Cause Marketing Success Begins at the Front

Jason Falls wrote a great post recently on how a lot of companies are scared to death to allow employees to represent them online.

“What are you crazy? Who knows what they’ll say about us.”

What Jason says is so true. It certainly is one of the reasons why my 6,000 employee nonprofit is hesitant to give employees access to social networks.

But uncertainty about what to expect from employees is also a big concern for companies that are considering a cause marketing program as well. When you start talking about a campaign that involves frontline employees (i. e. cashiers, sales associates, etc.) being the face of the program, management will begin to doubt that the rank and file will be “on board” for the program.

Here are some of the things we’ve done to make sure that employees are on board and know they are the key to cause marketing success.

Involve them from the start. We make a point to be on hand to roll-out  our cause marketing programs to as many frontline employees as possible. This gives us a chance to tell them about our cause, how the program will work, to answer any questions, and, of course, to say thank you.

Show them how it impacts them. One of the reasons cancer causes are cause marketing powerhouses is because cancer impacts everyone. Frontline employees push the program to help a loved one. That’s a powerful connection. But if you’re not a cancer cause, what’s your powerful connection? I work for a safety-net hospital and explain to people how easy it is to lose your health insurance and fret about getting the best health care, including cancer care. How do you plan to get frontline employees to care enough about your cause to ask shoppers to support it?

Don’t stop managing them. A cause marketing program is like any other in-store promotion. Managers need to train employees in it, encourage them to promote it, reward them when they do and measure the results so they can be compared to the performance of other stores within the chain. Giving a cause marketing program “special treatment” tells the rank and file that it’s not special at all.

Incentives work, sometimes. I’ve written about this already.

Keep it simple. The ask at the register has to be a one-sentence ask that the customer can understand and act on. When we first started our cause marketing programs in stores, our one-sentence ask included the name of our hospital. Unfortunately, that confused a lot of consumers because they weren’t familiar with our hospital. Later, we switched to “Would you like to donate a dollar to feed a sick child?” This was a simpler ask that was less frustrating for the shopper and the cashier. Easy to ask. Easy to understand. Easy to give.

Don’t make them choose between making money and helping you. A lot of times frontline workers are incentivized for signing shoppers up for a credit card, selling them an additional service, etc. You need to make sure that during your cause marketing program these other offerings are either suspended, or as we’ve done in several instances, incorporated right into the point-of-sale program. In one instance with a quick lube partner, we included a coupon for a transmission fluid change right on the pinup so the cashier could sell the two together.

Frontline employees want to help good causes. They also want to earn a living. Their time with shoppers is also limited. Don’t make them choose.

Cause marketing success at the register with frontline workers is a key topic of the upcoming Six Figure Cause Marketing webinar, which begins on September 14th. This three-hour course is just $149!