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.

Culture Change for Learning in College - Critical Thinking Lacking

I found this article Culture Change For Learning that has a laser focus on issues in higher education today specifically addressing the lack of at the undergraduate level:

• Critical Thinking
• Problem Solving
• Writing Skills

The authors are spot on but need to figure out how to get their point across in a more congent fashion. Writing "by the pound" doesn't cut it with me. Long form journalism on the Internet just does not attract readers in the same way that books or magazines do.

They pose 4 areas of systemic re-thinking... however how about this? Just create standards that EVERY course must address and tieback back to:

• Critical Thinking
• Problem Solving
• Writing Skills

I do this with each and every class I teach. It is not difficult to add into the curriculum AND is does require more work and diligence to insure students leave at the end of the semester with a slightly better understanding of the above.

If every class adhered to this, cumulatively, students would leave college better prepared for the over used phrases "the new normal"!




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

Wealth or Waste? Rethinking the Value of a Business Major

Wealth or Waste? Rethinking the Value of a Business Major

This WSJ article takes a look at the undergraduate degree in business and it's ability to prepare students for the business world. The core of the article is graduates need Critical Thinking and Problem Solving skills first in order to apply business learnings. The criticism is Marketing, Accounting and Financial students are learning rote skills without the ability to be able to apply these skills in the real world with a big picture view point.

The authors viewpoint is undergraduates lack:  

• Problem Solving
• Critical Thinking 
• Creativity

To me this sounds like what we teach in Entrepreneurship, problem solving, critical thinking and creativity. A number of Universities have ICE programs, Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship... essentially developing an umbrella curriculum that incorporates, science, technology and business.

My classes in Small Business Management at both the undergraduate and graduate level have a strong emphasis on Ideation, Problem Recognition and Critical Thinking. This occurs early in the semester before we delve into developing the business plan and proforma projections. Developing a set of financials that looks great needs the underpinning of a great idea that solves a real market problem.

Read the article and view the video... it gives me ideas for future curriculum development in my Entrepreneurship Classes!



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