This is my featured post in Mediapost: Causes. Subscribe to its weekly newsletter and learn from some of the best thought leaders in the cause world! 

One of the more successful digital tactics for cause marketing are Facebook “Likes” promotions. When you “Like” the nonprofit’s page or the company’s page – or both, depending on the promotion – the company makes an in-kind or cash donation to the nonprofit.

A good recent example of Facebook cause marketing was the Kraft Fight Hunger Facebook page for Feeding America during November. “Liking” the page triggered one meal donation, and more donations were earned as fans answered football and food-related trivia questions through the 2 Minute Trivia Drill Game.

The program generated a whopping 25 million meals for Feeding American food banks across the country.

An added benefit of Facebook Like promotions is the boost in fan count on both partners’ pages as friends and family ask others to “like” the page.

This coming weekend, home products giant IKEA is betting that Facebook cause marketing will fill its stores.

On January 14th, IKEA is hosting a Bring Your Own Friends (BYOF) event with deals and giveaways and is rewarding Facebook fans that invite their friends with a donation to Save the Children.

There are two things we can learn from this program.

First, it takes Facebook cause marketing to a new level by using Facebook “likes” to help drive what really matters to a retailer: in-store foot traffic. This may become standard practice for brands. As I reported back in September, changes to Facebook are making “likes” and fans second to engagement.

Nonprofits and cause marketers should expect brands to experiment with new metrics for Facebook cause marketing, including testing its potential for driving traffic to stores.

Second, this promotion puts the cause marketing at just the right place – after the self-serving main offer of savings and giveaways, which is what really motivates shoppers. The donation to Save the Children is a secondary benefit, and the charity gets the money whether the invitee shows up or not.

IKEA’s shopping event for charity is better than most retailers’ programs.

Despite all the talk of their success, I’m not a fan of the “shopping days” Macy’s, Bloomingdales and other stores market to charities. They’re pyramid schemes with the stores and a few big charities at the top making all the money.

The IKEA Facebook Like promotion is sound marketing, great digital cause marketing and good philanthropy.

I like it.

Enter the Pinterest “Causes I Love Contest” and you could win a $250 gift card! 

One site I’m committed to spending more time on in the new year is the virtual pinboard Pinterest. It’s easy to use, powerfully visual, populated with cause marketing-loving women and growing like crazy. 4,000 percent in six months!

That's growth!

The heavy presence of women 25-44 on Pinterest is what distinguishes it from other new social media platforms, which are generally populated by men 18-24. Here’s a site that already has the audience everyone wants: women and moms who make most of the household buying decisions.

I think most people jump on Pinterest for the same reason I did. They want a place to easily organize images and display them all in one place. No more looking at pictures one at a time. No more digging through tabs to find the album you’re looking for. It’s all right there.

When I needed a place where I could display pictures of people who had snapped a picture of themselves with my book Cause Marketing for Dummies Pinterest gave me an easy place to pin, organize and see them all at once. 

I also created a board for cause marketing promotions I liked. I plan to break out this board further with boards for point-of-sale, purchase-triggered, action triggered, message promotion, etc. to make even more sense of the images I’m pinning.

My cause marketing board on Pinterest.

Most of the pinning happening right now on Pinterest is around art, home decor, style and other things women love. Brands are also getting involved. USA Today recently joined. Mashable is on Pinterest, as is Peapod Delivers.

Lands’ End just finished a Pinterest contest that encouraged users to create their own holiday pinboard around their favorite Canvas items. Creators of stylish pin boards received gift certificates for $250.

Pinterest users are also pinning about brands, such as Starbucks.

Are you doubting that Pinterest will break the list of top social networking sites and will soon be forgotten? Think again. It’s already broken the top ten list right behind Yelp with nearly 32 million visitors in November.

But is your nonprofit right for Pinterest? Ask yourself these questions.

Do you have an interesting or compelling story to tell with images? Every cause does, but believing you do is half the battle. Pinterest is a natural site for museums, historical sites and cultural institutions. Maybe your nonprofit helps needy kids and you have a pinboard called “happy moments” to capture all the great things you’re doing for and with kids.

Is your cause considered hip, trendy, or do you just want to be? Pinterest users are looking for cool, trendy and hip things. I think organizations such as Goodwill and Shelter Scotland could pin fashionable used clothes available in their stores. Conservation International could post images of the beautiful and endangered frogs they are trying to save.

Are you engaged on other social media platforms? Despite my enthusiasm for Pinterest, it’s not a standalone platform. I wouldn’t start with it unless I already had an active blog, Facebook and Twitter. It’s win-win. You’ll gain traffic from visitors to Pinterest but your social media platforms can drive traffic to it as well.

Are you looking to reap the rewards of local SEO? I’ve talked about the benefits of your nonprofit being easily found online. Pinterest can give your SEO a big boost because the links posted there – every image links to a real web page – are being posted by REAL PEOPLE and not marketers and spammers trying to game the system. This won’t last forever so get busy now!

If you answered yes to most of these questions, keep the following in mind as you get started on Pinterest:

Be useful. Pinterest users are looking for ideas and inspiration. Speak to that muse. Just don’t pin a picture of the new lobby area of your school. Highlight an architectural detail that makes it interesting, unique and inspiring.

Create categories that reflect what users are looking for. If you run the Paul Revere House and want to post pictures of the furnishings and silver work call it “Early American Decor” or “Silver Teapots.”

Give the job to someone who has an eye for aesthetics. Not everyone has a good eye for pictures – that includes me! Just look at some of the images on Pinterest. They’re beautiful. Yours should be too.

Learn from these 15 Pinterest superusers. I found this article on the habits of 15 superusers very helpful on what Pinterest is for and not and how to use it wisely. This post made me laugh as there is only one guy on the list. Yep, Pinterest is for the ladies.

Don’t just pin, repin. Pinterest is just like any other social network. It’s not all about you. Search through Pinterest and find images that you can repin on your boards. As with most social platforms, this is where the magic happens!

Let your supporters pin for you. Add “pin it” buttons to your blog or web site so your visitors and supporters can create their own pin boards that highlight your cause.

Fundraising ideas for Pinterest are already popping up. Check out this one from the folks at Help Attack!

~~~

Enter the Pinterest “Causes I Love Contest” and you could win a $250 gift card! 

Let me show you how easy it is to use Pinterest for causes.

Here’s an easy way to give Pinterest a try, and you might even win a $250 Donorschoose.org gift card.

1. Sign up for Pinterest and create a board called “Causes I love Contest.”
2. Pin images to the board of anything you love about your favorite cause(s). Need some inspiration? Check out the “Causes I love” boards on Pinterest. You can pin anything. Just make sure it looks awesome!
3. At noon on Thursday, January 12th, I’ll judge the best board based on content, originality and downright stylishness and emotional appeal and reward the winner with a $250 Donorschoose.org gift card to use for a school project in your area that’s sure to make a classroom smile.

This is a guest post from Ephraim Gopin, a Social Media and Fundraising consultant. Check out his blog here or connect on Twitter.

In the business world, many companies engage in Competitive Intelligence (CI), which means they use numerous tools to find out everything they can about competitors. A growing trend in CI research is following social media outlets. The same thing should be happening when your nonprofit identifies a company to discuss a potential partnership.

A nonprofit isn’t the only one who needs to be careful with whom they partner. Reputation is everything. Just because your NPO runs great programs doesn’t mean you can generate the awareness and favorability businesses covet. Not all cause partnerships are equal. A lot of companies pursue cause partnerships in October because of the proven bump in favorability National Breast Cancer Awareness month gives brands.

On the flip side, nonprofits shouldn’t rush to partner with just any business. The partnership has to be mutually beneficial, and not all business have the resources to drive customer support for your nonprofit.

My advice is for both partners is to do a social media background check before forming a partnership. Each should check out the other’s presence on social media outlets and determine:

• How well they engage with their customers/supporters (e.g. Twitter, Facebook)
• Can each partner drive the other’s agenda, providing ROI for both sides (e.g. blog)
• How large is their following online. There’s a big difference between having a large Facebook following and a large, engaged following fan base.
• Are staff and C-suite executives active on LinkedIn – a very important social media outlet for cause marketing
• LinkedIn can also reveal whether each side has the marketing team and prowess to generate positive PR in the community.

It’s not always about finding the biggest corporation with the deepest pockets. Nor is it just about finding a local nonprofit that does good work in the community. This is a partnership, and both sides should know what the other has to offer before partnering.

The good news is that this information is easily accessible with a little research on social media. But you’ll never find it if you don’t look for it.

LinkedIn is rising to the top of the social media heap when it comes to finding people, partners or causes.  LinkedIn is basically a huge database with all sorts of information about people and organizations as well as who they know and what they care about.

By searching using LinkedIn’s advanced search feature both the business and nonprofit sides of a cause-marketing partnership can virtually meet the leaders and staff of potential partners, see what their interests are, check out the groups they belong to, and see what they’ve written about lately, all indications of whether their interests match yours.

Facebook made some interesting changes last week that may help evolve how nonprofits and businesses use Facebook “likes” for cause marketing. The change should shakeup how organizations weigh the meaning/worth of a Facebook “like.”

All of us have seen Facebook cause marketing programs before. If you “like” the nonprofit’s (or sometimes the businesses’) page the company makes a donation to the nonprofit. I call it action-triggered cause marketing because it requires no purchase from the user, just an action.

I came across one of these Facebook like promotions just last week. For September 19th only Weight Watchers agreed to donate a dollar to Share Our Strength, an anti-hunger organization, for every Facebook like on the company’s or nonprofit’s page.

Facebook “like” cause marketing promotions are simple transactional programs that raise nonprofits a few bucks and increase their Facebook following, which might help turn fans into supporters.

Moving forward Facebook visitors won’t have to “like” a page to comment and post on it. This makes a “like” a less valuable piece of property because visitors won’t have to opt-in to participate. As John Haydon points out, just as comments grew and engagement changed when visitors to blogs didn’t have to register to comment, Facebook’s changes will lower the bar of entry for participation.

But what will be the impact on cause marketing promotions involving Facebook likes?

We may see fewer promotions as the like button will no longer be the holy grail of Facebook pages – engagement will. This is a good thing. John has always stressed to me that ending up on someone’s news feed is more difficult than just having them “like” your page.

Facebook has a sophisticated tool called Edgerank that decides if your update is included in someone else’s newsfeed. Interest, frequency and engagement determine your fate.

Here’s what I’ll be recommending to my clients for cause marketing promotions involving Facebook likes.

1. Businesses should reward nonprofits for a variety of activities, not just liking a page. They could reward comments, posting of pictures and video, actions take over multiple days or weeks. John believes Facebook will be rolling out a whole sleuth of tools to make measuring engagement easier for nonprofits and businesses.
2. The changes to Facebook pages punctuates the need for businesses and nonprofits to get serious about creating first-class content. Managing a Facebook page is like running an interactive magazine that has deadlines, a real need for engaging and varied content and a drive battle every day to rise above the noise and competition. Managing a Facebook page will now be more more like turning out People Magazine than getting votes on American Idol.

Nonprofits and businesses shouldn’t stop doing Facebook like programs. We need good online cause marketing options. The key is to look beyond the first kiss and encourage and reward frequent and deeper interaction. Facebook likes are a good start between nonprofits and users. But it’s what happens next that proves whether it’s like or love.

Everyone wants to be more successful selling their cause marketing programs. But how? Try social media. It’s been a key part of my success, and I bet social media can help you too. I’ll talk about how to use social media to sell cause marketing in another post. But let’s first confirm why you should use social media for cause marketing in the first place.

Social media makes the selling process easier. Selling is hard enough, that’s why you need a non-sales sales tool. In steps social media. Social media isn’t good for selling, and, not surprisingly, people don’t like to be pitched on social media. But they do want to be engaged. Engagement is key as persuasion occurs through identification. People buy you from you when they can identify with your attitudes, values, interests, background, beliefs, etc. You don’t use social media for selling. You use it to engage stakeholders and to build identification.

Social media keeps you top of mind. Samuel Johnson famously said that people need to be reminded more than they need to be informed. Social media tools–if you’re active on them (no, they don’t work if you just sign up for them and then abandon them)–have an ever-present quality to them. Social media puts you just a tweet, a wall post or a comment away from connecting with your prospect.

Social media allows you to be useful. Don’t just be good. Be good for something. I always try to be useful to my followers. I share case studies, introduce them to people, congratulate them when they succeed and encourage them when they fail. Social media is a great way to be and stay helpful.

Social media allows you to be your wonderful self. Social media is conversational, interesting and fun. It lets your personality shine through! You can use acronyms, contractions, abbreviations. You can speculate, debate and be light-hearted. In short, it encourages you to communicate authentically and sincerely. People don’t buy from causes or companies, they buy from people. Social media allows you to be the man or woman that people want to buy from.

Social media keeps it real. Long letters nobody reads. Emails with attachments. Stupid, wasteful meetings. Meet and greets with lots of gladhhanding. You won’t find these on social media. But if you find even a semblance of them, you can move on quickly. Social media in general is direct, brief, informal, highly engaging and solution-oriented. Isn’t that just the kind of communication you want with a prospect?

Last week’s Cause Marketing Forum Conference had many benefits. But one of the best for me is that I have a bunch of new cause marketing tweeps to follow on Twitter. Here are six you’re going to love.

Nancy Lublin. Nancy’s the CEO of DoSomething.org. Nancy gave a compelling speech on the good, bad and ugly of cause marketing. I like Nancy. I didn’t agree with everything she said about cause marketing, but I appreciate her strong opinions on the field and how cause marketing can be done better.

Lindsay Avner. Lindsay is the Founder & Executive Director of Bright Pink, a national breast/ovarian cancer non-profit organization for young women. She has some great corporate partners and plans to join forces with many, many more.

3BL Media. 3BL is a CSR and cause marketing newswire. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t following 3BL! There are many good reasons to follow them, but one of the best is their daily CSR Minute, which delivers the latest information on our field.

Jeff Weness. Jeff heads corporate development at a Minnesota Children’s Hospital. I had the pleasure of listening to Jeff tell his story at the Hospital Corporate Development Summit I co-led. He’s had some great accomplishments, including a $17 million corporate gift.

Seema Rani Bhende. Seema is a senior director in the social innovation practice at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. She has an energetic, well-informed interest in CSR and cause marketing. If her tweets are as good as her conversation, I’m going to learn a lot.

For Momentum. The FM team at the CMF conference was fantastic. Interesting, fun and total cause marketing wonks. Just my kind of people. Here are their names: ^MR^MES^KS^TD^AN^KG^KN^VT. I agree with you: that doesn’t make any sense to me either. But these are the initials they put at the end of tweets so followers know who’s tweeting. I think I teased them enough that they’ll soon have individual handles. Until they do, you can enjoy their tweets from the company handle.

Hyatt Chicago. They didn’t attend CMF. They don’t do cause marketing. But when it comes to social media this is a for-profit that nonprofits can learn from. Follow and learn. Thanks to Jen Kedinger from the Hyatt for all the “twention” she gave me last week.

There’s social media, and social networking and then there’s social gaming. And they’re all growing like crazy and can be used for cause marketing. While my focus is generally on how social media and cause marketing can work together, social gaming is an uncharted area for me. Fortunately, I now have a good guide.

Tony Morain of Direct Relief International (DRI) is a graduate of the Six Figure Cause Marketing program Joanna MacDonald and I teach. But he’s taught me a few things on how social gaming can be used for cause marketing. Tony must be a serious Farmville player because he’s planting seeds in fertile ground.

eMarketer estimates that 68 million American will be playing social games (online games on which you play with people across the street or around the world) by 2012.

A leader in social gaming is Zynga, which is behind the two games you either love or hate on Facebook: Farmville and Mafia Wars. Combined, these two games have 70 million players. That’s a lot of people and a lot of potential donors.

That’s what Zynga thought when they approached Direct Relief after the Japan Earthquake. Zynga hoped to replicate what they accomplished after the Haiti Earthquake. Players donated by buying Haiti white corn in FarmVille, a Haitian drum in Mafia Wars, a Haiti fish in FishVille, and a chip package in Zynga Poker. The fundraiser produced a bumper crop, raising $1.5 million.

While a violent video game such as Mafia Wars is an unlikely partner for a humanitarian aid organization, Direct Relief decided to move forward, and never looked back.

Zynga created a virtual fan that players of the game could buy for $5, 100% of which went to Direct Relief. In a matter of weeks, they raised $600,000 for Japan. Moreover, they raised more online awareness for DRI than ever before, leading Direct Relief to be listed in Charity Navigator’s Top Ten Most Viewed Charities. This is impressive considering Direct Relief spends a fraction of what the other nonprofits on the list spend on marketing and advertising.

Mafia Wars is partnering with Direct Relief again to help people in the south recover from the devastating tornadoes that swept through the south earlier this month.

What a fantastic cause marketing program. A few key takeaways for cause marketers.

With cause marketing, the money is in the customer, not in the company. Zynga could have just written a check to charity after the Japan Earthquake, but it most likely wouldn’t have been for $600,000. Zynga was smart and responsible to leverage its business model and give players a chance to support Japan.

Brand matters. Zynga sought out a well-known and respected organization to partner with. Good cause brands are like magnets that attract money, partnerships and opportunity. If you want to succeed in cause marketing, build your cause brand and companies will follow.

Cause marketing can work after disasters. I made this point right after the earthquake. Zynga didn’t try to profit from the disaster or their players’ support for victims. They simply chose an easy and powerful way to involve their business and customers in disaster relief.

Even killers have a soft spot. You’ll want to steer clear of offline businesses involving the Mafia, but working with non-traditional partners that want to make a difference is okay. While Komen had its misstep with Kentucky Fried Chicken, fast food chains make excellent partners for cause marketing.

But like Mafia Wars you need to proceed with caution and care, or you reputation will get whacked.

Side by side is the front and back of the Bruins' pinup. The QR code is on the back.

Back in January I talked about Quora and how it could be a resource to consumers who had questions about a cause marketing promotions, and an asset to causes that wanted to be more transparent about their programs.

This month my fellow Dummies writer Joanna MacDonald and I are putting Quora to the test with a QR code on our latest pinup that will be sold at iParty and Fuddruckers locations throughout New England.

Trying scanning this QR code with the QR reader on your smartphone.

When consumers scan the code with their smartphones (try it yourself!) it takes them to this Quora page where they can comment or ask a question about the campaign.

We plan to monitor the page regularly so we can answer questions quickly and accurately.

The QR code links to this Quora page where consumers can get timely answers to their questions about the program.

To answer common questions about the program we also included a link to a  frequently asked questions page on Quora.

We used the FAQ page on Quora to answer common questions about the program.

How many people will scan the QR code? I’m not sure. A small percentage of shoppers most likely. But they may represent regular givers that want more information about the programs they’re supporting at the register.

Will Quora be confusing to shoppers that don’t know what the heck it is? That’s a good question. Probably like 99% of the people out there have no clue what Quora is. But if they view Quora as it tool that gets them the answers they want it might not matter what the name is.

What else can we do to make our Quora page more effective? I think we could include a link to a video on the SPARK Center, the program at my hospital that will benefit from the program.

To make our program easier to find, I also added some tags to the top of the entry, although I really don’t expect people to find our page by searching Quora. Most will go to the page directly from the QR code.

Or they may find the page via search engines.

A Google search on “spark center bmc” lists our Quora page as sixth on search results. Queries on other words and terms associated with the promotion also showed up in the top results.  If consumers are searching online for information on this cause marketing program, they’ll most likely find it via their favorite search engine thanks to Quora.

That’s another good reason to give Quora a try.

I’m interested to hear what you think about this experiment!

“Fate leads those who are willing. The unwilling it drags.” – Seneca

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about mobile and cause marketing lately. Mobile seemed to be a big buzz word at SXSW earlier this month and I know firsthand there was lots of talk about it at Nonprofit Technology Conference the following week. Over the two days I was there, the only sessions I attended were on mobile. A lot of chatter about mobile devices!

Frank Barry got me thinking about mobile again this morning (Frank does that from time to time) with this infographic. Mobile is pervasive, inescapable and dominant. Like a tidal wave heading for our shores, there’s no running or hiding from it. As cause marketers we have to man and woman up!

But many of us are still playing in the sand oblivious to the impending wall of smartphones, apps, check-ins, texts, and mobile web sites bearing down on us.

As cause marketers we need to resize our thinking for mobile and prepare for the future.

1.  The change begins with you. I’m surprised by the number of aspiring cause marketers I meet that don’t even own smartphones, or choose to use them like regular cell phones. You can’t lead your organization’s mobile efforts if you’ve never looked at a web site or replied to an email on your smartphone. While people nod their heads when I say mobile is important, they strangely don’t believe that this revolution applies to them.

2.  Get busy. Think about everything you do as an organization and what needs be optimized for mobile. A little daunting, huh? Take a breath. A speaker at NTC talked about this (beginning at slide 19) and identified four key areas to rethink for mobile: text campaigns, mobile web sites, applications and email campaigns. This is great place to start.

3.  Start using Foursquare. Sure there are other location-based services to try: SCVNGR, Facebook Places, Gowalla, Loopt, etc. But Foursquare is the Facebook of location. So if you’re pressed for time or interest, stick with Foursquare. Check-in to locations, click on “Specials,” add pictures, leave tips (something I’ve only begun to do thanks to a push [more like a shove!] from Estrella Rosenberg.) Focus on becoming more comfortable with how location marketing works for businesses and where cause marketing is playing and could play a key role.

4.  Get social NOW! “Wait a minute!,” you might be thinking. I have to embrace mobile and jump on social media too?” Yep, here’s why. Social media is the ying to mobile’s yang. They belong together. 50% of the people on Twitter use Twitter mobile. People watch 200 million Youtube videos a day on their mobile devices! Mobile devices are social devices. If you’re not going to pick up a bat and glove and play along with people, don’t even bother showing up for the game. Or sit in the stands as spectator.

5.  Stop talking about your fricken web site. I do believe that web sites are important. I don’t believe they are the digital holy grail for your cause. Without innovation, engagement and portability it’s an online billboard that doesn’t change or engage, and the people that do see it generally just ignore it. Get over your web site.

We all have limited time and resources. The cause marketing of tomorrow requires that you give your full attention to mobile, location and social media.

The mobile wave is hurtling toward you. Will you float or flounder?