topic of ‘supporting our troops’ while 39 percent were very or somewhat involved with the cause. The corresponding numbers for ‘feeding the hungry,’ the second highest scoring cause, were 65 percent and 39 percent. In general, Americans are more likely to be supportive of causes that they are knowledgeable about.

Outback isn’t the only company that begins with an ‘O’ to sense the current American zeitgeist of support for the troops.

Internet retailer Overstock.com offers anyone with a .mil email account a free membership to Club O, a loyalty program. Members of Club O get free shipping, exclusive shopping events and “5 percent rewards dollars back on every purchase,” according to a media release from Overstock. The promotion was tied to Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 21, 2011. Overstock also has an existing relationship with the Wounded Warrior Project.

Even the little guy can get in on the action. The Eau Claire Express, a summer baseball team comprised of collegiate players, did a military night in their game May, 19, 2011. The Express played the game in camouflage jerseys and servicemen and woman received free admission. While the Express charges admission, the players can’t be paid or they would lose their amateur eligibility. So the Express commonly donates a portion of home game receipts to local schools, hospitals, Special Olympics, and the like.

Frequently when studies like the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study come out, full results remain proprietary to whoever commissioned them, leaving most cause marketers in the dark about specific findings. Huzzahs to the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown and Olgivy Public Relations for broadly releasing the results of the study and confirming what Outback and Overstock already knew; Americans are keen on showing their support of members of the United States military.

How an Agency Should Evaluating a Cause Marketing Campaign

How should an agency evaluate a cause campaign it had a hand in?

This question comes on the heels of posts the last two Fridays about how to evaluate a cause marketing campaign if you represent the cause and how to do so if you represent the sponsor.

While there’s plenty in both posts that’s pertinent, agencies still have their own unique gloss on evaluating the success of a campaign.

• Agencies frequently care about things like whether a campaign helps them ad another trophy to the case or brings the respect of peers and the trade press.
  
• Agencies care about achieving higher creative standards.
• And it goes without saying that agencies care about whether the work they do for the campaign meets internal benchmarks for profitability.

But in my view what should matter most for agencies is the degree to which they are aligned with the nonprofit’s goals and objectives. Agencies must evaluate the success of a cause marketing campaign based on whether it achieved the nonprofit’s and the sponsor’s definitions of success.

Sometimes this means setting aside biases (both personal and institutional). For instance, in my home State of Utah the Department of Transportation and the Department of Public Safety ran a public safety campaign called Zero Fatalities. The tagline was: “it’s a goal we can all live with.”

The agency had an institutional bias for wordplay, but does a campaign like this really call for puns? I don’t know who the agency for this campaign is, but in my view they sold the State a bill of goods.

In cause marketing campaigns, the job of the agency isn’t to be clever for the sake of being clever. The agency's job is to help create a campaign that works, that is a campaign that sells.

Dan Pallotta makes an interesting point in a recent post in the Harvard Business Review blogs. Businesses sometimes scorn nonprofits as being inherently not self-sustainable, he writes. But, “if reliance on the wealth of others makes a business not self-sustaining, then no business is self-sustaining. The music industry, for example, is not self-sustaining, because it relies on the wealth of consumers, who use their money to buy albums,” says Pallotta.

What can help make nonprofits self-sustainable? Here's how Pallotta answers:

“Most people want to help others. Their lives would feel incomplete without this connection to humanity. We can tap into this human desire by marketing compassion with the same rigor as we market luxury cars.”

That’s the ultimate assessment for an agency. Did they bring value that made the campaign more effective? Or did they bring creative that won cheers from their peers and yawns from the nonprofit's constituency?

Repeat After Me, Cause Marketing is Co-Branding

FSIs or Free-Standing Inserts are those booklets of coupons mailed to your address or stuffed into your Sunday newspaper. They’ve been a hallmark of cause marketing almost from the very earliest days when much of cause marketing involved consumer packaged goods (CPG). For a time the use of FSIs to distribute coupons was declining, but they’ve surged again during the Great Recession, as has the average value of coupons.

The cover of FSI at the left, sponsored by the British-Dutch CPG company Unilever, features the cause Boy’s and Girls Clubs of America. It dropped on May 17. My FSI had eight pages of Unilever coupons not counting the cover, along with at least that many more pages from non-Unilever products.

Unilever, the body copy on the cover tells us, is donating $250,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of America. But that’s the full extent of the co-branding. Where’s the paragraph or two of explanation of all the valuable things Boys and Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) do for school-age kids? Where’s an ancillary promotion benefiting the BGCA? Where’s the additional photos of BGCA kids learning or being active at their local club? Where’s BGCA’s URL or Facebook page?

Cause marketing is co-branding, just as much as those Coke cups on the judges’ desks on American Idol is co-branding. Implicit in the idea of co-branding is that both parties benefit. Coke keeps its brand in front of a young audience. American Idol makes a few nickels from the deal, sure, but it also benefits from being associated with one of America’s most enduring brands. Coke and Idol both win.

Now BGCA got $250,000 for about the amount of effort it took to take the check to the bank. And easy money in these troubled times is especially valuable for charities.

But when a sponsor demonstrates to customers and potential customers why supporting their cause of choice is not only wise but emotionally satisfying, you make your sponsorship more valuable than just a logo and 30 words of copy.

BGCA isn’t off the hook here. They should have insisted that as a condition to the sponsorship that they get not just the cash, but an endorsement from Unilever in the form of page of explanation in the FSI of BGCA.

Procter & Gamble, a smart marketer if ever there was one, shows this every year with their FSI that’s themed to the Special Olympics. In their May 1, 2011 Special Olympics themed FSI at left, P&G devoted two pages beyond the cover to co-brand its long-time partner.

Compare and contrast P&G’s fulsome support with this spare effort from Unilever.

Win One, Give One Cause Marketing

We’ve talked about buy one give one cause marketing (BOGO). And buy one give one get one cause marketing (BOGOGO). Even buy one plant one (BOPO) cause marketing. Now Betty Crocker Fruit Rollups from General Mills offers WOGO; win one give one with the item in question being a XO laptop computer.

Here’s how it works. Inside specially-marked packages of 6 varieties of Fruit Rollups are certificates for a free XO computer. A total of 2001 XO computers will be given away in the sweepstakes. A matching number will be donated to children in Africa.

From December 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011, General Mills will also donate one dollar to One Laptop Per Child, the nonprofit organization behind the XO, for every Fruit Rollup coupon redeemed up to $4,000.

Winonegiveone.com, the promotion’s website, offers a third way for laptops to be donated to Africa. The site, which is targeted to kids and moms has a kind of Angry Birds-type game that allows you to propel a heroic action figure to Africa via a rocket, a catapult or a slingshot. For every 400 heroes that land in Africa, General Mills donates additional laptops up to 442 total. When I landed one on the continent the counter said that 160630 heroes had been sent so far, 90 percent of the goal.

Once in Africa you can explore a kind of digital diorama of Grahamstown, based on the actual city of 125,000 in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. There are more games, short videos, and easy-to-swallow didactic content. I learned, for instance, that South Africa has three capital cities and 11 official languages!

It was all great fun for this big kid. In fact, the only lame part was the FSI where I first spotted the earlier this month. Out of all the cool elements in the promotion, the FSI somehow manages to be boring.

Finally, Cause Marketers Are Hearing Each Other

I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years and have been involved with cause marketing for coming up on 20 years. During that time one of my enduring grumblings has been that marketers from the causes and from the sponsors were talking to each other, but not really listening. It was like a modestly-happy couple communicating everything but trust. But now there are increasing signs that they’re finally hearing and trusting each other.

Witness this label effort called Child Hunger Ends Here from ConAgra Foods on behalf of Feeding America. ConAgra owns more than a half dozen food brands including three that target children; Chef Boyardee, Peter Pan peanut butter, and the Kid Cuisine brand of quick-serve meals.

Enter the 8-digit code from the package of any participating ConAgra item at www.childhungerendsheare.com and a donation is made to Feeding America, up to 2.5 million meals. That probably represents a cash donation of around $360,000, since Feeding America says it can get seven meals out of each dollar.

After you enter the code, you get the page above that offers up printable coupons for ConAgra items and asks for your email address.

But pay special attention to the three things that opting-in could bring:

• "Yes, I would like to receive future emails about the Child Hunger Ends Here program."
• "Yes, I would like to receive emails from Feeding America."
• "Yes, I would like to receive emails about ConAgra Foods brands."

Imagine that. If you opt in, Feeding America will get your email address!

For a very long time I’ve been telling cause marketers, my clients and you, my faithful readers, to share this kind of data and more…to give onetime cause marketing promotions second life as a database. I won’t claim that my message has finally been getting through. Feeding America and ConAgra are very sophisticated organizations, after all.

But I am glad that to be able to point others to forward-thinking cause marketing partners who are doing things right.

Funding Your Startup or New Charity

One of the most confounding charitable endeavors I was ever involved in was figuring out how to fund a startup charity that made grants to other charities. HelpUsAdopt.org, founded in 2007, is in a similar boat. The 501(c)(3) foundation grants would-be adoptive parents up to $15,000 for adoption expenses.

In short, they raise money to give it away.

Included in their fundraising mix are gala-type events, annual donor solicitation, and a small catalog of products including the necklace and bracelets modeled in the ad at the left by actress Nia Vardalos, of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame.

The necklace Nia is wearing in this ad from the June 2011 Redbook magazine goes for $225 and the bracelets for $35 each. The HelpUsAdopt.org store also currently sells a brown wooden bead necklace for $95 and a tote bag for $20.

The nonprofit fundraising world is set up to favor established charities, and with good reason. IRS figures show that 16 percent of nonprofit charities that filed a 990 tax return in 2000, didn’t file one in 2005. Since 501(c)(3)s don't have to file a tax return if they take in less than $25,000 not filing means that they either went out of business or that they couldn't raise money.

As a consequence, if your organization is less than five years old, grantmaking foundations seldom gaze your way. Knowing this, grant writers often keep themselves aloof from new charities. Corporate donations are unlikely, although not impossible, to secure for nubes. Bequests, which are a big slice of the revenue pie for established charities are really rare for rookie charities. New charities, therefore, tend to rely on major donors until they can get their feet under them.

HelpUsAdopt.org seemingly has five major donors who came in at the $15,000 level, including the founders, Becky and Kipp Fawcett. So that’s $75,000. Four more came in at between $5,000 to $10,000. So figure $7,500 times four which adds in another $30,000, bringing a grand total of approximately $105,000 from nine major donors. Events and smaller donors brought in the rest of the $300,000 HelpUsAdopt.org has given away since 2007.

It appears to me that as a new charity HelpUsAdopt.org is relying on the jewelry to sell. For my part, I’m chary of such a strategy.

If you sell stuff, someone has to keep inventory on hand. The jewelry is sold online only, so someone has to drive traffic to the website. Then the website has to covert traffic to sales. Someone has to fulfill orders. And if it doesn’t sell someone has to eat it all. It appears to me that HelpUsAdopt.org is the entity on the hook for all this.

All of this would be OK if HelpUsAdopt.org was 'all benefits company' like Newman’s Own, which sells stuff in order to make grants to charities. It would be OK if HelpUsAdopt.org was merely doing a cause marketing deal of the type that Susan G. Komen does where someone else takes the risk of putting the pink ribbon on garden trowel or warm-up suit and selling it. But HelpUsAdopt.org is not Newman’s Own or a Susan G. Komen licensee. It’s a straight-ahead 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity.

I hope I’m wrong about HelpUsAdopt.org’s foray into product direct sales. They have a worthy cause. But I don’t think I am.

How Causes Should Evaluate Their Cause Marketing Campaign

So your cause's cause marketing campaign is over (or at a pause) and it’s time to evaluate. How do you do that?

• If your nonprofit is like most of your peers you’ll probably put everybody who was even remotely connected to the project in a room and hash it out until everyone’s eyes bleed. Sounds like a good reason to cut back on the number of participants, right? On the contrary. The fact is, given the turnover in nonprofits, the very most junior person involved with the campaign this year could be running it 18 months from now. Moreover a debriefing is a form of training. (But be careful that it’s not training in how not to run a debriefing!)
• At a minimum the debriefing should lead to a discussion about whether the campaign met the goals you set out for it. Of course that means that you committed the goals to paper or some digital format beforehand, didn’t you? It also means that people come to the meeting prepared to talk specifics. If the goal was to convert fans into donors, then someone needs to bring a spreadsheet to the meeting with the numbers of new supporters and how much money they generated.
• If the campaign is large or important there may be a need for some kind of formal evaluation. Maybe an outside firm needs to validate the number of social media expressions and/or old media impressions.
  
• Perhaps an audit of the campaign’s books is required or maybe it’s just prudent.
• Maybe you need to study formally the participants’ satisfaction with the campaign. If the campaign requires a customer satisfaction survey, consider leading with “the ultimate question” devised by Bain consultant and author Fred Reichheld. The ultimate question is: rated on a 1-10 scale, “would you recommend this campaign to a friend.” If you don’t get a ‘net promoter score’ of nine or 10, well, then the next survey needs to determine why that is.
• Whether or not you ask the ultimate question of your customers, you must ask your sponsor(s) some version of it. If you don’t get a net promoter score of nine or 10 from them, you better start doing some damage control. Remember in almost every case it’s cheaper to keep sponsors than to find new ones.
• If the campaign didn’t meet your internal goals, talk about why. One answer could be that the goals were unrealistic. It could be that someone involved didn’t execute one or more elements of the campaign correctly. Maybe the campaign was poorly designed. If it went well, don’t just pat your own backs, figure out why it succeeded. Everyone knows a grand slam homerun when they see it, but not everyone knows how it happened. Spend the biggest single chunk of time in the postmortem meeting talking about how and why things went right or wrong.
• Even if the meeting is large, make sure that everyone gets their say. There’s a couple of reasons for this. Many after-action meetings get dominated by the people with the strongest personalities. But they’re not necessarily the smartest or most insightful. That mousy student intern… with a true outsider’s perspective… may offer the most astute observation of all. The second reason to require that everyone speaks is to ensure that everyone gets a chance to be heard. You don’t want to be the kind of nonprofit that doesn’t allow your people to be heard. You can do that by going around the room and insist that everyone make some remark that goes longer than one sentence. Prep them in advance for their participation so that people who need to prepare can do so.
• Talk about the role vendors, outsiders and sponsors played. Was the agency participation dynamite? Underwhelming? Somewhere in between? Was the work from other vendors up to snuff? Did the sponsor seem especially pleased? If so, ask them to put that on paper or offer an endorsement for your flip camera.
• If you had an agreement or contract with the sponsor, did you meet all its terms?
• Make sure that minutes from the debriefing are kept. After the fact, require that participants review and update the minutes and give them a deadline to make changes. Sometimes fresh ideas or thoughts come after the meeting and if they’re pertinent they should be added to the document. Prepare some kind of summary sheet that explains the campaign completely, if briefly. Stuff the summary, the minutes from the debrief, and all the exhibits (budget figures, copies of contracts, samples of the creative, and the like) into an expandable file folder. You could do this digitally as well. As everyone moves to other projects, most of the specific memories people have will fade. The file, whether digital or analog, becomes your organization’s living memory of the campaign, so make sure it’s as accurate, complete, and accessible as you can make it.
• For the same reason, most of the people involved should make their own notes from the campaign, apart from the organizational memory folder. These could be general in nature, but they must also contain notes and ideas specific to their function during the campaign.

Cause Marketing to the Fashionable Man

The year is 1885 and the organization building the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty runs out of money. Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York newspaper The World, runs an editorial saying that he would print the name of everyone who donated even one penny to the fund. Sure enough pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters start rolling in, along with larger donations. Construction resumes and by April 1886, the pedestal is finished and ready for Lady Liberty.

It’s an old ploy, but the men’s magazine Gentlemen’s Quarterly is using it to raise money for The Gentlemen’s Fund, which in turn raises money for four nonprofit charities; Oceana, represented in this ad by actor Adrian Grenier, Feeding America, DonorsChoose.org, the classroom teacher-funding charity, and Natural Resources Defense Council.

When you donate $100 you can be recognized in GQ’s December 2011 Men of the Year issue. Donation amounts of $200 or more receive a few extra benefits in addition to mention in the magazine.

Called Gentlemen Give Back, the editorial mention is just one of three ways The Gentlemen’s Fund raises money for its benefiting charities. The site takes direct donations for the four charities, they sponsor a benefit called The Gentlemen’s Ball in New York City in October, and they sell merchandise. The charities may also get a take of the sponsorship money.

And, oh, what a list of sponsors! The Gentlemen’s Fund sponsors are veritable who’s who of men’s fashion houses and goodies that end in vowels; Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Porsche, Prada, Gucci, Versace, along with IWC watches, Barneys, Land Rover, Hugo Boss, and a bunch of other chi-chi brands conspicuously absent from my closet and garage.

The celebrity support is solid, too. We already know about Adrian Grenier. Actor David Arquette supports Feeding America, TV host Jimmy Fallon the Natural Resources Defense Council, and actor Ashton Kutcher stands up for Donorschoose.org and his own charitable foundation called DNA, which fights child sex slavery.

Gentlemen’s Quarterly is published by Cónde Nast, which is also the publisher of Vogue, where the Grenier ad came from.

I like the idea of targeting men with this stylish celebrity-driven cause marketing that is so familiar to female audiences. I certainly think Cónde Nast is giving the campaign respectable support; I’ve seen Gentlemen’s Fund ads in sister magazines including Wired, Vanity Fair, and Golf Digest.

But I wonder how well it’s actually doing.

The website says the 2010 The Gentlemen’s Ball in 2010, which featured live appearances by Fallon, Kutcher, and Arquette, and a video from Grenier, attracted 300 guests and “raised $400,000.” I don’t know if that’s net or gross, although I do know how expensive it is to throw a charity ball in New York City.

But I can all but guarantee that any of the better charity balls held during New York’s Fashion Week earlier this year did better.

Cause Marketing in Nigeria

It is with great pleasure I offer up this guest post from Yinka Olaito, a specialist in brand communication, social media, and business communication in Lagos, Nigeria. Yinka is the chief communication officer of Michael Sage Company in Lagos, and a trainer, speaker and fellow blogger. I asked him to address the topic of Cause Marketing in Nigeria. (That's part of the Lagos skyline on the left).

Cause marketing is not new to any tribe (industry, nation, state, or professional association). The challenge in implementing cause marketing is how to be involved, where to be involved and when to be involved in order to create right impression and get maximum value.

Most organizations involved in cause marketing often jump into it just to feel good or because they see other companies doing it. Many get involved in causes that the top management feel good about without any strategic consideration. We’ve seen misdirected cause involvement actually hurting corporate image and perception instead of adding value to the corporate brand loyalty, patronage.

Nigeria is exploding with different cause involvement. Before the recession many banking actors were frontline gladiators in cause involvement without adequate marketing of the cause. My understanding then was that most of their cause involvements were based on ‘just feeling good or to belong.’ Today the dust has settled and many of them have stepped back.

While it may be said that not every one of them got it wrong, the few that got it right did not sustain the tempo. We believe that accounted for why they could not maximize the benefit of loyalty and patronage that should have been the aftermath of the process. When getting involved in cause marketing, there is need to understand that cause marketing is not a feeling but a marketing discipline that requires strong strategic positioning and relevant skill to get the most out of the practice.

Today, telecommunication and few oil and gas brands remain the most visible brands involved in cause involvement and marketing. Another conglomerate, Dangote, owned by Nigeria’s richest man Aliko Dangote, also seems to be engaging in cause marketing. Some have suggested that like the banks, Dangote is spending more on the marketing than on the cause itself.

Among the telecommunication brands, MTN Nigeria seems to be getting it right with its Foundation. The foundation has invested in education and health and the impacts are lasting. Strictly speaking what they’re doing isn’t cause marketing, but certainly both parties are benefitting.

Here’s how we think Nigerian companies could improve the value of cause marketing:

• Use cause marketing to build deeper relation: this will require strategy development. Also, many brands need to consider cause investment relevance to the brand.
• Use it to increase brand loyalty.
• Manage cause marketing efforts with such finesse that they can generate a long lasting brand loyalty.

One positive benefit of cause involvement and marketing is in its ability to increase brand positive perception. Many brands here in Nigeria still need to learn how to best take advantage of this benefit of cause involvement and marketing.

Effectively Communicating What Your Cause Really Does

Typically, charities are better at asking for help than they are at demonstrating success at their mission. That’s why I was heartened by this ad from Save the Children.

Only the savviest of a charity's supporters understand what their charities do in a specific way.

We all know that food bank puts food on the shelves, that nonprofit hospitals treat sick people, that aid charities help people in extremis, and that pet rescue charities move pets out of bad situations.

But knowing a food bank’s mission doesn’t exactly clue you into how important logistics are to them. Aid charities succeed or fail based in part on the quality of personal relationships with local officials. All the good things a hospital does can be erased if it can’t also rein in infections.

With GoodGoes.org Save the Children effectively communicates what saving children looks like at the ground level in the developing world.

In effect it’s a kind of blog, with posts from Save the Children health workers in a half dozen countries on four continents. Here’s a post from Madalitso Masa, who, along with her husband works with about 100 families in Malawi in east Africa:

“Many vaccinations took place this week as we welcomed three beautiful, healthy newborns into my community. What joy! Building trust takes time. But after so many healthy newborns were delivered, many of the communities have embraced me and expressed their confidence in my abilities. It is wonderful to have a job where I can improve the well-being of others through my work and learn about their different cultures, customs, and values.”

The posts are all undated and in English and allow comments. There are photos of the workers and their charges, a short biography, and a kind of scorecard of the work they did over the last month. Madalitso, for instance, treated 2 children for diarrhea, 4 for malaria, vaccinated 11, and made 6 newborn baby house visits.

It wasn’t clear to me whether these stats were for April 2011 or just a snapshot of what she generally does. Still, this is on-the-ground charity work made concrete.

I’d be surprised to learn that all the featured health workers write English, although in Malawi English is one of the official languages. Still I suspect that a lot of language and cultural translation took place in order to keep these posts up to date. GoodGoes.org looks pretty straight forward, but it’s a safe bet that because of distance and language hundreds of staff-hours go into making it look so.

Of course this is also a fundraising effort. You can donate right at the website. But it’s not primarily about raising money. Instead, with GoodGoes.org Save the Children is telling you why you would want to donate.

I greatly admire what Save the Children has done here.

Most domestic charities could do the same, if more easily.

Imagine, a pet rescue charity, for instance, live-blogging the rescue of pets from the flooded areas along the Mississippi River, for instance. Or a food bank following one item of food a week; from the moment when it's donated, to the transportation and warehousing it undergoes, to the point where it lands in the home of the family where it will be consumed.

It's fair to say that Save the Children, which takes in nearly $450 million a year, is better staffed for communications like this than the average food bank. But someone could do everything I've just suggested with a flip camera, a digital camera, and a notebook.

Paper Icon Campaign from Smith’s Food and Drug

Smith’s Food and Drug is in the middle of its annual campaign for Primary Children’s Medical Center, a key part of which is this paper icon. I purchased mine for $1 on Saturday, May 7, 2011.

Since 1992 Smith’s, a 130-store unit of the grocery giant Kroger, has donated more than $7.6 million to Primary, one of only a handful of Trauma One pediatric hospitals in the country, and the only such hospital in its service area, which includes parts of Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana.

Smith’s donation to Primary in 2010 was $1 million and $837,000 in 2009, signaling the regard with which Primary is held in the local community as well as Smith’s skill at fundraising, even in the face of an economic downturn.

The paper icon is large, more than 6½” in diameter, and in full color. The back is blank except for a black and white UPC code. The clerk dutifully asked me if I wanted to buy the icon. The credit card machine had a coordinated paper surround that also promoted the campaign.

The icon itself features kids’ art, which is cute enough. Generally I suggest that the icon art represent in some way the population being served. If it’s a zoo, it should be zoo animals. If it’s food bank the paper icon should represent patrons. If it’s Special Olympics, it should be Special Olympians. Etc. Although there are many reasonable exceptions.

Primary chooses to represent its mission with kids’ art. Having worked for Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) kids’ art sort seems so 1995, which is about when I was using kids’ art in promotional materials. For that reason I probably can’t be objective on how appealing people find kids’ art when the child in question is not their own.

You’ll also notice that the hospital itself isn’t actually represented by even a typographical logo. One of the enduring mysteries of Primary Children’s Medical Center is that it doesn’t exactly have its own logo. They will, on occasion, use the ungainly thing to the left. But you won’t find it on the front page of Primary’s website.

For its own reasons Intermountain Healthcare, the nonprofit that owns Primary and 21 other local hospitals, wants to be the brand that people recognize. But Intermountain’s persnicketyness on the topic has long struck me as an example of ‘cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.’ Having visited dozens of children’s hospitals from coast to coast, Primary is the only one I know of without its own logo.

That said, Intermountain and Primary get away without a logo because the hospital has a 100-year history in the community, tons of goodwill, a well-earned reputation for excellence, and a slightly unusual name.

How could Smith’s improve this well-put-together and effective paper icon campaign?

• As a starter they could make use of the back of the icon for explanatory text or photos.
• By its nature the circle shape wastes a lot of paper that just gets trimmed off. They could certainly create a tessellated shape that would create little to no waste.
• They could include a tear-off receipt for the donation amount.
• They could ask for higher dollar amounts than $1.
• They could create a contest element wherein a tear-off portion serves as an entry.
• They could utilize a tear-off for bounce-back coupons.
• Finally, I’m waiting for the paper icon campaign that addresses the question that some people have: What happens to the icons after they’re displayed? Smith’s could certainly insist on recycled paper for the icons and promotional materials. But they should also demonstrate greener intentions by making a point of recycling all of the used paper icons.

What Sponsors Should Measure in Cause Marketing Campaigns

If you’re the sponsor of a cause marketing campaign, you’re in the green room, you’re in a makeup chair and you’re sitting pretty.

Here’s what I mean. When I was writing the Children’s Miracle Network (CMN) Telethon a representative from one of CMN’s largest sponsors used to avail herself of the same makeup services provided for celebrity hosts and guests. Strictly speaking this was verboten. While she appeared on air during sponsor segments, CMN had a separate makeup area for sponsors.

She had some thin excuse why she couldn’t use the regular makeup services… skin allergies or something. At any rate, everyone from CMN in a position to raise the issue with her chose to just let it go. She had a volcanic temper and if she took up a little face time with an honest-to-pete Hollywood makeup artist, what did it really matter?

It’s not so different when it comes to evaluating the success of a cause marketing campaign. While the cause and agency in a cause marketing campaign should have their own criteria for measuring a campaign’s success, the criteria that matters most comes from the sponsor.

It’s the golden rule in action; she who has the gold makes the rules.

So what should the sponsor measure and evaluate?

• Social media 'expressions' and their quality.
• Dollars raised (if it’s that kind of campaign).
• New customers (if it's that kind of campaign).
• Customer opinion surveys measured against prior years.
• The campaign as it compares against competitors and similar campaigns.
• Old media impressions data.
• Some sort of measure(s) of pathology. That is, where things are going wrong. If 65 percent of stakeholders complain about the same five things about your campaign, you've got a punch list.

When it comes to gauging external audiences, most of these measurements suggest themselves and so I won’t go further.

Measuring expressions is a new metric that has come with the rise of social media. It gauges how much traffic your brand gets away from your direct control: Tweets, fans/friends on Facebook, bookmarks on the social bookmark sites like Digg, Delicious, love from bloggers, and the like. People don't have to say nice things or not so nice things about your campaign or brand. To the degree that they do, it's worth measuring.

I would argue that one area that sponsors, nonprofits and agencies frequently miss is the measurement of their internal audiences, including rank and file employees, vendors, partners, etc.

A well-imagined and executed cause marketing campaign can help give a company real personality. Cause marketing at some companies helps with employee loyalty and retention. Moreover, with their money or their time, internal audiences often ‘pay’ for a good chunk of cause marketing campaigns.

Wouldn’t it be good to know if your employees find the campaign to be unrewarded drudgery? Or, that your vendors would happily pay more for their participation in the celebrity golf tourney? Isn’t that information worth knowing as you mull over your participation in next year’s campaign?

Don't Make Language Your Enemy in Cause Marketing

The ad at the left is for a pair of yoga pants. When you buy them from Lucy.com, an unspecified donation is made to Off the Mat, Into the World, a nonprofit co-founded by the model in the ad, Seane Corn. The ad ran in the magazine Yoga Journal in May 2010.

‘Off the Mat’ is a fun name, suggesting that there’s other things in life that reward the participant in addition to yoga. So what does Off the Mat do? The ad says OTM’s mission is “inspiring conscious, sustainable community service through the power of yoga.”

I know what community service is and I understand the words conscious and sustainable in a broad way. But when they’re all combined in that sentence it seems like nonsense. It’s hard to imagine unconscious community service, for instance. In this sentence it’s as though plain English got tied up like a pretzel.

I suspect that for many of the readers of Yoga Journal words like conscious and sustainable used in this way represent a cant or argot. That is, a phraseology or idiom particular to their world.

It’s probably fair to say that few non-yoga practitioners, like myself, pick up Yoga Journal and consequently don't know the subtexts of the culture. However, just because you have your own idiom and media that caters to you is no reason to make your ads vague and unclear.

Brothers Chip and Dan Heath explain why in their fine book Made to Stick. Concrete language, grounded in sensory reality, is more memorable than any argot. “It’s the difference between reading about a wine (‘bold but balanced’)” the Heaths wrote in an article about their book, “and tasting it… We talk about the ‘Velcro Theory of Memory.’ In brief, this concept says that the more sensory ‘hooks’ we put into an idea, the better it will stick.”

Just as screws hold better than nails, clarity and concreteness give our memories more to hold on to than does subtext and idiom.

A Cause Marketing Study I’d Like to See

Since cause marketing usually faces the consumer, retailers are under pressure to engage in cause marketing campaigns for causes large and small. Necessarily this means that retailers say no to more cause partnerships than they say yes to.

This is as it should be. There are a million or so 501(c)(3) nonprofit charities in the United States and only a thin slice of them are good matches for retail sponsors.

That said, there are certainly many instances when a retailer could be well-matched with more than one cause. Indeed, some grocers do paper icon campaigns for MDA, Children’s Miracle Network, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and others, albeit separated by several months.

Witness this circular from Lowe’s that came to me yesterday. On the front page one of the on-sale items is an 18-piece tool kit, in pink because it benefit's Lowe's campaign for Habitat for Humanity, called 'Women Build.' Appropriately, Lowe’s supports Habitat for Humanity philanthropically as well.

On page two is this layout for Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Five items in Komen’s trademark pink are shown, including a potted pink dahlia. Sales from the items benefit the charity.

Of the two major home improvement chain in the United States, Lowe’s targets woman more deliberately than does Home Depot. So Komen is a good match for Lowe’s as well.

Here’s the cause marketing study I’d like to see done.

• Does the fact that Lowe’s is supporting both causes simultaneously hurt one or the other or both?
  
• Is their proximity to each other helpful or hurtful?
  
• Are the people who buy the Komen merchandise different than those who buy the Habitat merchandise?
  
• The Habitat tool kit is also available in green. Should the circular’s graphic designer have chosen green-colored tool kit instead to minimize potential confusion with Komen?
  
• Should the items be merchandised in proximity to each other in the stores themselves, or not?
  
• What if there was a third charity in the mix in the same time frame, also appropriate for Lowe’s, like KaBOOM!, the playground-building charity? Would their themed merchandise still sell?

Cause Marketing on Packaging

Cause marketing with consumer packaged goods often takes place on packaging.

While companies are sometimes loathe to forgo this valuable real estate, it’s almost always the case that the campaign sponsor and cause both benefit most when the packaging explains the campaign well. Remember the wise words from our friends in direct marketing: “tell more, sell more.”

In fact, I once undertook a study of higher value food items on store shelves for a client. What I found was that more expensive or high cachet food items had, on average, more than 20% words on their packaging than did less expensive substitute items. High cachet items were more likely to tell a story or include a narrative of some kind.

The packaging items from the Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database, all circa 2002-2004, illustrate my point.

Blue Sky Soda sells in natural food stores. I picked up this can at Whole Foods. Blue Sky, owned by the larger soda purveyor Hansen’s, is kind of the Shasta of natural sodas. That is, it’s value-priced. A 2¼ x ½ inch paragraph of explanation on the side panel… laid out so that you have to turn the can to read it… explains the campaign thusly:

“Blue Sky will donate 10 cents to American Rivers for every Blue Sky soda blue can tab received by October 31, 2002 (up to $15,000). Carefully remove blue can tabs and mail to: Blue Sky – American Rivers Fund, 1010 Railroad St, Corona, CA 92882. Join Blue Sky to help protect and preserve America’s Rivers. To get involved call 877-4RIVERS or visit www.americanrivers.org.

Blue Sky is currently doing a Save Tabs, Save Pets campaign benefiting Petfinder.com Foundation and set up almost exactly the same. The major difference is that now the donation is 5 cents per pull tab.

Contrast the Blue Sky can with the explanation from corporate parent Hansen’s for its pull tab campaign benefiting City of Hope Breast Cancer Research. Hansen’s doesn’t give the City of Hope in more words than Blue Sky gives American Rivers. But instead of just a few cubic inches, Hansen’s gives up something close to 1/6th of the can’s surface area to explain the campaign. And the portrait-style layout means it’s meant to be seen and read.

Likewise, this effort from Dairy Queen benefiting Children’s Miracle Network offers up only the logo. Even in 2002 (or thereabouts) when I picked up this Blizzard cup, Dairy Queen had already donated tens of millions of dollars over the years to Children’s Miracle Network. Strange, then, that they couldn’t afford even 10 words of explanation. Why even bother with just Children’s Miracle Network’s logo alone and without context?

Compare the Dairy Queen cup with this carton of Ben & Jerry’s Vanilla for a Change. The back explains that the vanilla for the ice cream is sourced at fair prices from small-scale farmers in Indonesia whose farming practices are more sustainable. By buying Ben & Jerry’s you’re supporting small vanilla farmers.

As with the Hansen’s can, Ben & Jerry’s gives up a substantial amount of its packaging real estate to the cause.

The take home is this: When you decide to turn over some of your packaging to a cause, make sure it’s enough to help the cause tell its story. Otherwise you’re truly wasting the precious packaging real estate.

Livestrong Stadium Deal Sets Naming Rights On its Ear

In March Sporting Kansas City, a Major League Soccer (MLS) team announced that its new $200 million stadium, scheduled to open in June, would be named Livestrong Sporting Park, in honor of the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

Moreover, it appears that Livestrong did not pay for the naming rights and is instead guaranteed a donation of no less that $7.5 million over the next six years. The money will come from a portion of ticket and concession sales to both MLS matches and other events held in the stadium, including concerts.

This is the first time a nonprofit has received naming rights for a stadium in the United States. Normally, stadium naming rights go for millions of dollars, even for MLS stadiums. The MLS team in my modestly-sized market, Real Salt Lake, gets a reported $1.5 million to $2 million a year for naming rights from Rio Tinto, the global mining conglomerate headquarterd in London, but with a substantial presence in the Salt Lake Valley.

Soccer is no stranger to causes. My friend Jose Sanchez in his guest post on April 12, tells how Mexico’s Fundacion Cim*ab (a NGO dedicated to raising awareness about breast cancer) and Federacion Mexicana de Futbol did a 'Pink Futbol' campaign that spanned that league.

Futbol Club Barcelona’s jersey included a UNICEF logo, for which it reportedly paid UNICEF €1.5 million a year. That deal is apparently ending since FC Barcelona has agreed to a €4 million a year deal for jersey sponsorship with the country of Quatar.

But the Lifestrong deal is potentially more valuable than the FC Barcelona-UNICEF deal since it includes all events in the stadium.

I’d some to see the math on the Livestrong Sporting Park deal, since it is so different than anything other naming rights deal.

In the meantime, witness the power of the Livestrong brand when it comes to cause marketing.