As we built our online presence with our Website and Blog, I encountered an interesting convergence of powerful recommendations for Cause Marketing:
- When I was shown an example of a blog, the upper left hand column presented a button to easily link and donate to the American Red Cross. I liked it. Such valuable Virtual Real Estate dedicated to good, to virtue.
- On consulting with Howie Jacobson, Managing Partner of Dixon Schwabl, Horses (and almost everything else) on Parade, he recommended cause marketing affiliation or sponsorship. (Frontier Communications, our local phone company and a Dixon Schwabl account, encourages their customers to designate $1 of your monthly bill toward Golisano Children's Hospital.)
- In a talk on entrepreneurism at the University of Rochester's Simon Business School, Thomas Harrison, Chairman and CEO of Omnicom Group's Diversified Agency Services, the world's largest holding group of marketing services companies, said he'd instructed Omnicom's more than 160 companies to present their "Plan To Give Back".
Cause Marketing can improve your brand and promotes customer loyalty. Faced with many similar choices, customers select the offering with the added value of helping a charity or non-profit. Cause-related marketing can be a powerful differentiator, marking your brand as a brand with a conscience.
The 2006 Cone Millennial Cause Study found 9 out of 10 people 13 to 25 indicated they are "likely" or "very likely" to switch from one brand to another - providing the price is equal - if the second brand is associated with a good cause.
In selecting a cause market for our Website we considered several issues:
- Since our site was local, going national, we wanted a national cause with a strong local presence.
- We considered our local Realtor's Association Charity, but it doesn't go national.
- We considered some national non-profit's with local chapters, but many had political or religious affiliations, which could turn some people off.
- We decided on the Center For Missing And Exploited Children, children being an almost universally loved group.
We went to the CMEC's Website. They had a number of ways we could put their logo or banner on our sites. None were similar to the American Red Cross's button and fit our desire to put the CMEC logo and donation link in the upper left hand column.
We've put a CMEC "text message" on our Website with a link to their donation page. We're working with CMEC now on a better solution using their logo with call-to-action text.
When our data base of street address-hooked domains and Websites grows from "All Homes For Sale" to "All Homes", WebHomeUSA.com could be the best way for every government agency to reach all the people in their target area with weather, Amber or any other alert, in their "Reverse 911" format. We could provide an alert platform in addition to contact by: phone, page, text message, email, radio and TV; and provide all the up to the minute infomation these other media can't.
I'm reminded of the business quote: "They don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care".
And Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote: "No man can help another without helping himself".
What's even better is how good I feel about giving back.
Adapt Or Die! Happy Searching.
WebHomeUSAblog; The Blog of Real Estate Search Marketing
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