I love this cause marketing promotion from a UK housing charity that brings together eight Edinburgh thrift shops with the leading location-based service, Foursquare.

It capitalizes on a physical location. Shelter Scotland helps people with all sorts of housing problems from homelessness to poor living conditions. 16 percent of Shelter’s annual donations come from its two dozen thrift shops throughout Scotland. Not all nonprofits are destinations for shoppers or visitors. But the ones that are should follow Shelter’s lead and tap Foursquare, which just isn’t for nonprofits that are cultural institutions and museums. What about thrift-store giant Goodwill or a busy historical attraction like the Freedom Trail in Boston? Foursquare should be part of their [cause] marketing too.

Shelter jumped in with both feet. They launched the program in eight stores to start and created a great video to educate supporters about the campaign and how to use Foursquare. Shelter isn’t assuming anything. They’re building a Foursquare promotion one user at a time and are not giving people a reason to say no (e.g. “I’ve never heard of Foursquare.” “I don’t know how to use it.”)

Shelter also developed real benefits for users that regularly checked-in to their stores. They’re offering a buy two, get one free special for both newbies and for loyal customers on every sixth check-in.

I also like how Foursquare users can earn cool badges from a noted designer. Shelter even created a unique badge for each store. Those who collect all eight will be entered into a contest to win prints of the designs.

The folks at Shelter really gave this promotion some forethought and didn’t skimp on the details.

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The promotion has room to grow. Shelter is off to a great start and can develop the promotion in  a couple ways. The charity has a number of corporate partnerships they could add to the promotion. In exchange for a co-marketing opportunity on Shelter’s Foursquare page a company could make a donation for each check-in. The real opportunity, however, is for Shelter to create Foursquare promotions for businesses–preferably ones with lots of locations–and include a cause marketing component that will benefit the charity. Companies would profit from Shelter’s expertise and the housing chartiy would profit from sharing it.

Shelter was smart to focus on smartphone users. Now’s not the the time to question the merits of mobile. Trust me, its future is as bright as the printing press! However, Shelter shouldn’t stop with Foursquare. What about SMS? Those who read me regularly know that SMS is my new cause marketing darling so bear with me. Adoption rates for location-based services such as Foursquare are low and growing slowly. Adding a text component to Shelter’s mobile promotion might make sense.

Use SMS for reach–because it’s the ring that everyone answers–and then a QR code, landing page, application such as Foursquare for a richer media experience. SMS is the messenger that will tell mobile users that supporting Shelter Scotland and earning rewards for themselves is just a check-in away.

I talk to more and more people every day who want to use Foursquare and other location-based services for fundraising and cause marketing.

I point them to a whole series of posts I’ve written on the subject. But now I think I need to make the whole process just as simple as possible.

Fortunately, I have some help as McDonald’s has just launched a Foursquare promotion with its restaurants in Philadelphia to benefit the Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC). This promotion runs through March 17th.

Here’s what you’ll need for your cause marketing promotion on Foursquare.

1. A partnership between a cause and company. In this case, it’s McDonald’s and the RMHC. No company or cause? No cause marketing.
2. At the minimum, the company has made a commitment of money or product per check-in. McDonald’s is donating $1 for each check-in.
3. The venues that will be part of the promotion need to be claimed on Foursquare. If they’re not, they’ll be nowhere to check-in to! Fortunately, creating a venue is easy. On the bottom right of this page, click on “Search and claim your venue.”

The next phase is to set-up the actual promotion.

• Encourage consumers to check-in on Foursquare. Who should you target? First, people on Facebook and Twitter as they are already social media savvy and more likely to be using Foursquare. The other opportunity is with in-store customers via signage. Check out these posters that our partner, Finagle A Bagel, hung in their stores.

• Be clear with users on how their check-in is counted. This is what I really like about the McDonald’s promotion. A one dollar donation is made to RMHC whenever a Foursquare check-in is sent to Twitter with the McDonald’s Philadelphia handle “@McDPhilly”. If you’ve used Foursquare you know this is very easy to do (see below), and it’s a great promotional idea for McDonald’s. They’ll reach a much bigger audience on Twitter and it makes for easy counting as you only have to do a search on the @McDPhilly handle to determine what the  contribution should be.

• Reward users for their participation. McDonald’s is giving each customer that participates in the mobile social fundraiser a coupon for a free McCafe Shake.

• Add up your check-ins on Twitter when the program is completed. But you might want to do this daily or weekly. There are many ways to do this, but you can use Tweetdeck or Tweedgrid and did a search for the handle “@McDPhilly”.

I think this is an easy way to use Foursquare for cause marketing. You don’t have to petition Foursquare for any special promotion or badge. You can track your own numbers on Twitter, which are open for all to see.

But it’s obvious you need a couple things to make this program work.

1. A generous company to front the money for the program. No money, no donation per check-in.
2. Either the cause or the company, preferably both, need to be engaged on social media. If you have 10 followers on Twitter and 80 friends on Facebook and you think people will suddenly come out in droves to support you on Foursquare you are dead wrong.

Consider the example last week of Second Harvest Food Bank and the Social Media Challenge they did with Massage Envy. The reason the program worked is because Second Harvest already had a vibrant online community (which was further enhanced by the  program).

To review:

• Find a partner with some dough.
• Confirm their social media credentials.
• Develop a program that is easy and fun.
• Reward and thank supporters.
• Use Twitter to track engagement and donations.

Like the people under the Golden Arches say, I’m lovin’ it.