Thanks to everyone who turned out for the live discussion today at Philanthropy.com on Foursquare for Charities. I hope you learned something!

Today’s transcript

To help digest some of the things we talked about, here are the posts I’ve written on Foursquare for your education and enjoyment.

I wrote a two-part series on Boston-based Boloco and their Foursquare program and how nonprofits might learn from it.

Part 1

Part 2

Here’s a guest post I wrote on Foursquare for Philanthropy.com

How Nonprofit Groups Can Benefit From Foursquare

Here are two posts on the big Foursquare launch at SXSW this spring by my friends at StudioGood.

Part 1

Part 2

A groundbreaking program here in Boston that sparked my initial interest in Foursquare was Harvard University’s use of the geo-location service. Here’s their story and what nonprofits can learn from it.

Harvard Schools Cause Marketers on Foursquare

Are you convinced that CauseWorld is the next Foursquare? I’m not. Here’s why.

CauseWorld: Location-Based Cause Marketing

I hope you enjoyed today’s live discussion. If you have any questions just leave a comment.

Additional Reading & Listening

Podcast: Making the Most of Location Based Networks by Allison Fine

A Social Media Experiment Raises Big Money for Small Charity (Story on my wonderful co-presenter today Estrella Rosenberg).

Last week we enjoyed a sumptuous Foursquare promotion created by Boston’s own Boloco. The Foursquare Mayor Boloco Card is bursting with creativeness, spices and natural goodness, just like the food Boloco serves.

The promotion is a feast for us who are looking for ways to use geo-location services. Boloco’s efforts offer direction on how causes can create their own 4sq promotion with local businesses.

Here’s how.

Start by re-reading last week’s post. Think your nonprofit isn’t big enough to give Foursquare a try? Think again. Worried that you don’t have the technical skills to work with the geo-location site? No special skills are required. Not sure that you should be focusing on Foursquare in the first place? Read my post here.

Identify prospects to approach. Stores or restaurants with multiple locations and foot traffic are your best targets. You’ll see why soon. Boloco is a perfect example. They have 16 busy locations throughout New England. Targeting a chain with fewer locations is fine. Just adjust your expectations: fewer stores generally means fewer customers, and fewer customers means less of, well, anything you hope to get out of the partnership.

Explain how Boloco is using Foursquare. And how your promotion will work almost exactly the same way as theirs. (For all the brazen talk being “first” in new ideas, businesses secretly like when someone else has gone first!) Like Boloco, each location will have a mayor that will be feted with honors, to be determined by the store or restaurant. The reigning mayor can simply flash their 4sq mayor crown on their PDA to the store manager. (While the Boloco mayor card and offline exchange between ousted and new mayors is a great idea, it’s not necessary for the program to work.)

Add a cause component. To turn the Boloco Foursquare program into a cause marketing machine try one of these two tactics.

1. Cash or Inkind - Say you partner with a store or restaurant that has coats or food to donate to your organization. With their new Foursquare Mayor Gives Back program the winning mayor of each location chooses the nonprofit that gets the lion’s share of the donation. It’s a great way to involve customers in the giving and to educate them about the company’s good deeds and organizations that need their support.
2. Point-of-Sale - Pinups are a great way to raise money and promote the Foursquare Mayor Gives Back program. Selling pinups at the register promotes the program with customers and raises money that can be awarded to your cause by the reigning mayor on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Combining Foursquare with pinups introduces 4sq to customers who aren’t currently using the geo-location service, but might with a little encouragement and incentive. For all the merits of the Boloco  promotion it’s focused on Foursquare users, not in on boarding new users. Adding pinups to the mix raises money for the cause and alerts more customers to the promotion, which means more Foursquare users vying to become the next mayor.

The Foursquare Mayor Boloco Card is a great starting point to launch a cause marketing initiative. Nonprofits are rewarded with exposure, inkind goods or cash. Retailers can better activate their 4sq promotion with consumers and potentially earn their halo by supporting a good cause.

Like restaurant leftovers, I hope this second take on Boloco’s Foursquare promotion was more tasty than the first!

I’ve always liked Boloco, the burrito restaurant chain with 16 locations throughout New England. They have great, reasonably priced food, and, as a special bonus, are tops in giving back and social media.

Boloco is active on Facebook with close to 4,000 “likes”, and have over 3,000 followers on Twitter where the CEO himself, John Pepper, tweets for the company.

With their social media prowess it didn’t surprise me that they’d jump into Foursquare in a big way.

Beginning May 1st, Boloco will launch a Foursquare Mayor Boloco Card. One for each of its 16 locations. The 4sq member who checks-in the most at each location becomes mayor gets the card. If they get ousted they need to hand the card over to the new mayor IN PERSON!

The Fousquare Mayor Boloco Cards don’t have any perks connected with them right now beyond bragging rights, but Boloco plans to change that soon.

In a fun twist to the program, Boloco also plans to give Foursquare Mayor Boloco Cards to Mayors in four locations. Mayors Menino, Maher, Bouley and Kiss of Boston, Cambridge, Concord (NH) and Burlington (VT). They too will have to turn in their cards, but only if they lose their next election.

Regular readers know that I’ve written a lot about 4sq in the past few months. And with nonprofits just starting to check-in to 4sq, now is our chance to learn best practices from businesses like Boloco that are experimenting with the geo-location service.

This is what we can learn.

Size doesn’t matter. Geo-location services are well suited for small and medium sized businesses. You don’t have to be Walmart or Starbucks or Chili’s to take advantage of Foursquare. Just as if you’re a nonprofit you don’t have to be Komen, St. Jude or Product RED.

Use the service “as is.” You don’t need to fuss with badges or work with the Foursquare API. Boloco is using the service as it’s suppose to work. When a customer becomes mayor of a Boloco they just need to flash their crown to the cashier. Nonprofits should use Foursquare the same way, as it is. And rewarding mayors is just one of the ways to use 4sq.

Think about your demo. Boloco just didn’t start using Foursquare for kicks. They were already on Facebook and Twitter and are obviously comfortable with social media. So are their customers, who are evenly split between men and women, range in age from 20 to 40 and are college educated. 4sq’s current appeal in urban areas also syncs with most of Boloco’s locations. Does Foursquare make sense for your nonprofit? If your cause represents retired dairy farmers from an office in a small town in upstate New York, probably not.

In part two, which I’ll post next week, I’ll discuss how you can package Boloco’s Foursquare program into a cause marketing promotion you can shop to businesses in your area.

Boloco has served up a great example for nonprofits of how to use the geo-location service. Like their delicious burritos, it’s a meal worth lingering over.

The majority of calls I take on cause marketing are from budget-conscious small nonprofits raising anywhere from a few hundred thousand to a few million a year. They have a small staff and one or two development people, who usually have other responsibilities like marketing or public relations (or sometimes everything!). They also have limited resources and can’t invest in new staff, advertising or training.

What they all share is exactly the same question: what are some low-budget and easy ways I can get started with cause marketing?

Here are five tips to get you going.

Look within. The beginnings of cause marketing success are usually found within–via an existing corporate relationship or a board member who is also a business owner–not without. My first two cause marketing partners, iParty and Ocean State Job Lots, supported my nonprofit with in-kind and cash gifts from their CEO’s long before they involved their stores and customers. Look around to see what existing corporate relationships you can take a new direction.

Visit Cause Marketing Forum. Man, if I got a quarter for every time I recommended Cause Marketing Forum to someone I could fund my twice-a-day Starbucks habit with something besides my kids’ college funds. But the fact I promote it gratis shows just how valuable this site is for budding cause marketers. The sheer amount of information on the CMF site is impressive! There’s so much to learn. Just reading the site end to end you would gain quite a knowledge of cause marketing.  I know that firsthand, because I’ve done just that. Enhance your online learning experience by joining me at CMF’s annual conference in Chicago this June.

Stick to pinups. There are lots of ways to raise money with cause marketing, but none of them are easier or more lucrative than pinups. My most recent major pinup program raised $212,000 and had only $7,000 in expenses. The costs on each pinup range from 8 to 15 cents. If you sell your pinups for between $1 and $5 ($1 is typical, but I’ve sold them for as much as $3. Others sell them for as much as $5), you’ll maximize the return for your organization and raise a lot of money. It’s no coincidence that some of the most successful cause marketing programs involve pinups.

Jump into social media. I don’t get the hesitation from nonprofits on social media. I think we can all agree that what social media represents–two way communication, user-generated content, etc.–is here to stay (even if Facebook, Twitter et al are not). Nonprofits also don’t have many other good choices besides social media. I haven’t heard this one lately: “We’re waiting to start a blog because we’re in the midst of a $10 million advertising campaign.” So why aren’t these nonprofits all over social media? And why aren’t they exploring ways to use social media with cause marketing? I’ve written a lot about using Foursquare for cause marketing. One of the ways you can get started in cause marketing is to get busy marrying social media to it. Because this is a match made in heaven. Do it now so you’ll have one less thing to play catch-up on a year from now.

Work with me. Some nonprofits decide they don’t have the time, staff and resources for cause marketing and make the most cost-effective decision they can: they call me. Often it’s a nonprofit that already has a bird in the hand (a corporate relationship!) and wants to get going. They bring the partner to the table, we close them on a cause marketing partnership with our two organizations and execute the program from start to finish. At the end of the program–and after expenses have been paid–we split the money. While the nonprofit could have tried to execute the program themselves and collected 100% of the dollars raised, my team and I know these programs cold and how to squeeze every dime out of the partnership. We do all the work and the nonprofit gets a check. So far it’s worked really well for everyone.

These are my five tips for low-budget cause marketing. What would you add to my list?

You can read my latest post over at Philanthropy.com. Thanks to Peter Panepento (a Yankees fan no less) for inviting me to write it, and for posting it the day after a huge Red Sox victory over the Evil Empire!

Fact or rumor: Jonathan Papelbon used Foursquare last night to check the Red Sox into first place in the American League East.

The Foursquare Checkin for Charity campaign at SXSW 2010 I first reported on last week was a big success for the Save the Children Haiti Relief Fund.

• By the end of SXSWi, attendees had logged over 135,000 checkins on Foursquare.
• The effort was  supported by over 2,400 tweets that included the #sxswHaiti hashtag.
• The 25 cents per login PayPal and Microsoft pledged for a maximum gift of $15,000 was achieved in less than 48 hours!
• The campaign also got some good press, including in WSJ.

The campaign was a great boost for Foursquare as location based services were all the rave at SXSWi this year. Checkin for Charity also showed this tech-savvy crowd what was possible with Foursquare in the cause world.

Kerrie LeBourveau, a member of the StudioGood team that executed the campaign, explains.

“It was a great way to energize an already active community.  Sometimes when I told people about it, they were taken aback and had no idea that something like this was even possible with Foursquare! It was pretty cool to see.  Also, we saw a lot of people actually SHOWING each other their little foursquare messages. Kind of neat to see a guerrilla kind of thing that was not totally forced or pushed on by some big brand.”

This may really be the lasting impact of Checkin for Charity. Foursquare ambassadors who can share best practices with causes that will finally have a  social media platform for cause marketing they can truly call their own.

Looking for more ideas of how you can launch a Foursquare cause marketing program for your local nonprofit? Check out this one. Must be a good idea. I got it from Boston’s own Harvard University and I’ve heard they’re wicked smaht!

Cause marketers and Foursquare fanatics take note: some great stuff is kicking off today at SXSW 2010 in Austin, TX. Get your notepads out and sharpen your pencils because the folks at StudioGood will have some great lessons to share over the next few days.

And I’ll be the one reporting the news! Although I won’t be doing it alone because Boston needs me too much with the Red Sox home opener less than a month away.

Kerrie LeBourveau from StudioGood is on the ground in Austin and promises lots of details, pics and video so I can share with all of you just how this first in location-based cause marketing unfolds at SXSW.

Here are the details of the Check-in for Charity to bring you up to speed.

• Starting today every time you Check-in on Foursquare in Austin, Microsoft and PayPal will donate $0.25 toward Save the Children up to $15,000.
• There will be check-in locations around SXSWi.
• You don’t need to be in Austin to help. Just use the hashtag #sxswHaiti on Twitter and Save the Children and Microsoft and PayPal will make the same donation.

Stay tune for my updates on Check-in for Charity, its progress and my insights on how we can all learn how to combine Foursquare and cause marketing to raise more money for causes.

I’m frequently asked what apps I use to stay abreast of the latest news on cause marketing, how I add my two cents and find the occasional prospect. My list is actually a lot shorter than you might think.

Tweetdeck. Twitter is my main source of information on just about everything, including cause marketing. Just 18 months ago I read a slew of magazines and three newspapers a day. My inbox was peppered with daily keyword alerts from Google and marketing newsletters. Today, I only use Twitter. And on my desktop to manage the influx of info is Tweetdeck.

When I come across a tweet with a link I want to read later, I no longer save it to Delicious. I just favorite it in Tweetdeck. If I want to save it longer, I ship it off to Evernote.

Tweetdeck is great because Twitter search, Facebook and Linkedin can now all be viewed on one magnificent screen. Having access to Linkedin has been particularly helpful as I can see with whom my fellow cause marketers are connecting (thanks for all the great leads @davecause!). Sometimes they’re people to learn from; other times prospects for business. Tweetdeck helps me manage both.

Tweetie. Tweetie is my iPhone app for Twitter. Minus the integration with other social media sites, it keeps me well connected with cause marketing news and with my followers. When I’m just tweeting, I almost prefer it to Tweetdeck.

PicPosterous. PicPosterous is the app I use to export pictures to my Posterous blog. But I use it even more now because Posterous is my default image service on Tweetie. So right from my iPhone I can snap a picture of a cause marketing program and use PicPosterous to instantly post the image on Posterous and instantly ping Twitter, Facebook Delicious, etc. In short, it’s been a great way to share cause marketing pictures on-the-go .

Evernote. Check out my post Better Cause marketing with Evernote.

Foursquare. The location-based service is more than just something I use to check-in to Starbucks twice day. It’s become a central conversation point for my talks with current and prospective partners on what shape the transactional cause marketing I do will take in the years ahead. I spend a good deal of time explaining to partners the potential of location-based services like Foursquare to cause marketing partnerships.

Tweetdeck, Tweetie, PicPosterous and Evernote keep me on track with my daily cause marketing activities. But Foursquare is my crystal ball. And I see a lot of check-ins with Foursquare in my future.

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.

I didn’t go to Harvard University (or “Hahvahd” as we call it locally), but last week I got a a Harvard education on Foursquare.

Foursquare, which is accessible from smartphones and other mobile devices, enables students and visitors to explore the campus and surrounding neighborhoods while sharing information about their favorite places.

In addition to creating an up-to-date online rating guide of stores, restaurants, businesses, and other venues throughout Harvard Square, foursquare users can also employ the application as a game, in which they earn points, and ultimately acquire coveted foursquare “badges.” Harvard is the first university to use foursquare to help students explore their campus and surrounding places of interest. Users who have visited a predetermined number of sites on the campus will be awarded the Harvard Yard badge on their foursquare profiles.

Harvard has led the way in a lot of areas, now it’s leading in how cause marketers can use Foursquare. Here’s how I plan to make good use of my education.

• My hospital is located in Boston’s historic South End, which is chock full of stores, restaurants, shops and others spots worthy of Foursquare check-in.
• After visiting a predetermined number of sites in the South End Foursquare users will unlock a South End badge on their profile.

Here’s what’s different.

• I plan to recruit a corporate sponsor for my badge. A biz in or around the South End would be great – b.good, Hampton Inn and Target come to mind.
• When users unlock their South End badge they would get a message: Congratulations! You just unlocked the South End Badge! Target [for example] has made a donation on your behalf to the Preventive Food Pantry at Boston Medical Center.

The program could incorporate additional elements, some of which I’ve discussed in other posts. Target could host a pinup program to promote their involvement and raise more money. South End stores could offer shoppers a reward when they unlock their badge.

All I need now to make my dream a reality is for someone to create my badge and work with Foursquare to set things up. That’s where I could use some help. Foursquare worked with Harvard to create their badge. I’d like them to do the same for me. How ’bout it Dens?

The great thing about my badge is that it holds the promise of revenue. If Foursquare can get causes coming up with creative ways to get businesses to sponsor badges, it’s a great step in the right direction for their business model.

Harvard is a great place to get an education. But if Foursquare is ready to graduate and make some money, they might want to try cause marketing.