Cause Marketing that Leads to Real Social Change by Zoetica Co-Founders

Credit: Fence photo by Tim Tolle, from Flickr

The following is a joint post by Kami Watson Huyse, Geoff Livingston and myself.

Social media is in is toddler hood, especially as it applies to cause-based corporate giving campaigns and CSR initiatives. Due to the very public nature of pioneer campaigns, we are able to peer into the box to gleen the strongest approaches towards social media and avoid the weaknesses.

At Zoetica, we have been examining social media-based cause campaigns in depth and would like to offer some thoughts on how corporate social responsibility is evolving in the 21st century.  You can read our in-depth post over at Kami's blog.

A fusion approach that balances marketing with social change is needed. Clearly, more research needs done to study what leads to meaningful change in cause-based campaigns and CSR initiatives. As a part of my research fellowship with the Society for New Communications Research, Kami Huyse and I are working on research about how companies that contribute to online communities fare in this important metric of change, and if this also contributes to the bottom line as well.

Through this, and other research, we hope to further the case for tying cause-related marketing to social change outcomes.

Comments

[Wildwomanfund]

Dear Kami, Geoff and Beth,

The thing about cause marketing is, people are getting wise to it now. They've bought their Livestrong bracelets, their NFL END HUNGER clam chowder, their Yoplait for the Cause. Was the nonprofit able to say, "Thanks to your yogurt purchase, we raised millions for cancer research"?

Well, no, not really, because the actual money funneled through these cause marketing campaigns with products attached was not that large. For example, based on the Komen website, 11,695,936 tops have been sent in, That's 10 cents per top, amounting to $116,959.36 over several years, which Komen won't receive until the campaign is over. Meanwhile Yoplait is making their usual tons of money thanks to their affiliation with this cause. Imagine if each of those donors of the tops of yogurts had sent in even just $1 to the Komen foundation. They would have $11 Million instead of waiting for $116 thousand.

I would like to think that Yoplait led the way to meaningful change for cause marketing, but it's unlikely that Komen even saw the names of those 11 million ten cent donors.

Perhaps if corporations gave even more of their marketing budgets to nonprofits that they had a tie to. For instance, Boeing, the behemoth fighter jet manufacturer, could give substantial money to veterans organizations, paying for PTSD counseling, job training, support, and case management. Perhaps Smithfield Farms could spend some of its millions in advertising to give $1Million to an environmental nonprofit in the area of one of its slaughtering plants. For a start. What do you think?

http://wildwomanfundraising.com