'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.

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.