Wow. What a great Cause Marketing Forum Conference this year. Day two featured an excellent lineup with lots of good and interesting speakers.

My favorite speaker of the day was Kami Watson Huyse, President of Zoetica, who presented on best practices in cause-related social media. You can find her slides here. Among other things, if you’re looking for solid information and direction on how to best compete in online contests, Kami is the woman to talk to. Great job, Kami!

Other notable presentations were Nancy Lublin from DoSomething.org who talked about the good, bad and ugly of cause marketing. Nancy had some strong opinions—such as how some agencies are misleading and overcharging their nonprofit clients—that didn’t sit well with some of the people I spoke to during the break. But her cutting criticisms of industry practices confirmed what I’ve always said about public speaking: the world isn’t black and white, but the best speeches are.

Charles Best from DonorsChoose.org, a Cause Marketing Forum Golden Halo Award Winner, also impressed me. I know little about the organization, but Charles’ speech inspired me to learn more. Expect a post on DC’s cause marketing work soon.

I taught two “powerful discussions” on location-based cause marketing that were a lot of fun. A big thanks to Chris Noble and Joey Leslie who attended the first session and added much to the discussion—including interpreting my Boston accent for attendees.

I thought this 9th Annual Cause Marketing Forum Conference was excellent – the best yet for me. Here’s why.

• Arriving at the hotel on the last day of the International Mister Leather Conference was a real feast for the eyes. Leathermen, the scent of leather is with me still, and I will never look the same way at a man wearing black leather short-shorts with matching suspenders and hat ever again.

• The hotel was great. See my post on the pre-conference for more details. It’s the people who make a stay nice and I was impressed with the staff at the Hyatt. There was lots of space in this hotel—the largest Hyatt in the world, I was told. So whether it was listening to presenters in the main ballroom or networking in the lobby, we had some much needed elbow room. Oh, and I thought the food was great!

• I really enjoyed many of the presentations this year. I made an extra effort to stay in the main ballroom and listen instead of drifting out to the lobby area to chat. But I also thought we had plenty of breaks for networking.

• The very best addition this year was a clock to keep speakers on time. The folks at CMF are genius! I never felt stuck in a so-so presentation because I knew it would soon end and not go on forever, a hallmark of bad speeches. Note to speakers: it’s quality, not quantity. Stand up. Speak powerfully. Sit down!

• The addition of “powerful discussions” was excellent and offered something for everyone. Mine had around a dozen people. A great size for talking and Q&A.

I’m sure the CMF team already has lots of ideas on how to improve the event next year, which will be the 10th anniversary of the conference. But they made great strides this year, and not just with the conference. The CMF website has been upgraded, it has an interesting blog and active Twitter handle.

I like that CMF is deeply committed to improving the conference. When they see problems, they fix them. When they see opportunities they pursue them.

My only wish is that more people would attend the Cause Marketing Forum Conference to see what a great event it is and to take advantage of the wonderful resources it offers for cause marketers in both the nonprofit and for-profit world.

I hope to see you there in 2012!

Pre-Conference Update

I flew into Chicago today so I could be ready for the for the Hospital Corporate Development Summit tomorrow morning. This second year workshop is just one of three programs that will be held on Wednesday before the opening reception tomorrow evening and the full conference on Thursday.

I had a long, expensive cab ride from O’Hare Airport as I arrived during morning rush. It cost me $50! Fortunately, the hotel has a shuttle that leaves every half hour or so so the ride back will be free. [Update: Not free, according to Megan Strand. Cheaper than a cab, but you also make "92 stops at the airport." I think we can say there are a lot of stops, but maybe not 92.]

The conference has a new home this year: the Hyatt Regency Hotel. This is a huge hotel with over 2000 rooms! It’s well situated for downtown, shopping at The Magnificent Mile and the lake. Oh, and it’s a good place to enjoy the conference!

The hotel had an interesting vibe this morning as another convention was wrapping up. The International Mister Leather Conference was held at the hotel this year. Of course, I only had one thought when I saw all these leathermen: what a great group for cause marketing! I’ll be pitching the organizers on Chaps for a Cause next year.

My room at the Hyatt is very nice. Wifi isn’t free, unfortunately. But I’m checking with the CMF team to see if it will be the day of the conference.

Speaking of the CMF team, I saw Dave Hessekiel, Megan Strand and the rest of the gang and they are busy planning another great conference.

If you plan to work out while you’re at the conference, the Hyatt has a very well equipped gym with treadmills, bikes, stairmasters, weight machines and dumbbells. They don’t have a pool, but I’m told the health club right next door does and the hotel may have a special deal with them.

If you’d rather get outside for you workout or walk, Millennium Park is right down the street. I had a great run up by The Shedd, Chicago’s first-rate aquarium.

Remember, if you’re tweeting about the conference, the hashtag is #CMF11. And be sure to follow @TweetCMF for any conference details!

Finally, if you’re like me and just need your Starbucks everyday, there is one close to the hotel at 225 North Michigan Avenue at the corner of Lake Street. They do brew Starbucks at the hotel, but I wouldn’t drink this swill even if you were buying. Just sayin.

Want to learn more about cause marketing? Do these things right now:

1. Sign up for my bi-monthly newsletter (top right of this page).
2. Buy my book, Cause Marketing for Dummies, and get some great free stuff.
3. Invite me to speak at your next event!
4. Learn more by reading my latest post: The Difference Between Transactional, Transformative Cause Marketing.

Last January I wrote a post on What is Cause Marketing? that got a lot of great feedback. Over the past year I’ve gone back to that post many time and reread the comments again and thought about how I was defining cause marketing.

I felt I had the first part right.

Cause marketing is a partnership between a nonprofit and a for-profit for mutual profit

What I thought needed redefining was just what it encompassed. In last year’s post I wrote that cause marketing involved three types of programs: point-of-sale, percentage-of-sale and licensing.

This year, I’m much more open to including most activities between a company and a cause. They include:

Point-of-sale. When a cashier either solicits a shopper for a donation (active cause marketing) or signage is prominently displayed at the register to encourage the shopper to make a gift (passive cause marketing) that’s point-of-sale. Unless you’re completely new to my blog, you know that POS, in the form of pinups, is my bread-and-butter program. But if you are new here’s a primer.

Purchase or action triggered donation. When a consumer buys a product or service (like a latte at Starbucks on World Aids Day) a donation (5 cents) is made to a cause (Product Red) that’s a purchase-triggered donation (I think this is a better describer of what happens when a shopper buys a cause product than the “percentage-of-sale” tag I used last year). Sometimes instead of a purchase, a donation is made when the consumer performs some type of action. For example, Macy’s donated a dollar the Make-a-Wish Foundation for every letter to Santa dropped into their special letter boxes at Macy’s stores.

Licensing. This is when a company pays a fee to use a nonprofit’s brand on its product. Licensing may include a certification process by the nonprofit before the company is allowed to use the logo. A longstanding licensing pact is Arthritis Foundation’s Ease of Use Commendation for the Advil Caplets Easy Open Arthritis Cap. Cause marketing licensing is practiced by the only the biggest causes (e. g. Komen for the Cure, American Heart Association) and is not a tactic for your average or local cause.

Message Promotion. This is when a business puts its resources to work to promote a cause-focused message. David Hessekiel at Cause Marketing Forum has a lot of great examples in his Halo Award Archive.

Employee Engagement. This is when a company leverages its workforce for social good. I think of Home Depot’s Partnership with KaBOOM! to build 1000 Playgrounds in 1000 Days, which involved nearly 100,000 Home Depot volunteers.

Digital Programs. The web, social media and especially location-based services will dramatically impact cause marketing and change the way we execute the above tactics. To leave this out is to leave out the future of cause marketing and how cause and companies will partner in the years to come.

I still don’t think the “marketing of causes” or sponsorship are cause marketing. (Jocelyn Daw told me recently that while sponsorship is when the cause puts its resources to work for the company, cause marketing is when the company goes to work for the cause. I like that!) But there are some interesting and creative ways to integrate cause marketing with sponsorship.

Nor is cause marketing cause branding or corporate social responsibility, although it is a subset of the two.

Finally, cause marketing is not philanthropy. While it has philanthropic aspirations and goals, it’s better described as marketing, and, in some ways, a business.

Those are my thoughts on cause marketing for January 2011. What are yours?

[Update 1/21/11: In the comments be sure to check out Jocelyn Daw's comments on how to distinguish traditional marketing from cause marketing. She makes it quite clear. Also, she outlines the 4 P's of cause marketing: Partner, Purpose, Passion & Profits.]

I hope you’ll make the trip to the Cause Marketing Forum conference next year. Two weeks after the  event, I’m still thinking about the things I heard and learned at CMF10.

A word that was seemingly on the tongue of every speaker was “strategy.”

Strategy. A plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining a specific goal or result.

Every presenter that discussed their cause marketing program either talked of the “strategy” behind their efforts or emphasized the importance of having one.

I get it. And it sounds great. But looking around the conference at all the nonprofits that were new to cause marketing, the best strategy for most of them seemed like a solid set of tactics to get them going.

Tactic. A means for achieving a goal; a maneuver.

A tactic isn’t as sophisticated as a strategy. If your basement floods every now and then [been there] and you pump it out with a floor pump and hose you borrow from your neighbor, that’s a tactic. If you install French drains in your basement and regrade the landscaping outside your house so rain water flows away from it, that’s a strategy.

It’s clear which one is better, but they both do the trick. Tactics have the benefit of educating you on what kind of plan, what kind of strategy you should adopt. Tactics also allow you to get started without waiting for a grand strategy to form first.

I can speak to embracing cause marketing tactics because my Six Figure Cause Marketing webinar, which began just last Thursday, takes a very tactical approach to getting nonprofits up and running with their first program.

Do you have a supporter who owns a chain of stores? You can do cause marketing. No elaborate business plan required.

Do you run a successful event, maybe a walk, run or ride (or maybe a big Halloween event like I do every October!)? You may have an asset that you can turn into cause marketing gold. No need to spend time thinking of how it fits into your larger development strategy.

Most of you have read my post on What is Cause Marketing?. Cause Marketing is a win-win partnership between a nonprofit and a for-profit that generally involves point-of-sale and percentage-of-sale programs.

So if you work for a nonprofit all you need to get started with cause marketing is a company with either foot traffic or locations, preferably both. The important thing is not to get caught up overthinking what your cause marketing strategy is. Just to get going and develop your strategy as your tactics take you step by step to your goal.

As my brother, a high school teacher, likes to tell his students, “You have a wonderful future ahead of you. I suggest you get going.”

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Association of Fundraising Professionals Brown Bag today to hear me, Joanna MacDonald and Dan Curtin, General Manager of Zipcar Boston, talk about cause marketing.

As promised, here are my slides from the presentation (at least the most relevant ones). I’ve linked them to several posts that might be helpful to you.

What is Cause Marketing? Read my post of the same name, and be sure to check out the comments.

Point-of-Sale. You can read about several great examples of pinup programs that support Komen, Jake’s Ride and BMC. Not familiar with pinup programs? Here’s a primer.

Percentage-of-Sale. Check out this post I wrote on Absolut Boston and the Charles River Conservancy.

Sponsorships. As I explained today, cause marketing isn’t sponsorship, but I know selling sponsorships are still a big part of what nonprofits do. That’s why I’ve written a whole series on it called Selling Local Sponsorships for Nonprofits.

iParty and Ocean State Job Lots. You heard a lot about iParty and Ocean State today. These links share some more background about them and our partnerships with them.

Zipcar. As you heard today, this car-sharing company has been a good friend of the hospital. Here are some more details about the email pinup they did for us.

Foursquare. I’ve written three posts on Foursquare and one on CauseWorld. You should also read this AdAge article on Foursquare, which highlights how businesses are using the service. Consider the possible extensions to cause marketing.

Cause Marketing Forum. Their annual conference shouldn’t be missed! You can also follow CMF’s founder on Twitter. Visit CMF for loads of case studies on cause marketing and info on the conference.

The future is free. I talked about this in my “prophecies” for cause marketing. Read about it here.

Hire us. BMC is always looking for new nonprofit and for-profit partners. You can learn more about the different ways we can work together here.

Last week I was part of a group of Boston cause marketers David Hessekiel from Cause Marketing Forum pulled together to discuss the field. It was a lot of fun, and I think we all learned something from each other.

In addition to my own organization, there were reps from The Jimmy Fund, Oxfam, Pine Street Inn, Children’s Hospital, Project Bread and The Home for Little Wanderers. We all run cause marketing programs, albeit all at different stages from the dormant to the sophisticated. We all had some success to speak of, but in each of us, myself included, there was talk of frustrations, challenges and even inadequacies.

But there was also a great sense of determination among everyone there to get the job done and support our respective organizations.

For the Home of Little Wanderers, there was talk of low brand recognition and the struggle to communicate all the things they did in the community.

Solution: The Home is focusing its corporate efforts on the holiday season where it has its most well known and most successful programs (i.e. annual toy drive and holiday card sales).

Brand recognition has never been a problem for The Jimmy Fund here in New England, but it is outside the hospital’s service area. This has become a bigger problem as national companies gravitate toward working with national charities that mirror their customer base.

Solution: The Jimmy Fund developed a national cause marketing program for cancer charities of which they are a member. Incredibly, now they are raising more money than ever before thanks to their national footprint! It’s nice to see that some good deeds are rewarded.

Like The Jimmy Fund, The Pine Street Inn, is no stranger to innovation. While their cause marketing program is currently in transition, they were the geniuses behind what I called their Tower of Power. I hope in these tough times they will now see the wisdom in bringing it back!

If The Pine Street Inn was the smallest organization represented in the group, Oxfam was by far the biggest. We discussed how there were very few international cause marketing brands, and how Oxfam was strategically positioned to be one of them. Wow! What an incredibly exciting and powerful opportunity.

Project Bread has incredible cause marketing potential with its annual Walk For Hunger that last year had 44,000 walkers. But even with this huge public event, Project Bread is still mistaken for other local banks, like the New England Food Bank. But this isn’t deterring them from pursuing corporate sponsorships.

Children’s Hospital – Boston certainly had one of the more powerful brands in the room. Sick kids and fundraising are a pretty potent combo. But walled out from pursuing many national pacts because of their partnership with Children’s Miracle Network (which for sure brings them money) they are also penned in to a very competitive Boston marketplace where “sick kids” have to compete with every other worthy cause under the sun. Or do they?

Solution: Children’s has escaped their earthly bonds for virtual freedom! Generation Cures, an online gaming community, empowers ‘tweens and families across the country to learn how science saves lives while raising money to develop cures for kids. Corporate sponsors can participate via coupon programs, cause marketing, and naming opportunities.

Sitting around that table last week in Boston we didn’t talk like we were some of New England’s better cause marketers, but we were.  We were better because there were a hundred reasons why each of our organizations should have never started a cause marketing program, but they did.

We were better because once established in cause marketing we continued to drive innovation (cue: Keep Walking). The folks at The Pine Street Inn looked up at the tower that lorded over them. Children’s Hospital saw an opportunity in the ether of online. The Jimmy Fund saw dollar signs in working with other cancer organizations. And BMC decided to become showmen and launch its very own Halloween event in downtown Boston.

The same could even be said of David Hessekiel when he gave up journalism and started a cause-venture, Cause Marketing Forum, that benefits so many people who want to start or to grow in the field of cause marketing.

You could see on everyone’s faces and hear in all their stories that not everything had gone as planned. There were roadblocks. Stumbles. Lost opportunities. But each of us, in our own way, was pressing toward the mark with intelligence, resourcefulness and grit.

It wasn’t hard to understand why. We didn’t start as winners. But we are working hard to make ourselves ones every day.

Sitting at Cause Marketing Forum’s annual conference last month listening to all the great presentations from St. Jude’s, Ronald McDonald House and other big charities on their hugely successful cause marketing programs and looking around at all the small nonprofits in the room actively listening and taking copious notes, I was reminded of something the late runner-philosopher George Sheehan said years ago. 

In a similar setting but with elite athletes speaking on marathon training to ordinary runners he was blunt when it was his turn to speak: “Forget what they just told you,” he advised the crowd.  “They’re animals.”  What he meant was that elite marathoners are so gifted and so fundamentally different from the rest of us, their advice and experiences really don’t apply to the rest of us.  That’s one of the things I wanted to tell the other nonprofits that populated the room that day.  Given the chance, here’s what else I would have told them.

Big cause marketing programs have dedicated cause marketing teams.  Yours won’t.  I’m just not director of cause marketing at my nonprofit, I’m also director of events.  I manage our marathon program, annual gala and golf tournament, among other things.  Oh, and I also do cause marketing.  But because I have a strong interest and expertise in the area, I try to bring cause marketing in to everything I do, including events.  Regardless of what we do, I’m always looking for that intersection of philanthropy, marketing and business.  You should too.

Big cause marketing programs raise gobs of money from cause marketing.  Yours won’t.  Of course, raising “big money” is a relative term.  Even the millions of cause marketing dollars generated by cause marketing leaders like Komen or St. Jude’s is only a small percentage of the total funds they raise.  On average, nonprofits raise just 5-15% from all corporate giving, including cause marketing.  Now, if you’re raising $400 million a year, five percent is still a tidy sum.  But what if you organization only raises $400,000?  Five percent isn’t so significant, right?  That said, you need to look beyond  money to the exposure cause marketing offers and the potential connections to  both individual donors and corporate foundations.  I hate to use the term “loss leader” when describing cause marketing, but its value to nonprofits certainly goes beyond dollars and cents.  Because if it was all about the money, no one would do it except the big players. 

Big cause marketing programs deal with cause branding, passion branding and corporate social responsibility.  Yours won’t.   Local cause marketing programs are generally simple, limited, and transactional.  One of things I admire about big programs like St. Jude’s is how sophisticated they are.  They have a lot of layers and moving parts: in-store promotion, point of sale, percentage-of-sale on products, media, celebrity endorsements, events, and all happening simultaneously to boot.  It’s impressive.  That’s why they have large teams to execute their cause marketing programs and why they raise tens of millions of dollars each year.  But that’s not what your program is going to look like, nor does it have to to be modestly successful. 

Most local cause marketing programs are point-of-sale programs that involve little promotion or media beyond what’s sold at the register, which is fitting because the success of the program hinges on the cashier making ”the ask” (e. g. “Would you like to donate a dollar to help a sick child”).  Most local cause marketing partners will limit the time they work with you to a specific time of year (Halloween and Christmas are big ones for us) so they can work with other charities the rest of the year.  Very few will deeply drink the cool-aid and commit to a long-term strategic partnership. 

While you should never stop trying to evolve cause marketing programs into multi-year, comprehensive, strategic partnerships (I have two to my credit in my four year tenure at my current position, despite executing two dozen cause marketing pacts of all sizes), sticking with just cause marketing doesn’t make your efforts a failure.  It still serves your organization in a lot of important ways.  While not every oyster has a pearl, their soft bellies can make for a satisfying meal!