ActiveCause

Brennan Jenson and The Chronicle of Philanthropy asks Does Cause Marketing Replace Virtue with “Mindless Buying”?

Cause marketing – the collaboration of for profit and non profits – reached 25 years  this year marked by the anniversary of the American Express/ Statue of Liberty collaboration.   Since that time, cause marketing has had much to celebrate.

As Brennan reports “The Product Red campaign, for example, has raised nearly $60-million for the Global Fund to FightAIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria thanks to consumers buying select “red-branded” items from companies like Gap and Apple that include a donation as part of the purchase price.”

 

Angela M. Eikenberry, assistant professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, casts a jaundiced eye on what she also calls “consumption philanthropy.” Writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, she says such schemes have “hidden costs” that make them “unsuited to create real social change” and that they “replace virtuous action with mindless buying.”

Ms. Eikenberry writes that such philanthropy is based on “individual market transactions” which distract participants from collective solutions to collective problems.

 

The brand and market trends seem to indicate otherwise.  In the current economy – and in better times – consumers are more likely to participate if it becomes part of their lifestyle and weaved into daily actions. At ActiveCause we believe smaller daily organic actions will have a greater impact than a singular deliberate donation.  And most nonprofit executive directors in our network have cited 2 key initiatives – raising awareness and raising money.  

“More broadly,” Ms. Eikenberry continues, “In the absence of people’s active and effortful moral engagement, corporations and their profit-driven needs set the tone for acceptable ways of being philanthropic.

This assumes that the consumers have no decision power with brands.  In our collective years in working with big brand marketers and communicators, we see now more than ever that consumers, their choices and passions are what drives brand decisions.  Key initiatives usually include “local community involvement and activation”.

Although cause marketing is only one component of our strategy, ActiveCause strives to provide tools to smaller nonprofit brands to capitalize on brand and cause marketing trends.  The majority of nonprofits participating in our programs to date are not big brand nonprofits but smaller local causes that have a certain degree of intimacy with the community. 

So from our perspective consumers – and that includes nonprofit consumers – are in the driving seat.  It’s up to all of us to provide information and transparency for those consumers to make smart decisions about where to put their time, energy and money. 

 

Tags: ActiveCause, Business, chronicle of philanthropy, Education, Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria, Key, Product Red, United States

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Blogpost. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.