The two have teamed up for a cause marketing pinup program called the Great American Shake Sale at ten Shake Shack locations on the East coast. This modern roadside burger stand is committed to raising at least $25,000.

I love the pinup SOS and Shake Shack created for this program. (If you are unfamiliar with pinups, read this post.)

• It’s a simple, attractive design
• It sells for just $2
• All the money raised goes to SOS’s No Kid Hungry
• It’s a good example of a nonprofit targeting a mid-size company (where there’s more opportunity for the average nonprofit than with the big companies well known charity’s target)
• The best part: you donate $2 and you get a free shake worth $5

People give a buck or two because they want to and don’t need a shake to motivate them. But it sure does make a great thank you!

Share Our Strength is a national charity, but there’s no reason your local nonprofit can’t identify a company and run a successful pinup program. You could raise $25,000 like SOS will, or even more (Muscular Dystrophy and Lowe’s Home improvement raised $7.6 million earlier this year).

My goal with Six Figure Cause Marketing – The Power of Pinups is to show local nonprofits how to create, sell and execute successful and lucrative pinup programs.

This two-part webinar includes my book, Cause Marketing for Dummies and is just $99 at CharityHowTo.com.

There’s an option for some additional training with me if you need some extra help getting your program going.

You can check out all the details here.

Thanks to my Friend Emily Kokernak in New York City for discovering and sharing this program with me!

“I went in to buy a shake, and of course for $2 I did it – the shake alone is $5 there!”, said Emily. “It’s a GREAT deal! Free shake – without having to buy anything. And – the people working there were really nice and tried to sell it – explaining the cause, etc. They had banners strung across the ceiling and it was really tasteful in keeping with their clean decor.”

Thanks, Emily. That’s what good cause marketing is all about!

A common question I get is how can a local nonprofit land a cause marketing deals with a national chain when the latter will only work with large, national nonprofits. It’s simple: don’t target national chains. Instead, target regional, mid-size chains that are more likely to work with a local charity that’s more visible in their service area.

Look at the list of America’s Best Supermarkets to the right. In the 2012 ranking, there are four supermarkets I’ve never heard of – and with good reason. These supermarkets are located outside Massachusetts.

Take the Stater Brothers supermarket chain. Don’t know them, but you probably do if you live in Southern California where they have 167 stores. As far as I can tell they don’t work with a national nonprofit. This press release highlights their work with local food banks.

Another example is Raley’s, which has 137 stores, mainly north of San Francisco. Their latest press release talks about their support for Sacramento parks.

Harris Teeter is another example with 200 locations. Fairway opened its 100th store in 2011.

These midsize chains are excellent candidates for cause marketing programs. They have plenty of locations and foot traffic for a pinup program, which commonly raise a lot of money in supermarkets.

However, don’t stop with supermarkets. Target other mid-size chains as well (e.g. convenience stores, restaurants, even fast lube chains).

I’ve had success with all sorts of mid-size businesses and here’s what they all had in common: you’ve never heard of them, because they are native to my area.

So, if you’re searching for a cause marketing partner, forget the big national chains. They’re busy with their big national cause marketing programs. Go where you’re known, welcomed and loved. Visit your local market. Tell ‘em I sent you!

* * *

Speaking of supermarkets, check out this cool idea from Budgens supermarkets in the U.K. Here’s how The Guardian describes it.

Wooden blocks roughly the size of box of Maltesers branded with the single word “hope” will be interspersed with groceries at branches of Budgens in Crouch End and Belsize Park in London in a pilot scheme. Shoppers will be urged to take them to the till where they will be charged £1 per block which the retailer will forward to the Alzheimer’s Society – the block is returned to the shelf.

I asked the same question after reading this: what’s a box of Maltesers? I found this image.

I like how the blocks are on the shelves just like any other item. This might be a good alternative to a traditional pinup programs, which are getting a little overdone in supermarkets. The challenge of swapping pinups for blocks is that without the ask from the cashier (e.g. “Would you like to donate a dollar to Alzheimer’s Society?”) you should plan on raising a lot less money.

Raise money with Pinups with my course: Six Figure Cause Marketing – The Power of Pinups

Point-of-sale programs are the backbone of cause marketing, raising the majority of consumer donations each year. The dominating point-of-sale tactic is pinups.

One question I get all the time after I present on the different types of cause marketing tactics is “What’s a pinup? And where do I get them?”

The second question always cracks me up because I envision people searching for pinups in the aisles of Target or Walmart. I can hear them saying, “Where can I buy those damn things?!”

You can stop your search. You don’t buy pinups at a store. A printer makes them for you. Here are a few other things you should know about pinups.

1. A pinup, which is sometimes called a paper plaque, paper icon, scannable, or mobile, is sold in restaurants, department stores and any other place that has customers and a register. Most pinups are sold for between $1 and $5, although I’ve seen them sold for more and less. When the customer buys one, the donation is added to their bill. They usually sign their name to the pinup, which is then displayed somewhere in the business as a sign of customer support for the cause.

Together, pinups make for a powerful display.

Most pinups aren’t that big, just several inches tall and wide. They can be any shape, or die cut to look like a teddy bear, shamrock, heart, etc. The paper used for pinups is usually inexpensive, and for good reason as just about all pinups will end up in the trash at the end of a program.

Remember, the bigger the pinup, the more fancy the design, the heavier paper stock used, the more it will cost you to design, print and ship.

Most pinups cost anywhere from a few cents to a dime apiece to produce. The most I ever paid for a pinup was 18 cents each, but it was die cut, four-color, large, perforated, etc. Yours will probably be cheaper. As always, it depends on your designer, printer and your willingness to shop around and negotiate.

2. Most pinups have a place on the front where the donor can write his or her name.  It’s not necessary, but it does make the pinup a bit more personal.

3. Most pinups have the nonprofit’s logo on the front with some kind of tagline.

4. Putting a picture on a pinup is a good idea as it puts a face on the campaign. You’re not just giving to MDA when you buy its pinup. You’re helping those kids!

5. The back of most pinups includes a barcode that can be scanned at the register. This makes it much easier for cashiers to process the donation and for the business to report the donation to the nonprofit. When I began my career in the nonprofit world in the early 1990’s, cashiers used to keep donations separate in an envelope next to the register. It wasn’t the best or safest way to handle donations. If a business won’t or can’t use a barcode (e.g. a bakery, coffee shop) a good option is to designate a button on the register to record the donation.

6. The back of the pinup usually includes additional information on the nonprofit, perhaps your mission statement.

7. The shamrock pinup from MDA is a classic design that really hasn’t changed much in the past 30 or 40 years. Yeah, it’s been around that long. Other options for the pinup include coupons, which means printing a larger pinup. This can be worth it, however, as coupons can give shoppers an extra incentive to give. Businesses also like coupons, especially when other business partners in the program are distributing them to potential new customers. What’s often overlooked is that pinups are a great place to promote a program or an upcoming event (e.g. charity bike ride, walk or run). It sure beats paying for advertising.

The best alternatives to pinups are electronic asks via credit card machine (you can see an example here) and what I call passive cause marketing programs. The latter is similar to pinups but the cashier doesn’t verbally ask for a donation. These programs are less intrusive to customers and less work for the cashier, but they also tend to raise a lot less money too.

Consumers may find charity asks at the register annoying, but they also tend to give more money and more frequently when someone asks “Would you like to donate a dollar to ______________________.”

What questions can I answer on cause marketing pinups? Just leave them in the comments below!

I’ve asked Maggie to stop by and update us in the comments section of this post.

Maggie was kind enough to record this interview with some of the key people involved in the program. These wonderful supporters talk about so many of the things that are important to a successful cause marketing program I just had to share it with you!

• A sincere commitment to the program’s success.
• A recognition that local businesses should support local causes.
• Each store involved in the program has a tangible goal to achieve.
• Each location has an in-store ambassador to motivate and track employee success.
• Store managers volunteered at a Salvation Army to see firsthand where the money they raise will go.
• The importance of THE ASK. Customers won’t support the program unless you ask them!
• Incentives for employees as a thank you for their efforts.

Maggie Keenan, a branding and cause marketing consultant in Savannah, Georgia, is a graduate of my Six Figure Cause Marketing course, which shows nonprofits and businesses how to develop and execute an effective and lucrative cause marketing program.

Maggie gets an A+ for her latest effort: a regional cause marketing program to support the Chatham-Savannah Authority for the Homeless, Inc. Hodges Management Company, which owns the local KFCs, KFC/TacoBells and DQ Grill & Chills, approached the Housing Authority about doing something to help the homeless this holiday season.

Thanks to Maggie, they came up with a great campaign: Dishing Out Meals: Fighting to End Hunger & Homelessness in Our Community.

You can read all about Maggie’s outstanding cause marketing program on her blog. But let me take a moment to mention some of the things I really love about it.

It embraces the easiest and most lucrative type of cause marketing: point of sale. The pin-up below sold for a buck. While there are other types of cause marketing Maggie could have recommended to the partners, point of the sale is truly the best, especially for local programs like this one. I’ve raised as much as $300,000 in just a few weeks with pinups.

It taps every asset the business had for giving. Realizing that the pinup wasn’t the best option for drive thru customers, Maggie created a value card with a QR code that takes customers directly to the Homeless Authority website for more information or to make a donation. Great thinking, Maggie! [One suggestion: The mobile donation page isn't optimized for smartphones. Check out what my friend Bob Jones at Give.mobi can do to make this a better experience and raise you more money!]

It battled indifference and apathy from the outset. Have you ever been asked to buy a pinup but the total lack of interest from the cashier convinced you that he or she didn’t really care if you did? Hodges Management Company did their best to ensure that apathy and indifference wouldn’t be part of this program. All general managers spent a Saturday learning and volunteering for the cause, an experience they’ll share with their employees.

I’m proud of everyone involved in this program, and I’m eager to see the results when it’s done. Most of all, I’m really proud of Maggie Keenan. She’s a great student, asked lots of good questions and kept in touch with me to make sure she didn’t make any of the many, many mistakes I made in my first programs.

Congratulations, Maggie! I’m sure this won’t be that last post I’ll write on one of your successful cause marketing campaigns!

Maggie learned about creating and executing point of sale cause marketing programs in my Six Figure Cause Marketing program. You can too! Buy the recorded version of 6FCM for just $99!

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!

That happen to me yesterday when I spoke to the Women in Philanthropy in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

After Joanna and I spoke, Gwen Majercak from Cooley Dickinson Hospital in nearby Northhampton, MA shared the above pinup with me that sold in local stores for $1 and raised $10,000 last year.

Right on the pinup it says the funds raised from the program supported medical care to 9,000 newborns born to teens at the hospital.

Gwen’s success is impressive as Cooley Dickinson is far from the big city and the big chain retailers. Nevertheless, Gwen put together a great program and she’s busy planning this year’s drive.

One thing I really liked about this pinup is the perforated round icon at the top that pops out and is displayed in the store with the person’s name. The rest of the pinup, along with some important facts Gwen put on the back, goes home with the consumer.

I’m really looking forward to hearing the results from this year’s program! Congrats to Gwen and Cooley Dickinson Hospital.

Interested in learn more about point-of-sale programs and other cause marketing fundraisers? Sign up for one of my cause marketing bootcamps at  CharityHowTo or join me for my three-part training program Six Figure Cause Marketing.

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.]

Since 2004 when Ocean State Job Lot began selling their signature red gift box in their 100 stores to support cancer care services at the hospital, Job Lot has hosted multiple pinup programs that will surpass $1 million shortly after they start their winter program this weekend.

(It’s not s a surprise considering how well their business is doing, even during a recession!)

Last year’s winter program, which ran for four weeks, raised $212,000. For the past two years, OSJL has done a second program in the spring in support the food pantry at the hospital.

Cause marketing is just one way the owner of this New England discount retailer, Marc Perlman, helps us. In addition to being a major individual donor to the hospital, his company gives us  clothes, coats and food for our patients.

Just this week, Marc sent a tractor trailer full of cranberry sauce, potatoes and other products for clients of our food pantry whose Thanksgiving wouldn’t be complete without his support.

I often hold Job Lot up as an example of a great cause marketing partner. They added cause marketing to their stores to further support our cause and to engage and educate their customers in the effort. I’m sure they enjoy some benefits from all the cause marketing do, but they’ve never expressed any interest in what it does for them. (Believe me, I’ve tried!)

They’re also not a retailer that bases its giving solely on OPM (Other People’s Money). As I mentioned above, they help us in a lot of other ways.

That’s why when people start complaining about the selfishness of cause marketing partners I get confused because I’m lucky to have a few great partners that show me everyday the reasons why cause marketing is a good thing.

Right now, I can actually think of a million of them.

“Would you like to donate a dollar to help sick kids? As a thank you, you get these coupons that have $125 in savings.”

It’s a great one-two punch! But here are four more reasons your cause marketing should have coupons.

Coupons open the door to cross-promotional partners. We learned early on that some retailers would partner with us they could cross-promote with another business. This was the case with Valvoline Instant Oil Change, which wanted to target the minivan-driving moms that shopped at iParty. Now when we recruit a partner we partly base our prospect outreach on what businesses would value cross-promotion in their stores.

Coupons are hot! According to a Ad Age, last year redemption of coupons that go through clearinghouses surged 23% to 3.2 billion coupons (and up 30% to $3.5 billion in value) in the U.S., the first gain in 17 consecutive years. Through the first nine months of 2010, coupon redemption is up another 5.3% to 2.5 billion vs. the year-ago period, with the value of coupons redeemed up 7.7% to $2.8 billion. Consumers are looking for more coupons, which is great for cause marketers like me that rely on point-of-sale programs like pinups where coupons can be added. The surprising news is that consumers of all ages aren’t getting their coupons from the internet, they’re getting them the old-fashioned way: they’re clipping them.

Coupons are overwhelmingly clipped, not downloaded. 2.1 billion coupon redemptions last year came from print inserts. Internet coupons account for just 1% of distributions. So if you think adding coupons to your pinups seems a bit old school, think again. A soon to be released report shows that 91% of consumers ages 25 to 34 use newspaper coupons. Consumers are eager to use coupons and they’re getting them almost exclusively offline. And what better place to get your coupons than after donating to a good cause at a favorite store.

Coupons prove that cause marketing works. Coupon redemption during or after a campaign is an excellent way to show partners that cause marketing works and is driving traffic. After successfully helping your cause, this is just the result a business wants. One partner of ours was thrilled when a pinup program brought in 1,100 coupon-bearing customers from cross-partner stores that generated an additional $400,000 in revenue.

Coupons give your cause marketing program a one-two punch, open the door to additional partners and provides the paper trail that cause marketing works. You also have the wind at your back. Coupons are in high demand and consumers get them offline so why not through a pinup.

Why wouldn’t you want to include coupons in your next cause marketing program?