Starting Small Businesses Has Never Been Easier

I believe that it's easier to succeed with small businesses than ever before. There are more opportunities for entrepreneurs to start small businesses today than at any previous time.

Here are some good reasons for why I believe this is true.

A) With the increase in population comes an increase in opportunities for small businesses.

Generally, a sparse population requires a small business owner to provide a wide variety of goods or services to survive. With a denser population, the small businesses can still survive by providing a very narrow range of products or services.

For example, in a smaller population a small business which provides gardening services would probably need to offer many things. Services could include general garden maintenance, planning, tree felling, lawn cutting, vermin control, pond planning and maintenance, hard landscaping etc.

With a bigger population a small business could thrive perfectly well by providing just one of these services, as there are more people who will need it.

B) The costs involved in starting and running small businesses has never been so low in proportion to income.

Technology has replaced many of the things which people used to do, and technology does the job a lot more cheaply.

Today it's possible to reach literally millions of potential customers around the world very cheaply.

For example, only a few decades ago the cost of mailing to thousands of households was prohibitively high. Unless you had a very good product or service which sold well, a small business just wouldn't risk it.

Another example, business premises security used to involve security guards walking around checking that all was well. Now a good security system can be bought for less than 1 week's pay for that security guard, and it will work 24 hrs per day for years, for no pay.

C) Because modern life is so complex today, small businesses and individuals are open to new ideas, products and services like never before.

This creates a huge market for training courses, information provision services, educational aids, specialised products and services, novelties, etc.

With this great diversity come great opportunities to combine different products and technologies, thus making whole new areas of business possible.

For example, you can combine a low-light camera with wireless communications and a bird box. This means a nest may be watched remotely on a television or personal computer screen.

Another example would be to combine voice-chip technology with passive infrared technology to make it sound as though you have a huge dog indoors whenever anyone approaches your house.

Small Business Software Shopping Tips

Choosing the right small business software for your home-based
internet business can be a confusing undertaking to say the
least. It's a good thing most women love to shop because
otherwise it could be really frustrating. The challenge in
choosing small business software is striking a balance between
what you have to have and what you can afford. There are many
small business software packages that have a number of features
included, even though you may not use all of them. Then, there
are some that are sold in individual modules where you buy only
what you need.

The first step in shopping for small business software is to
distinguish between what you need now, what you want, and what

Working Capital: Financial Options For Small Businesses

Introduction

Large companies have always had a number of options that they could depend on to raise capital for their businesses. The have always had access to a number of alternatives such as selling stock, issuing bonds, bank loans and accounts receivable financing among others. Looking at the other side of the coin, smaller companies, those that have between $20,000 and $500,000 of yearly revenues, have always had a challenge trying to find capital to operate their businesses.

The lack of access to capital has prevented many small businesses from growing and capitalizing on the many opportunities that are available to them. It is not uncommon for small companies to reject large deals or opportunities because they do not have the necessary capital to obtain the resources to service the account. However, even when small businesses do take on large contracts, they find that they are never paid immediately upon delivery of services. Most contract terms demand that the supplier provide 30 to 60 days for the customer to pay their invoice - in effect, forcing them to extend them with supplier credit. The lack of adequate capital resources, along with the necessity to offer commercial credit to clients, creates a "perfect storm" that prevents small businesses from growing and that is very difficult to avoid.

A number of these issues could be sidestepped if the company had immediate access to working capital. Working capital could enable the business to add employees and resources to serve new clients and larger contracts. It also enhances a company's ability to extend 30 to 60 day payment terms to their customers.

This paper outlines the most common sources for working capital and provides an evaluation of each source. Each source has also been assigned a score, which summarizes the availability and flexibility of the source.

Scoring System

Each working capital source that has been evaluated has been given a score from 1 to 10. The following features where considered when assigning a score:

Accessibility to small businesses

Requirement complexity (e.g. do they require significant financial reporting?)

Flexibility

Payment terms

A higher score indicates that the source of capital has a positive outlook on a number of these criteria and is available to small businesses. A lower score indicates that a particular source of capital may not be best suited for most small businesses.

Memorial Day Cause Marketing

It’s Memorial Day on Monday in the United States, a Federal holiday that recognizes the men and women who served in the military and died. It’s also fair game for cause marketing around military veterans and causes.

Kroger the giant grocery chain, for instance, is running a year-long campaign on behalf of the USO that has a natural inflection point right now. In-stores the campaign shows as a bunch of splashy well-placed signage, plus notices at every checkout counter asking customers to donate to the USO.

Regular readers know how much I love those big budget cause marketing campaigns. But, then again, Kroger is a $90 billion (sales) company. They can afford splashy.

However, Kroger is the 23 largest company in the Fortune 500. While there’s plenty we can learn from the likes of Kroger, the effort at the left is a little more approachable for most businesses.

Here’s the offer:

Piano Liquidators will donate 10 percent of proceeds from the week of Monday, May 21 through Monday, May 28… Memorial Day… to the Utah Disabled American Veterans.

The Utah Disabled American Veterans is the Utah chapter of the DAV, the Disabled American Veterans, a national veterans’ organization with a 91-year history.

Ten percent of proceeds seemingly means that whatever Piano Liquidators’ profit is for the week of May 21-28, the company will peel of 10 percent of that figure for the Utah DAV. But proceeds is a slippery word. Does Piano Liquidators, for instance, just count the cost of goods sold when figuring proceeds or does it include overhead and other costs?

Some studies have suggested that companies get better results if they just make a donation and then, in the ad, say, “in honor of our brave and fallen Veterans, Piano Liquidators has donated $5,000 in the names of its customers and friends to the Utah DAV.’ 

In general cause marketing plays upon the social psychology concepts of reciprocity and social proof.

Those studies aren't entirely rigorous. But to the degree that they are true, I suspect it's most true at this scale of donations, say, less than $50,000.

Everything You Need to Know About Matching Cause and Sponsor in Cause Marketing

Here’s everything you need to know about matching cause and sponsor in cause marketing campaigns in 225 words or less.

Without resurrecting every post I’ve written on the topic of matching causes with sponsors there are basically eight options.

1. Pick a cause or causes that are a direct fit: for instance, a restaurant or a grocery store sponsoring a food bank.
2. Pick a cause or causes that are an indirect but related fit: McDonald’s sponsorship of the Ronald McDonald House. In this case it’s related because of the way McDonald’s targets kids.
3. Pick a cause or causes that are meaningful to important company stakeholders: Many sponsors of the various breast cancer charities fit this criteria.
4. Pick a cause or causes that have tons of popular appeal: Target’s sponsorship of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is an example.
5. Pick multiple charities with a single theme. JC Penney focuses much of its cause marketing ghving on after-school causes, for instance. Kohl’s cause marketing money goes to children’s health and education.
6. Pick multiple charities without a unifying theme.
7. Pick a charity or charities the executives or rank and file prefers.
8. Pick a charity or charity for no rational reason.

Unconventional Cause Marketing Metrics

The print edition of Fortune Magazine runs a regular feature called ‘My Metric’ wherein business leaders identify informal but telling measures of current economic activity.

In 2011 Michael Glimcher, CEO of Glimcher Realty Trust cited as his metric an increased number of black cars on the streets of New York City as a sign of the U.S. economy’s resurgence. He’s referring to car services which carry both higher prestige and higher costs than a yellow cab. Their cars are usually black and therefore especially visible in a sea of yellow cabs on a New York City street.

That got me thinking, what unconventional metrics evidence the power of certain cause marketing efforts?

One immediately leapt to mind, although only companies that do label campaigns could utilize it.

Most label campaigns have a defined timeframe in which to redeem the labels; March 15 to May 1, say. Campbell’s Labels for Education and Boxtops for Education from General Mills, both of which run year-round, are notable exceptions.

But I’d bet you a handful of Snickers candy bars that people nonetheless still send in some number of labels or try to redeem codes online well outside the campaign’s window. The number of false redemption attempts therefore would serve as a signal of customer loyalty to a label campaign, even in those seasons when it isn’t active.

What are some other unconventional cause marketing metrics? Please comment below.

Why is Family Business Help "Stuck" in Another Century?

I belong to several LinkedIn groups that focus on family business. 

An interesting question was posed on The Family Business Network: “What are the key differences between owner managers of a family business and Corporate Management business thinking? What are the main stumbling points between making the transition? “

Why is Family Business Help Stuck?

How about re-framing this question to add “entrepreneurial thinking”?  Why is it necessary for FB experts to use the dichotomy of family business vs. corporate? By definition a family business starts out as an entrepreneurial venture. Over time the founders lose that entrepreneurial vision since the perceived risks of growing the business and changing increase with their age.

Could this be that many who consult with Family Businesses are not entrepreneurs? 

Corporate mangers are in place to maintain the status quo… not to be visionary. And keeping a business as a family venture means thinking for 30 years out…

So maybe family businesses are best served by people who can bring in the corporate side of risk reduction and status quo AND people who have vision to carry the business forward for generations to come.

I am sure many may disagree and I come to this perspective from personal experience. 

 
All the best!
Dom Celentano
Tips on Running a Small Business

When to End a Cause Marketing Relationship

Normally, when it comes to cause marketing longer relationships are better for sponsor and charity alike. Think Rolling Stones and U2 not one-hit-wonder bands like Fountains of Wayne or Los Lonely Boys. That’s because cause marketing is a form of co-branding and like any branding endeavor it takes years for brands to achieve real customer awareness. Frequently changing partners confuses customers and stakeholders.

For instance, I can all but guarantee you that even after more than 15 years of deep association, in a test of unaided recall few people would be able to identify Subway Sandwiches and the American Heart Association as cause marketing partners.

I’ve written before that lasting corporate-cause relationships are like marriages that require constant upkeep. Or like bank accounts whereto you must make frequent deposits to cover the inevitable withdrawals.

But there are certainly times when it makes sense to end cause marketing relationships.

For causes it’s probably more so a dollars and cents issue than it is even for the sponsor.

In the United States and Canada where charities are granted tax exempt status by the IRS and Canada Revenue Agency and in England and Scotland with the status conferred to Registered Charities, it’s all but immoral for charities to remain involved with a campaign that costs the charity more than it generates.

And any charity that remains in a relationship that is “unprofitable” will be rightly second-guessed by its board, the press, and the public.

But there are other reasons for charities or sponsors to “break up.”

• Scandal. When news emerged about the nature of the deal between the American Medical Association and Sunbeam, members of the AMA demanded that the deal be scotched even though doing so eventually cost the AMA some $16 million in court judgments and legal expenses (Sunbeam successfully sued for breach of contract). The cost of scandal resulting from a bad deal, the AMA's board determined, was greater than the cost of the money.

• Bankruptcy. If you’ve got a sponsor that has declared bankruptcy it’s potentially an opportunity for a nonprofit partner. After all, in bankruptcy cost-cutting is only one-half of the way out. Companies must also sell their way out and cause marketing may have a role to play in such a scenario. But when a sponsor declares bankruptcy the responsible thing for the charity to do is to go to the sponsor and offer to let them out of their contract.

• Doesn’t work. What if you try every sort of permutation and still the campaign or relationship doesn’t work? Chances are it’s a bad fit (see below) but even if it just doesn’t work, you may need to end the deal.

• Bad match. Sometimes customers respond in ways you can’t predict and what seemed like a good fit at one time really isn’t. For instance, it may seem like good deal linking a BBQ grill company with a safety charity. But if customers don’t get the connection, or the cause doesn’t, by itself, have enough affinity to overcome any disconnect, you may have a bad match.

• Colliding cultures. The sponsor might be too bleeding edge and the charity too staid. Or vice versa. I’ve seen both. Regardless, if the cultures of sponsors and charity don’t share at least some common ground, then the relationship may be doomed.

Ethiopia's 'Sesame Street' Needs Your Help Saving Orphans

Bruktawit Tigabu is a 30-year-old teacher in Ethiopia who despaired over the number of orphan children in her country. More than 5 million of the country’s 42 million children are orphans; mainly due to AIDS and abandonment. When you consider also that at the same time 60 percent of Ethiopian children grow up illiterate you can understand Tigabu’s despair. As in much of the world, these tragedies fall hardest on girls.

In response she and her husband Shane Etzenhouser, an American software engineer, co-founded the for-profit social enterprise Whiz Kids Workshop, a television production company that uses puppets and animation to help lead Ethiopian orphans through tough topics like AIDS, malaria, and the child sex-slave trade in Africa. All while also teaching kids the challenging Amharic alphabet.

Back in November 2011, after reading the horrifying book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, I committed to help the plight of girls and women in the developing world. This post is part of that continuing commitment.

Whiz Kids Workshop is best known for its flagship show Tsehai Loves Learning, which is targeted at 3-6 year-olds and reaches about 2.5 million kids nationwide on Ethiopian television. Some people have characterized Tsehai Loves Learning as Ethiopia's Sesame Street. Tsehai is a sock puppet giraffe.

The Whiz Kids Workshop also produces documentaries and training. Whiz Kids has a staff of nine, but Tigabu does much of the work herself, including testing scripts and storyboards on actual kids. Smart!

Whiz Kids recently launched a second show targeted at older children called Little Investigators, which tackles topics like deforestation and child-brides.

Whiz Kids and Tigabu have garnered a host of international awards and recognition, even when going against much better-funded groups. She won the Rolex Young Laureate Award, for instance, the Japan Prize and grants from UNESCO. I saw her mentioned in Fast Company’s 2012 list of the '100 Most Creative People in Business.'

It’s a pity that more of this renown hasn’t translated into more money. Whiz Kids annual budget is a scant $100,000. If they had more they could certainly do more.

Please considering donating at the Whiz Kids website. Whiz Kids is a for-profit social enterprise, so your donation won’t be tax deductible. But… as I think is evident… money goes a long way in Ethiopia.

'SPAT' Can Keep Your Cause Marketing Activation Intact

It’s probably fair to say that more cause marketing campaigns are activated by social media and public relations than by advertising.

You my readers are a sophisticated audience so there’s no need to detail the differences between advertising, public relations and social media. Suffice it to say that while PR has greater credibility, it’s challenging to get the frequency using PR alone that you can get with advertising. Advertising offers frequency and repeatability, but it can be expensive and it’s less credible than PR. Social media can have both frequency and credibility; Kony 2012, for instance. But I think we can agree that Kony is the rarest sort of exception.

So how do you activate your cause marketing story using social media and PR?

One answer is that the story you tell the media has a boy and a puppy like the story that appeared in People magazine last year about then 7-year-old Evan Moss. Young Evan wrote a picture book called “My Seizure Dog” about an epilepsy-detecting dog that he wished his family could afford. In the book Evan imagined he and his seizure dog in various settings, including going to outer space together.

The book… sold at a local café and on Amazon… generated more than $41,000 and now Evan and three other children have their epilepsy-detecting dogs.

(The only other thing Evan could have done to get better publicity is to marry a Kardashian!)

But maybe your cause marketing story doesn’t involve Kardashians or  really cute seven-year-old authors with service puppies. How do you do activate your cause marketing using PR and social media?

Remember the acronym SPAT.

Why spat?

Well a spat is a fabric or leather covering worn over your shoes and pants legs to protect them from mud and dirt and such. That's a spat on the left. 

And while the word and the item are rather antique… high school and college band color guards are about the only place you’ll see them in common use in the United States these days… using SPAT will help to convey you your cause marketing idea intact while minimizing the chances that it gets too muddied by the press or the social media.

Summarizable. Even if the dictionary in my word processor doesn’t believe it, summarizable is the adjective form of the word summarize. In this context it means that your basic cause marketing campaign has to be capable of being expressed in a concise form; two sentences or less.

Photographable. What we’re talking about here is visual 'memes,' biologist Richard Dawkins’ term for ideas, symbols or practices that are carried culturally rather than genetically. Japanese Macaques that learned to wash their food from one another is an example of memes in the animal kingdom. Not all memes require a picture. But washing food wouldn’t have gone very far among Macaques if all they could do was chatter about it. Even for literate humans pictures are much less abstract than words. It’s a whole lot easier pass on a meme with a photo or image than without. Think of the Aflac duck, Coke’s contour bottle, or breast cancer’s pink ribbon.

Arresting. The best cause marketing stops you in your tracks. TOMS Shoes buy one, give one approach (BOGO), for instance or young Evan Moss.

Transcendent. The word transcendent carries a lot of bulk around with it suggesting something outside human capacity or even divine. But the first meaning of transcendent is something superior or beyond ordinary limits. And who wants to promote cause marketing that fails to transcend the ordinary?

You don’t have to have all the elements of SPAT to effectively activate your cause marketing via PR or social media. But when it comes to activating your cause marketing via SPAT, more really is more.

What to Do With Leftover Cause-Branded Merchandise

Not all cause-branded merchandise sells. So what do you do with the leftover inventory?

The Tuesday Morning store in my neighborhood almost always has pink-ribboned kitchen implements from Kitchen Aid that once benefited Susan G. Komen for the Cure but are now selling at a fraction of the original retail price. Tuesday Morning is a deep discount chain of about 850 stores nationwide in the U.S.

Frankly, as a cause marketer it’s slightly embarrassing. Never mind that there’s a whole host of possible reasons… many which have nothing to do the cause… why the merchandise would be remaindered to discounters like Tuesday Morning. Still, much of the point of cause-branded merchandise is that the appeal of the cause helps move the product.

Back in March 2011 the big UK retailer and veteran cause marketer Marks & Spencer offered up men’s underwear designed by six different British sportsmen and benefiting The Prostate Cancer Charity. The original price of the underwear was £15 for a two-pack. Later, on the Marks & Spencer website, the underwear (in limited sizes) was discounted down to £5 after a brief stopover at £10.

A press report said that the promotion generated £60,000 for the charity. Not bad.

But it’s gotta be a shade embarrassing for the four players whose designs have to be discounted… rugby player Jason Leonard, ‘the Fun Bus,’ pretty boy footballer Jamie Redknapp (who's married to pop princess Louise), bad boy snooker player Jimmy White and the classy footballer Les Ferdinand.

In a case like this where there’s a celebrity component, here’s a thought; hold back some of the promotion for later. Promotions… cause marketing and otherwise… tend to be front-loaded and rightfully so. You have to develop the momentum to see you through the promotion and the best way to do that is to go as big as you can right from the get-go.

But the celebrity aspect of this promotion affords Marks & Spencer and The Prostate Cancer Charity an extra arrow in the promotional quiver. Imagine offering up some bragging right to the celebrity whose underwear line sells out first. A press release. A billboard campaign. Facebook bragging rights. Whatever. Then get creative with any of the celebrities whose competitive pride won’t let them finish sixth.

Imagine, for instance, if right before Marks & Spencer was prepared to start discounting, the ‘Fun Bus’ Jason Leonard, started autographing the boxes of his line of Kelly green-colored underwear. Maybe he signs 200 boxes. I’ve watched American baseball players sign 200 baseballs plus another 200 baseball cards in one sitting. So signing 200 underwear boxes wouldn’t be terribly onerous. But instead of offering them first-come, first-served they go randomly to anybody who has paid the full £15.

Or maybe Jamie Redknapp, who along with his wife Louise represent a kind of beer-budget version of David and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham, could be part of some kind sweepstakes for a personal appearance. Again, this element of the promotion would only be triggered when Marks & Spencer’s usual metrics told them to start discounting.

This is a different way of running a retail promotion and more work than what is usually required. And, frankly, most retailers would reject it out of hand because it’s so far from the norm. Retail promotions just do not work this way. When merchandise begins to get stale, you discount.

But I’m a cause marketer not a merchandiser. And I’d love test this out.

Cause Marketing Cooperative

There’s dozens of ways to activate cause marketing. But the most common way… and frequently the least expensive… is with public relations.

One story that you must master when 'efforting' women’s magazines in particular is a pretty standard transactional cause marketing pitch; buy our thing and a portion of the proceeds benefits this fine cause. Get the details right and you’ll probably score some coverage.

But this is a classic case of good news/bad news.

The good news is you’ve got a pretty good chance at getting coverage in women’s magazines like Ladies Home Journal, O, the Oprah Magazine, Allure, Elle, Vogue, Lucky, Shape, Town and Country, and Self. The Alden Keene Cause Marketing Database has cause marketing stories from all of these women’s magazines and more.

The bad news, you’ll almost certainly have to share the coverage with other cause marketing efforts which may be thematically similar to yours. Magazine editors publish this kind of combined story with great regularity.

What do you do?

•    Do you hold out for your own story?
•    Do you pitch lesser titles?
•    Do you skip magazines altogether and target powerful mommy blogs, or even ‘women’s’ TV?

You first job is to try and make your cause marketing story stand out in a way that others can’t or don’t. Barring that, my suggestion is that you own your cause marketing story for what it is (and isn’t). If you can’t imagine a way to truly distinguish your cause marketing narrative, then I suggest as a fallback position that you approach would-be ‘competitors’ and enlist their cooperation in pitching your collective stories together.

In most cases the big PR agencies would balk at this idea. The only exception I can think of is if they’re representing a whole catalog of cause marketing campaigns in house. In such a case they might consider packaging the cause marketing campaigns they represent together, much the way sports agents will package multiple clients together in certain trades.

Here’s why a package deal might be a good idea for multiple cause marketing campaigns. Suppose that seven separate but similar cause marketing campaigns decided to pitch their stories together. Your PR budget is approximately 1/7th of what your six peers have to spend. By combining you can call upon seven times the resources you have by yourself.

This approach probably requires that the charities and/or the sponsors contact willing peers and then jointly hire a single agency capable of pulling off a seven-way pitch.

Granted there’s real risks involved. What happens if the magazine’s editors choose stories from only five of the seven partners?

But I think these risks are outweighed by the potential rewards of being able to bring many more resources to bear than one cause marketing campaign could by itself.

The Legalities of Cause Marketing

In the United States the practice of cause marketing is subject to governmental regulations, mainly at the state and local level.

If your organization is a nonprofit just beginning a cause marketing relationship, you’d be well served by seeking out expert legal advice before you sign any deals.

On that count, today’s post on the legalities of cause marketing comes courtesy of a guest poster, Maria E. Recalde, Shareholder and Chair of the Corporate Department, Sheehan Phinney Bass + Green PA, a law firm founded in 1937 with four offices in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

My thanks to Maria for allowing me to post this article that originally appeared in Sheehan Phinney's newsletter.

A cause marketing venture (also known as a "charitable sales promotion" or "commercial co-venture") is generally defined as a sales campaign in which part of the consumer's purchase of a product or service from a business - in cause marketing parlance "a commercial co-venturer" - will benefit a charitable organization (generally defined as a tax-exempt organization described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code). Cause marketing ventures are not only subject to general laws and regulations applicable to advertising, but they are also highly regulated by state laws.

Currently, a majority of states have some form of commercial co-venturer ("CCV") laws in effect. In general, CCV laws are triggered where the commercial co-venturer sells a product or service and represents to consumers that part of its purchase or use will benefit a charitable organization. Some CCV laws, however, apply where the commercial co-venturer promises to support a cause (e.g., "Alzheimer's research") without naming a specific charitable organization. Other states, such as Massachusetts, do not even expressly require an actual sale for their CCV laws to apply, but rather only that a commercial co-venturer use the name of a charity in advertising a product or service. See, e.g., Mass. G.L. c. 68, §18. Irrespective of the variations found in CCV laws, however, CCV laws are designed to protect consumers and charitable organizations against fraudulent or misleading advertising, and to ensure that the designated charitable organization actually receives its share of the proceeds that the commercial co-venturer commits to donating.

CCV laws cover a wide range of activities and can subject violators to significant fines and even criminal penalties. By way of example, and in no way exhaustive:

(a) A number of states, including New Hampshire, require the commercial co-venturer and charitable organization to execute a written contract (and the inclusion of certain terms in the contract) and to file an executed copy with the state. The charitable organization, not the commercial co-venturer, frequently must file the contract.

(b) Some states require registration and the posting of a bond (the amount varies by state).

(c) Some states require commercial co-venturers to file annual activity reports detailing the total dollar amounts raised from public contributions, disbursed to the charitable organization and retained by the commercial co-venturer.

(d) A number of states, including Massachusetts and New Hampshire, require the commercial co-venturer to make written disclosures in advertising. Some states require ads to disclose the expected portion of the sales price, percentage of gross proceeds, or other consideration the charity is to receive. Many states require this disclosure on a per-unit basis — often either as a dollar amount or as a percentage of the value of the goods or services purchased or used (e.g., "$1.00 per 6oz. juice box" or "5% of the purchase price").

Cause marketing campaigns can be structured in many different ways including online promotions, in-store promotions, direct mail coupon programs or solicitations made on product packaging. For example, a business might advertise that it will donate a certain portion of the proceeds of a purchase to a charitable organization, that it will donate "X" dollars to a charitable organization for every "Y" items purchased, or that for every item purchased the business will make a donation to a charitable organization.

The bottom line is that, when running a cause marketing campaign, businesses should evaluate the extent to which the promotion will implicate CCV laws and take steps to ensure compliance. When running a nationwide cause marketing campaign, a commercial co-venturer must ensure compliance with the CCV laws of each state.

Compliance with CCV laws is, of course, in addition to all general advertising and state consumer protection laws that apply with equal force in a cause marketing campaign to prevent false or misleading advertising. Common pitfalls include failure to disclose donation amount, suggesting a connection with a cause when none really exists, and failing to disclose applicable caps or minimum donations related to the campaign. Failure to follow applicable laws and regulations can lead to fines, penalties and bad publicity for both the commercial co-venturer and the charitable organization that it is supporting.

BEST PRACTICES IN CAUSE MARKETING
(1) Enter into a written agreement with the charitable organization, and include all provisions required by applicable state and federal laws.

(2) Comply with state requirements of registration and bonding to the extent applicable.

(3) When using a per-unit standard in the marketing campaign, state the amount of donation per unit and establish and state a maximum donation amount.

(4) Consider alternatives to a per-unit donation standard in an effort to avoid CCV laws while still showing support for a particular charitable organization or cause, such as donations per Facebook "like" - "we will donate $1 per like for our Facebook page, up to $5000" - or donations in a specified amount. Beware of states like Massachusetts, however, where CCV laws still may apply.

(5) Develop a standard set of disclosures that must appear in all advertising and avoid any variation, keeping in mind that some states may impose specific disclosure requirements. With regard to Massachusetts and New Hampshire and generally applicable advertising laws, for example, each advertisement used in connection with a cause marketing campaign in which a business is acting as a commercial co-venturer should include the following information: (i) name, address and phone number of the charitable organization;

(ii) a description of the charitable purpose of the promotion; (iii) the promotion period - the dates the promotion will run; (iv) the amount of each purchase that will benefit the charitable organization - the dollar amount or percent per unit; (v) any limit on the commercial co-venturer's matching contribution (e.g., any maximum or guaranteed minimum contribution — e.g., up to a maximum of $50,000); and (vi) any other material terms/conditions of the promotion.

(6) Ensure that consumers can clearly see all of the material terms on point-of-purchase materials and packaging before they purchase the product. For example, any limit on the amount that will be donated to the charitable organization should not appear inside the packaging.

(7) Ensure that advertisements do not mislead, deceive or confuse the public about the effect of the consumer's purchase on charitable contributions or otherwise.

(8) Avoid increasing the price of the product or service that is the subject of the marketing campaign during the campaign period.

(9) Ensure that the charitable organization's share of the proceeds are promptly paid to it and in the amount committed.

(10) Set up verifiable accounting and inventory tracking systems to maintain accurate, up-to-date records of applicable sales. Retain a copy of the final accounting.

(11) Avoid advertisements that represent that the charitable organization has endorsed the advertised product or service. If the charitable organization has not made an endorsement, the advertisement should clearly disclose this fact.

(12) Have the marketing department (or whatever operational unit is running the cause marketing campaign) obtain internal clearance for the particular promotion and consult counsel for legal advice as needed.

This article is intended to serve as a summary of the issues outlined herein. While it may include some general guidance, it is not intended as, nor is it a substitute for, legal advice. Your receipt of Good Company or any of its individual articles does not create an attorney-client relationship between you and Sheehan Phinney Bass + Green or the Sheehan Phinney Capitol Group. The opinions expressed in Good Company are those of the authors of the specific articles.

The Cause Marketing Proposal

The production of a cause marketing proposal is a very big topic. Rather than tackle it in one ginormous 5,000-word post, I’m going to tackle it piece by piece over the next month or so.

Today’s piece of it; "preparing for every contingency in your cause marketing proposal."

Let’s say hypothetically that you’ve made your best cause marketing pitch to a would-be sponsor. It’s smart, strategically appropriate, and well activated across new media and old. You’re certain your prospect’s customers will get it and respond.

But then a week goes by without hearing back from the prospect. So on day eight you call, but don’t press very hard. The prospect apologizes all over herself.

“Everybody back at corporate loves the proposal,” she says. “Trouble is, unbeknownst to the marketing staff, the CEO had promised a campaign to another cause. The marketing department doesn’t think they can or should do both this year.” So sorry. Maybe next time.

While you could play off of their guilt and press for a donation from the company foundation, instead you decide to offer a counter proposal. How about if all the company does is for a straight ahead donation from customers when they’re at the cash register or when they’re at the shopping cart online?

It’s not terribly complicated. The campaign would go for 2-4 weeks. The activation will take place mostly in stores and perhaps in the company’s advertising.

I counsel every charity in the cause marketing space be prepared to offer something else when the first answer from a prospective sponsor is no.

I’m not suggestion anything that smacks of desperation. Nobody likes a sad sack. However, you do need to spend real intellectual time and energy game-planning what the prospect’s possible objections are to your proposal and how you might counter each of them.

Do that right and you won’t sound desperate. You’ll sound like someone with good sense enough to plan ahead.

Pre-planning for no’s and your likely responses does other positive things. It helps you refine your pitch and strengthen your sales skills. It teaches you to think of cause marketing sponsorship as a negotiation, not just a proposal or pitch meeting.

More than anything else, it gets your foot in the door with the prospect. You may or may not ever be able to get the rest of your body in the door with said prospect. But be respectful and play things smart and you might just make a long-term connection that can pay off in ways you couldn’t anticipate.

Here's a for instance: A friend in Atlanta has worked in corporate giving offices for no less than three Fortune 500 companies. If you made nice with her when she was at MCI, you probably stood a better shot at getting money out of GE's community affairs office or Home Depot Foundation, when she moved to those companies.

If not, you may have burned not just one but three bridges.

Cause Marketing to Men

Last Summer results starting coming out from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study and among the headlines was that women are generally more responsive to cause marketing than men. Big surprise, right?

So are men AWOL from cause marketing? I asked the Center for Social Impact Communication (CSIC) at Georgetown University, which published ‘Dynamics,’ to parse out men’s responses on key issues.

Cause marketing targeted to men is a topic of some interest to cause marketers. Cause marketing is a form of sponsorship. Its biggest rival for sponsorship dollars comes from sports, which as a whole is about seven times larger than cause marketing. Men constitute the usual target market for sports. Men participate in sponsorship in a big way when it comes to sports. But cause marketers are still learning what attracts men.

I’ll list the question the CSIC asked first, followed by the top 5 answers from men, along with the best-finishing ‘cause marketing’ answer in bold. The answers are intriguing and in some cases suggest new entres into the psyches of men when it comes to cause marketing.

The CSIC study asked, “How men first get involved with a cause?”

•    Talking to others about it 39%
•    Donating money 38%
•    Learning more about the issue and its impact 35%
•    Signing a petition for the cause 25%
•    Donating personal items (clothes, points, hair, etc) 23%
•    Buying products/services from companies who support the cause 14%

The CSIC study demonstrates that men are as willing to practice checkbook philanthropy as they are to support a cause by doing.

This is confirmed specifically in the CSIC study’s second question: “How men most often get involved with causes.”

•    Donating money 41%
•    Talking to others about it 34%
•    Learning more about the issue and its impact 20%
•    Signing a petition for the cause 19%
•    Donating personal items (clothes, points, hair, etc.) 18%
•    Buying products/services from companies who support the cause 10%

Finally, “How Men Are Most Likely to Display their Support of Causes:”

•    Wear a cause ribbon pin 18%
•    Wear clothing or other attire displaying the cause logo 16%
•    Wear the color of the cause on a special day 15%
•    Put a cause bumper sticker on your car 15%
•    Use a reusable bag showing the cause logo 14%
•    Purchase specially designed products to support the cause 14%

In this last one the cause marketing approach is the sixth most common answer. In the prior questions there were other answers in between the fifth response and the highest-finishing ‘cause marketing’ response.

Because of the low percentage of the responses and the tightness of the grouping, there’s two self-evident  conclusions. Either men don’t often display their support of causes or the responses provided by the study didn’t capture the way men are likely to display their support. I suspect the former.

If cause marketers are serious about targeting men, they need a better understanding of what men are about when it comes to supporting causes.

Thanks to the data from the Dynamics of Cause Engagement study we have a much better idea than before.

Simple E-tail Cause Marketing

There’s a lot of fundraising going on at retail these days, oftentimes the easy to execute paper icon campaigns. But what’s an e-tailer do that’s painless for them to put together and quickly understand and appreciated by the customer?

A lot is at stake for cause marketers. E-tail in the United States alone amounts to $327 billion, according to Forrester, with the rest of the world coming in at more than twice that. Worldwide e-tail represents no less than a $770 billion business.

Newton Running, a Boulder, Colorado company that sells its own make of high-end running shoes in electric colors to marathoners and Ironman racers, takes a straightforward approach to its cause marketing.

As you check out, Newton asks you to add $1 to one or more of three causes; Athletes for a Cure, a prostate cancer charity, Trickle Up, a microenterprise charity, and One World Running, which provides shoes to the needy in Africa. See at left.

Between the three causes, Newton spends a grand total of 37 words, plus a logo for each. 

I know webmasters are loathe to do anything that might gum up their checkouts or increase checkout cart abandonment, but I’d suggest that they tell a little more. Like the direct mail folks say, ‘tell more, sell more.’

For instance a clickable video could explain how the founders came to support these three smallish causes and where their commitment comes from. They might speak about the good work they’ve seen done by them. And, if they’re also personal donors, they would certainly want to challenge customers to join them in their support.

This being the web a split A-B test to see what performs better for both the causes and the Newton would be simple to undertake. And if it... or some variation... doesn’t work, no big deal. They simply default back to the current approach.

Finally, Newton also sells through retailers. I couldn’t find any evidence that they do any cause marketing with their retail partners, but those kinds of campaigns are a good way for Newton to stand out from its competitors.

Hair of the Dog Cause Marketing

Texting or updating your Facebook status, posting to Twitter or even talking on the phones while driving hs at least as dangerous as drunk driving, according to research from Professor David Lee Strayer at University of Utah. So how do you get kids to disconnect while on behind the wheel?


An annual public awareness campaign from the National Organizations for Youth Safety is trying a hair of the dog remedy. Called Million Messages in May, the celebrity-studded campaign asks that teens send out a million driving safety messages during the month of May.


The press release says that just the celebrity portion of the campaign has already generated 5 million messages via social networks. So mission accomplished, right?


Well, kinda.

Across the globe, traffic accidents are the number one killer of teens. And social networking is a notable contributor to the carnage. Who among us hasn’t either texted while driving or turned to the next car over and seen that driver texting? A number of state and local laws specifically outlaw texting while driving.

So using social networks...that is, the hair of the dog... to get the word out is like using the packaging on food products to promote hunger relief.

Trouble is, while texting or Tweeting an update are many times more distracting to drivers than just talking on a mobile device, Professor Strayer’s research clearly shows that just talking… whether hands-free or not… is as dangerous as drunk driving.

The message from NOYS has to be put your phone away while driving.

Money Can't Buy Love. But It Can Buy Happiness!

Can money buy happiness? As a matter of fact, it can. But not in the way you might think.

Professor Michael Norton at the Harvard Business School did a series of fun experiments that found that if you spend money right, it can indeed lead to happiness. To come right to the point to be happy spending money, you can’t spend it on yourself.

But let’s back up and explain how Norton and his colleagues Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Atkin at the University of British Columbia figured this out.

They asked students at the University of British Columbia if they wanted to be in a study. If they said yes they tested their baseline happiness and gave them an envelope with cash in it. Some were instructed to spend the money on themselves by 5pm that day. Others got instructions to spend it on others by 5pm that day. Some got $5, some got $20.

They called the students that night and found that they had spent the money the way they were asked. They also asked what the students had spent the money on and again asked them about their state of happiness.

What did they spend it on? The ‘personal’ spenders spent it on earrings, makeup, and coffee.

“If you give undergraduates $5 it looks like coffee to them,” Norton says, “and they run over to Starbucks and spend it as fast as they can.”

 That held true also for the ‘pro-social’ spenders who bought gifts for friends, gave money to the homeless and bought friends coffee at Starbucks!

Norton and colleagues found that people who spent their money on others got happier and people who spent the money on themselves were unchanged; neither happier nor unhappier. The amount of money also had no bearing on the happiness quotient of those being studied.

Norton and colleagues then replicated the experiment in Uganda. After all, maybe these findings were valid only for relatively affluent Canadian college students.

Although how the money was spent by each group varied by country, that didn’t matter so much to the results as that you spent it one someone else rather than yourself. The results from Canada, in other words, proved to be pretty much universal.

They then piggy-backed on Gallup Polls taking place across the globe, asking people if they had given recently to a cause and, if so, how happy they were as a result. Almost everywhere around the world giving and happiness were positively correlated. In fact, Gallup found only one country were there was no correlation between charitable giving and happiness; the Central African Republic.

Norton also replicated the Canadian study with drug salespeople in Belgium. Some were asked to spend the money on themselves, some on their teammembers. This time they found that the ‘prosocial’ teams sold more stuff than the ‘personal’ spenders. The return on the 15 Euros was 78 Euros. Astonishing!

Then is a sublime twist, they repeated the experiment with dodgeball teams. I kid you not. The teams that spent money on themselves maintained their existing winning percentages, but the teams that spent it on their teammates became dominant in their leagues.

I suspect that part of the reason that cause marketing works is because it can make people happy. Cause marketers therefore, would be smart to personalize how their cause is benefited by a campaign.

Don’t make it about buying a much-needed new van for the food bank. Make it about buying a van so you can improve services to specific people.

Give people a compelling reason to participate in your cause marketing campaign and when they do you might make them happier!

Global Cause Marketing

Edelman’s 2012 Global GoodPurpose study is out and it finds a world increasingly responsive to cause marketing and expectant of the virtues that come from the practice.

GoodPurpose surveyed public opinion of 8,000 people in 16 countries: Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, & the United States.

Across the 16 countries 76 percent believe that it’s OK for brands to support good causes and make a profit at the same time, an increase of 33 percent since 2008, when the first GoodPurpose survey asked the same question.

Likewise, across the globe 53 percent said when quality and price are equal social purpose is the most important factor in selecting a brand, up 26 percent since 2008.

Seventy-two percent are more likely a brand that supports a good cause compared to those that don’t, 71 percent say they’re more likely to promote such a brand and 73 percent are more likely to switch to a brand that supports a cause. Those percentages are up 39 percent, 34 percent and 9 percent respectively over the corresponding figures in 2008.

I’m always interested in the numbers of people who will pay a premium for brands that support a cause and 44 percent say they’ll do that.

In the summary I saw, Edelman didn’t break out many of the results by country. That’s probably reserved for paying customers.

But Edelman did reveal that it is the Rapid Growth Economies (RGE) of Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and United Arab Emirates that are the most responsive to brands that cause market. Edelman refers to the RGEs as ‘bull markets’ when it comes to brands that support causes.

For instance, 83 percent of people in the purpose bull market countries say they have more trust in brands that are ethically responsible versus 66 percent in all the rest of the countries, or what Edelman terms as purpose ‘bear markets.’ Edelman doesn’t venture an opinion on why this is so other than to suggest that growth in purpose is mirroring economic growth.

Writes Carol Cone in the introduction, “Purpose has assuredly claimed its spot as the 5th P in marketing and, increasingly, as a business imperative.” When Carol ran her eponymous agency, that was true basically only of the Commonwealth countries… UK. Canada and Australia… and the United States. What an amazing transition that it can now be said to be true for the rest of the globe.

Impress Bill and Melinda Gates With Your Idea, Win $1 Million

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a message that they want to get out; “foreign aid really works.” And the foundation, in conjunction with the Cannes Lions Festival is funding a million-dollar contest to see who can best get that message out.

The submission is pretty straightforward and is limited to just two pages. The entry deadline is 15 May 2012.

What might the judges base their decision on? The rules list the following as a start:

• “New ways to collect and share first-person stories from those impacted by aid in the developing world;
• “Data collection and visualization that demonstrates the “how” and “what” of aid, e.g. where funding goes and how it impacts people and communities; money spent on development relative to other areas; measurable progress against the Millennium Development Goals. (The foundation is particularly interested in MDGs 1,4,5,and 6.);
• “Creative distribution mechanisms to deliver stories, data, and information to key audiences;
• “Concepts that spark active engagement and collaborative problem-solving, e.g. games, crowdsourcing, and other projects that move the field from one-way communications towards authentic engagement;
• “Revolutionary ways to humanize the challenge and the solutions and to connect communities receiving aid to those who provide it.”

As many as 10 ten semifinalists will get $100,000 to develop their ideas. They will be flown to Seattle to confab with the “Cannes Chimera,” a panel of super-creatives in a learning environment. The winner will get a $1 million to execute their idea.

Judging will be based primarily on two things: How well it lines up with the topic and how innovative or creative it is. Approaches like lobbying public officials are specifically disallowed.

Contests of this sort have a fantastic history.

A way for ships to get a fix on their longitude while at sea came about thanks to a contest sponsored by the British admiralty. Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic in part to claim the $25,000 Orteig Prize. The splendid British aircraft the ‘Spitfire’ was inspired by a contest. The Ansari X Prize opened up near-earth space flight to non governmental entities. Qualcomm is sponsoring a $10 million ‘tricorder’ prize to get to a version of the Star Trek medical tricorder. There’s a half-dozen more such contests organized under the aegis of the X Prize.

Such contests create a multiplier effect, inspiring many people and organizations to spend their time and treasure on winning the prize.

Good luck! And if you win, remember who told you about it.

A Plan For Succession - Short Term and Not Strategic

The New York Times The Beginnings of a Succession Plan  got me thinking about “succession” which is a term that gets tossed about by many,  without deeper thought as to what it means.

 

What is Succession?

Succession can be short term… meaning insuring short term business viability due to sudden and unforeseen circumstances. Although what many people view as unpredictable is really what family business transition specialists call predictable transitions and clearly one of those is death of the founder. 

However for many family businesses, succession means passing the baton to the next generation. The definition of generation gets “muddy” but the consensus is 20 to 25 years. So when dealing with succession,  core strategic issues come into play which unfortunately many do not want to deal with.

Shouldn't a major goal for succession be the determination of the viability of the business for the next generation… out 20 plus years? 

 

Family Businesses are Not Perpetually Viable

We now have what I call structural ambiguity present in the economy and the business environment. Assumptions that were prudent in planning and forecast in the past probably are now mostly irrelevant. And most of those in the helping professions, accountants, financial planners and attorneys get stuck in the tools of legal and financial succession. 

Far too many family members and their advisers assume “perpetual business viability” and the next generation simply cannot assume business viability for another 20 years. So just because the business may have been family owned for several generations past, I say… so what? 

 

The Overlap of Family and Business

The above is most difficult to do since the Family-Business overlap is so strong and the “family” component is highly emotionally charged. I hope to see more discussion on succession that addresses the strategic viability of family owned enterprises for this is the responsible thing to do for that next generation so they are not saddled with businesses where the window of opportunity may be closing or has already closed.

Is the window of opportunity closing at your family business?

You may enjoy reading The Most Important Family Business Goals .

All the best!

Dom Celentano

New Jersey Family Business Advisor

DIY Charity Walk

The first two things I can remember doing for causes as a kid was to sell Scout-A-Rama tickets and walk in the March of Dimes’ WalkAmerica, now called March for Babies. (Back then, I kid you not, the walk was 20 miles!) Plenty of causes have borrowed liberally from the March of Dimes walk events. March of Dimes, in turn, owes a debt of gratitude to the German Volksmarsch. Now a group called KindWalk enables you to create a DIY… ‘do it yourself’… walk for the cause of your choice.

Here’s how KindWalk works. You sign up for an individual membership at the website for $18 a year. You get a pedometer plus a raft of other benefits. They also have a second membership level for $51 that includes a pedometer with a USB port so you can download walk data directly to your account. Membership benefits include:

• Interactive Fitness and Nutrition Planner
• Weekly Recipes and Grocery Lists
• Monthly Wellness Newsletters
• Interactive Weight Tracker
• Smoking Cessation Resources
• Health Risk Assessments
• Wellness Calculators
• Vitals Tracking
• Health Coaching
• Rewards Program

There’s also corporate and group membership options that include a branded website. No word on what corporate or group membership options cost per capita.

The website has a pledge section and an internal social media network, among other things.

Once you’re a member you can join a team or create a team. That is, you could create your own ‘walk’ to benefit the cause of your choice.

Kindwalk has a lot of features, but if you visit the site I think you’ll agree that the marketing and branding is still as we say on the Continent, naissant. I also wonder why they don’t engage in some kind of cause marketing to drive membership. As in, “sign up now and we’ll be the first donor to your walk!” Also, Kindwalk doesn’t seem to offer any help on route planning, city permit issues or sponsorship.

Still, this is a very interesting option for charities or even sponsors that want something close to a turnkey solution for a cause walk.

(The photo at the left comes from a German Volksmarsch association).

Family Business Goals - the MOST Important to Consider

Note: Reposted in response to the NY Times Article Making a Plan for Succession.

Consider the question "Are you a family business OR a business family"?

I was attending a seminar recently on Family Business issues and goal setting, resolutions and succession were major topics. The goals discussed were those that would be apparent to others… family member engagement, focusing on the big picture, etc.

Here is the most Important Goal to Consider

The next generation is best served by setting a more important goal that has generational time frame impacts. So the question - Shouldn't a major goal of the next generation be to determine the viability of the business for the next generation? We now have what I call structural ambiguity present in the economy and the business environment. Assumptions that were prudent in planning and forecast in the past probably are now irrelevant.

Are You Assuming Perpetual Business Viability?

The younger generation simply cannot assume business viability for another 20 years, just because the business may have been family owned for several generations past.This is most difficult to do since the Family-Business overlap is so strong and the “family” component is highly emotionally charged.

As the moderators said and as I always say, sometimes the sale of the business is the best decision for the next generation. A business in the Maturity stage of a business’s cycle or in the early stage of declination may not be the best asset for the family.

Consider Becoming a Business Family

A Family Business is construct, a “container” so to speak that provides value in many aspects to the family. However if the family thinks of themselves as a “business family” or what is called an enterprise family, it is not narrowly defining a business sector where it can invest it’s Human, Social and Economic capital.

Do you like to work together? Does your family have a great mix of skill sets? Are you great at articulating a vision and strategy? If yes… then you can apply all of that valuable family capital to new enterprises that will be born now and last for several generations into the future.

For a deeper dive into this subject, you may want to read The Route to Finding the best Family Business Adviser.

Also you can read my response to a NY Times blog post on Succession Planning.

All the best!

Dom Celentano

NJ Family Business

Million-Dollar Nonprofit Writing

Not quite 10 years ago I wrote 25 words that helped generate more than $32 million for the nonprofit I worked for at the time.

The nonprofit… a children’s charity… was trying to develop a long-term income stream by buying (using nonprofit bonds) three assisted living facilities that would spin off extra cash flow. It was the most complicated deal I’ve ever been involved with.

Children’s charities and assisted living facilities don’t exactly line up and so we needed compelling and rational language that explained why the deal made sense.

I can’t find the exact key sentence, but it made reference to helping people at their most vulnerable stages of life; near birth and near death.

The bond issuance required an unbiased opinion letter from an unaffiliated lawyer who was an expert in nonprofit bonding. He identified my 25 words… among the thousands around them… as the underpinning for his positive opinion. Each of those 25 words turned out to be worth more than $1 million apiece.

The right words really can be invaluable to a cause. Used to be you could pawn off on the marketing-communications staff all the marketing, PR, and internal communications responsibilities.But with the rise of social media, which remains overwhelmingly tilted towards the word, everyone is now a writer.

A pity that everyone isn’t a skilled writer.

To brush up on your writing skills here are seven tips from an article published recently in the online version of the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Seek feedback.
Professional writers and writing students have both formal and informal groups to review their work while it’s in process. Such groups all but demand that you have thick skin. However, chances are ‘workshopping’ your writing with others will help you improve faster than you could on your own.

Write down helpful tips.
Keep a journal of ideas and record them as they come to you. This will go a long way in helping you avoid the dreaded ‘writer’s block.’

Write to an audience of one.
This*is an old writer’s trick that is more effective than you might guess. It works because most of us are talkers first and writers second. If committing your idea to the written word seems impossible, hold in your mind a single person and explain it to him or her. Then write it the way you’ve explained it.

Avoid complicated language.
When I was a kid I had a friend named Roy who was a terrific companion. But at age 9, 10, and 11, he was a little dim. When my writing gets too highfalutin or jargony, I try to strip out all the excess baggage such that someone like Roy could easily understand me. (What are the chances that Roy is now a rocket scientist or judge?)

Don’t tell readers what they already know.
Remember how much time the third Indiana Jones movie spends explaining what happened in the first two movies? The correct answer is almost no time is spent on backstory in the Indiana Jones movies. Instead, Indy’s adventures start from the first frame. Your writing should start fast, too.

Break it up.
Big blocks of text online are like death on burnt toast. Nobody wants any part of it. Even in print we use subheads, bullet points, pull quotes, graphics, pictures and the like to keep the text from turning into one big undifferentiated mess. Do at least that much online as well then add some meaningful links.

Keep it brief.
The Chronicle’s article says to be brief. But you should strive for more than brevity. You should strive to be concise. Remember what the Strunk and White wrote in their estimable book, Elements of Style? “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

High Caliber Cause Marketing

In cities prone to gun violence, gun buyback programs can effectively take guns off the street. The challenge is in funding the cost of the buybacks. Now cause marketing is lending a helping hand to the gun buyback program in Newark, New Jersey, a city of 275,000 about 10 miles west of Manhattan.

Here’s how it works:

Jewelry for a Cause, headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut buys shredded handguns from the city of Newark. It then melts the steel, aluminum and other metal alloys that makeup handguns and transforms them into a jewelry collection called Caliber. Pieces from the collection… expected to include rings, necklaces and bracelets… go on sale this summer at JewelryforaCause.net and are priced from $150 to $5,000.

Jewelry for a Cause is the brainstorm of corporate-lawyer-turned-jeweler Jessica Mindich, who has donated 20 percent of proceeds from several of her lines to causes including the Alzheimer’s Association, American Red Cross, and DoSomething.org.

Newark has long had a reputation as one of America’s most violent cities. Although violent crimes have been trending downward in the city for more than 10 years, it’s still about than 15 percent more violent than the United States as a whole and almost 200 percent more violent than the rest of New Jersey as a whole.

In November 2009 Newark offered a no-questions-asked gun buyback that yielded 280 guns at an average price of around $200. The $50,000 budgeted then was gone in three days, according to press reports.

During the 2010 buyback … the last time it took place… people received $350 per gun. Jewelry for a Cause took the metal from 250 guns for Caliber. That suggests it paid around $87,500 for the raw material. Assuming each gun averages around 28 ounces, Jewelry for a Cause bought about 7,000 ounces of metal for about $12.50 an ounce. No steel or aluminum on the planet costs that much per ounce.

For the sake of comparison, yesterday’s spot gold price was $1665 an ounce. Silver was $31 an ounce.

But, of course, Jewelry for a Cause wasn’t looking for just any steel or aluminum for its Caliber line. The back story of the Newark metal will help Mindich sell Caliber.

In short, cause marketing comes to the rescue again!

Cause Marketing or Corporate Philanthropy Program? It’s Not a Yes or No Question.

If your company is an active corporate cause marketer, should it also be an active corporate donor?

The short answer is yes.

The question was prompted by a press release I saw recently announcing a new cause marketing effort from Godiva, the high-end chocolatier owned by the Turkish company Yildiz Holding, and headlined ‘Godiva Launches Philanthropy Program.’ 

Now Godiva almost certainly didn’t write the headline for the release I saw, but a quick reading made it clear that what Godiva was announcing was more a cause marketing than a corporate philanthropy effort.

Godiva’s program recognizes women around the world who “contribute to their communities and inspire others to do the same.” The first honoree is Lauren Bush Lauren and the recipient of funds raised will be the charity she co-founded, FEED Projects, a global anti-hunger charity.

A new honoree will be chosen in 2013.

In time for Mother’s Day in the United States, Sunday May, 13, 2012, you can buy FEED tote bags… made by women in Liberia… online and at Godiva stores for $25. The tote bags will yield 10 meals for schoolchildren in the cacao-producing countries of Africa. Several of Godiva’s boxes are also packaged with the totes to also yield a donation to FEED.

It’s a nice campaign that’s been well thought-through. So, is Godiva done here?

The short answer is not if that’s all they do.  

Companies that do cause marketing should also be active donors to nonprofits, whether through a corporate foundation or by just writing checks.

Here’s why. Cause marketing is like one of those 7-layer chocolate cakes. It’s big and impressive and almost everyone wants a taste. But even though it is made with wholesome ingredients like eggs, milk, flour and maybe dark chocolate, and even though you could certainly eat a slice of it as a meal, it’s not really a meal replacement for very many charities.

For that matter, corporate philanthropy in general isn’t a ‘meal replacement’ for charities either. In the United States less than 10 percent of all charitable giving comes from corporations.

That said, cause marketing still isn’t a substitute for corporate philanthropy, it’s an addition. Cause marketing can raise tons of money (and awareness). More, even, than a corporate foundation might give in a year. But a well-funded corporate foundation might mail checks to hundreds of charities a year.

Prudent and generous companies ought to offer both corporate philanthropy and cause marketing.

An Actionable Marketing Plan for Nonprofits in 8 Sentences

If your cause is small, marketing it can be tricky. But marketing legend Jay Conrad Levinson has some ideas for how you can create an easy-to-use marketing plan for even the thinnest budgets

Jay Conrad Levinson… who gave wings to the term ‘guerrilla marketing’… has written or co-written so many books on the topic of marketing that I couldn’t get an accurate count of his full bibliography. But it’s something north of 50 books. His deep experience is your gain; the two or three of his books that I’ve read are chockablock full of usable information and ideas for marketers.

For charity clients with tiny budgets I use a modified version of one of Levinson’s tried and true techniques; the ‘seven sentence marketing plan.’ You heard that right, a marketing plan in just 7 sentences!

Here they are, plus an eighth that is my own addition.

1. The first sentence tells your purpose in marketing. The purpose has to be expressed in ways that are SMART: Sensible, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound.
2. The second sentence lays out the competitive advantage you’ll emphasize. Even if you have multiple competitive advantages you can really only emphasize one.
3. The third sentence explains who your target audience is. Even if you sell soap, your target market is not the whole world.
4. The fourth sentence explains what marketing weapons you’ll use. Limit the list based on stuff you can afford, you can understand and you can use properly.
5. The fifth sentence tells your niche in the market place. This is positioning against competitors. For instance, I’m a marketer, but my niche is subset of marketing called cause marketing.
6. The sixth sentence tells your identity. Don’t misrepresent your identity. Customers will see through it and cease working with you.
7. The seventh sentence expresses your marketing budget as a percentage of projected gross sales.
8. My eighth sentence explains how you will position your business to maximize word of mouth and social media. Word of mouth has always been the most credible form of marketing. And free social media…, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, et al… is a perfect way to enable word of mouth.

There your are. An actionable marketing plan for even the smallest cause or nonprofit in just 8 sentences.

CauseMarketing.biz Word Cloud

Quick post today from the left coast.

I’ve been having some fun with word clouds and the one at the left is from this very blog.

Like many such things, this word cloud hides as much as elucidates.

It’s plain, for instance, that the word cloud generator only grabs posts from the top-most page of the blog.

Still, it has its own beauty.

Cause Marketing Your Klout

An article in the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine makes it clear that I have another thing to feel inadequate about; my Klout score, which is a very modest 31. (Maybe it's time to take that Facebook thing seriously. Hmm.) For camparison's sake, Justin Bieber’s Klout score is a perfect 100. Robert Scoble’s is 85.

But now I can use my inadequacy for good. Klout for Good is a promotion that asks you to support Charity: Water, the World Wildlife Fund, and the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women. Klout also promoted a Christmastime tweet drive that generated gifts for underprivileged kids.

The Go Red and World Wildlife Fun efforts are primarily awareness-raisers, although they’ll certainly take your money. But the Charity: Water promotion is a fundraiser and a clever one at that.

Charity: Water asks you to ‘donate your birthday;’ that is to ask your social networks to donate to the cause in your name on your birthday.

As of this writing, 12,889 people had pledged their birthdays. Charity: Water promises to use all the money raised for water projects. When it’s all said and done, they’ll send you a photo and GPS coordinates of the water project your birthday funded (or, helped fund).

It wasn’t clear to me how the donations were processed or if Klout offers any more than just promotional support, but I dig it. The marketing was based around the idea that you and I probably already have plenty of stuff and don’t need more, positioning that I think can be very effective.

Your cause could almost certainly offer something very similar, even if the picture and GPS coordinates don’t make sense for what you do.

Your Non-Donating Neighbors Think You Need to Give More to Good Causes

A new study finds that people who don’t donate money to causes realize the heightened need and have found a solution: you need to give more, especially if you’re 'rich.'

The study, from Grey Matter Research, is a companion piece to a study released by Grey in Feb 2012 that found that charity donors say they’d keep giving even if Congress took away tax deductibility, they just weren’t sure you would.

In this study, instead of asking why they weren’t active charitable donors, Grey Matter asked people who hadn’t made any donations to nonprofits in prior 12 months about their perceptions of nonprofits and giving.

What they found is that 83 percent of American who don’t give would give if they had it. 

But the shocker was this: people who earned $100,000 or more were just as likely as those earning $20,000 or less to wish they had enough to donate.

More from Grey Matter’s study here.

Some of this miserliness could be the fault of fundraisers who emphasize larger donation amounts when prospecting. After all, it’s just as much work to ask for $100 as it is to ask for $10,000.

But part this rebounds onto the culture itself that has forgotten (or never learned) the parable of the widow’s mite. Part of the price of American civilization is to donate to worthy causes, even when you can’t afford much. If 10 million American families who hadn’t previously donated gave just $50 a year that would mean an extra half-billion dollars in charitable donations to worthy causes.

That 'widow's mite' would become the widow's might.

Earth Day Needs to Slim Down its List of Must-Dos to be Really Successful

Yesterday, Sunday April 22 was the 42st Earth Day in the United States, but if you saw less promotional activity wrapped aroun the day it may be because Earth Day has 'jumped the shark."

Albe Zakes, global VP of media retalions for TerraCycle, told Amy Westervelt at BusinessGreen.com that "With everyone and their mother doing some kind of quasi-green messaging around Earth Day, you risk a truly environmentally responsible promotion, product or service getting lumped into consumer's green fatigue and being consider green washing,"

Far be it for me to say I told you so, but I told you so last year on Earth Day 2011.

"As it’s presently constituted is that there’s too many emphases for people to keep in their heads. Earth Day is markedly more sophisticated in 2011 than it was in 1970. Trouble is, we've still got the same human brains we've always had."

"The Earth Day Network website lists 15 campaigns of emphasis: School Greenings Across the USA; Building the Climate Movement; A Billion Acts of Green®; The Green Generation™; Green Economy; Earth Day-India; The Canopy Project; Athletes for the Earth; Arts for the Earth; No Child Left Inside; National Civic Education Project; Healthy Schools Act; Green Schools; The Road to Rio™; Women and the Green Economy."

"I was so turned off by the number that I didn’t even bother checking what they were about."

I found a Kellogg’s Earthday Sweepstakes website, highlighted in an FSI (free-standing insert) that had a rotating banner which listed no less than 20 things we could do as individuals to improve the environment.

"My Earth Day friends," I wrote, "this is too much. I know the earth’s environment is a system and that a lot of improvements need to be made and made quickly."

"But just as the human mind has place for two colas (in America it’s Coke and Pepsi)…two smart phone operating systems; Apple and Android…two late night talk show hosts; Letterman and Leno and two beer companies; Budweiser and Miller… it has room for no more than two environmental goals at a time."

"And don’t come back to me with the exceptions."

"Environmentalists really don’t want to occupy the amount of space reserved in the human mind for Pabst, Dr. Pepper, and the Symbian OS."

"This is made worse by the complicated calculus of environmentalism. Trees for instance, are good because the soak up greenhouse gasses. Until they die, decompose and release their carbon and then they’re bad. Compact fluorescent lights are good because they produce good light with less power and (usually) last longer than filament light bulbs. Until they fail at which point they have to be carefully disposed of because they contain trace amounts of mercury, which is a toxic heavy metal."

Even locally sourced food is no slam dunk. If, for instance, the tomatoes you're eating are locally-sourced, but grown in a hothouse, it probably takes less carbon to grow and ship them from some warm weather climate than it takes to heat a local hothouse!

"Here’s my plea to the Earth Day organization and environmentalists everywhere; pick two things and keep hitting them until those two things are better. Then move to the next two things on the list. America is better off environmentally than it was on that first Earth Day 41 (now 42) years ago. And it can get better still."

But it's gotta be messaged smarter.

And smarter messaging means fewer concurrent goals.