The Cause Marketing Handbook provides in-depth strategies to help a business or brand:
- Select the best non-profit partner.
- Create fresh publicity opportunities.
- Incorporate the elements of a successful cause-related campaign into amarketing and business plan.
- Preempt and sustain crises and negative image issues.
- Avoid cause partnership disasters.
- Execute creative media events that will command attention.
- Measure the impact of the partnership.
- Build its online reputation.
Increase your bottom line, build brand awareness, and improve employee morale—all through a marketing campaign that embraces corporate social responsibility, earns consumer approval, and heightens media awareness. In this instructional and informative book, you will learn to how to create the ideal “mediagenic” partnership with a non-profit organization and how to select the ideal cause partner.
Cause-related marking, also referred to as cause marketing (incorrectly referred to as corporate social responsibility), is a public relations strategy that forges a strategic alliance between a for-profit company and a non-profit organization (or “cause”). In a cause marketing campaign, a company incorporates a philanthropic agenda as part of its marketing strategy, garnering ongoing public relations (media) attention and visibility through cause-related events, internal communications, online marketing, merchandising, package design, and other marketing activities. A cause partnership is symbiotic: The non-profit receives heightened awareness, increased donations, and improved volunteerism while the corporate partner benefits from ongoing, positive media coverage, an increase in sales, improved customer loyalty, and superior employee morale and retention. Through a strategic cause marketing initiative and the outcome, which is a softer, more compassionate corporate persona, a company can effectively communicate its commercial message image in a non-commercial way. Furthermore, if properly executed with substantive charitable support, it can preempt potential crises and protect its image.