It turns out customers are paying a lot of attention to the tizzy of cause marketing campaigns surrounding them. In fact, they are underwhelmed with information.

Cone’s 2010 Nonprofit Marketing Trend Tracker shows yet another reason to report on your campaign or program results–because customers care.  Astoundingly, not even half of consumers think companies and nonprofits share enough about their partnerships. In this case, however, ‘more’ doesn’t just mean more. It means relaying only the information that’s important to consumers as they evaluate your business, your selected cause and nonprofit partner and the campaign in front of them.

Fifty-eight percent of consumers are more aware of corporate/nonprofit partnerships today than in the past (from the Cone study cited above).  Give them what they want while you have their (limited) attention on your cause and product. Here’s how.

• 61% take the time to learn the details of a corporate/nonprofit partnerships before deciding to support it.
  
  Don’t make the customer hunt. Explain what she needs to do to trigger what action from your company and how it will benefit what cause.Pampers 2008 campaign was ‘gettable’ in 2 seconds. When you buy a package of Pampers diapers, PG would make a donation of one child’s vaccine to UNICEF.  The more specific your commitment is, the stronger the appeal. A commitment of 1 vaccine is stronger than a commitment of 10% of sales (how much is that?), and 10% of sales is stronger than “a portion of the proceeds.”  Avoid qualifications. A good program is as clear as Pampers.  You’ve lost me if only my purchase of Tropicana Light from Safeway during March qualifies.
• 75% want to hear about the impact of your corporate/nonprofit partnership.
  
  Whether you partner with a nonprofit on a cause marketing or awareness campaign, event or product, consumers want to know the outcome.  How much money was raised and who did it help? How many people were served? How were they specifically affected?  We’re conditioned to want feedback. If I give you advice I want to know if it helped. When I write a blog post I want to know how much it’s read. The desire for feedback means you’ve successfully involved the customer in the cause. They feel personally connected to it and are interested to know how what they stood behind made a difference in someone’s life. As a company or nonprofit, this is the best part! You can stand up and say “Olivia, look how your decision to take this action helped this person.”
• 48% think nonprofits and companies disclose enough information about their partnerships to consumers, donors or others interested in the relationship.
  
  Which means more than half of the often-called jaded and harried consumer wants to know more about the problem my business is committed to solving and what opportunity I’m giving the customer to get involved.  Give more in the clarity and impact of your program, not in your marketing message. Consistent programs can lead to greater recognition, feelings of personal commitment and streamlined messages. Think about (Product) RED or Newman’s Own. We know what they stand for without reading the fine print. Their consistent campaigns have familiarized us with their mission, although I think both brands could do a much stronger job of communicating the results of their campaigns and donations triggered by our product choices.

What do you think? Do you still pay attention to or evaluate cause campaigns? What most convinces you about a given campaign?

We know that transparency is a strong indicator of a company’s social mission. Turns out, it’s also good for business. Recently, transparency has been shown to be a significant driver of ultimate financial performance. The thread between transparency and profit is trust. By opening up internal operations, successes and failures to the public and to employees, we demonstrate transparency as a company, which customers like. But the reason customers like this is because it allows them to trust us, to recommend us, to tell us when we err and to choose us again.

Thera N. Kalmijn of SureGround and R. Paul Herman of HIP Investor discussed these ideas in Trust, but Verify – a New Mantra for Customer Growth published on Sustainable Life Media. The article is excellent, examining how we can earn and nurture consumer trust and use it to rally support and profits for our social mission. Some of my favorite points from the article are below.

• Increased transparency can get you an 18% jump in revenue, while opaqueness seems to lead to a 6% drop in revenue (per EngagementDB’s 2009 report).
• Transparency is defined by engaging customers in social media and using multiple formats to communicate company operations.
• Top drivers in determining a company’s reputation are 1) transparency, 2) honesty and 3) trustworthiness, compared to 1) product quality, 2) customer needs and 3) financial performance as found four years ago (2010 Edelman Trust Barometer).
• The adages (trust has to be earned, trust is fragile) are still true today. Increasingly, social and environmental disclosures-especially metrics-can help drive or damage trust.
• If a company doesn’t meet its social and environmental problems, they risk brand loyalty, price premiums, and reputation.
• An effective sustainability strategy creates trust and helps protect and build brand.
• SureGround’s developed this schema to guide companies:
  • Transparency–Appropriate, accurate, timely information and metrics
  • Recognition–The company has relevant rankings (in sustainability, green, etc.) and appears often in sustainability indexes
  • Understanding your consumer–What social and environmental solutions give them value?
  • Signaling–Visual “shortcuts”  that signal sustainability, e.g. labels, social media, media awareness, reporting*
  • Teaming–Two-way engagement with stakeholders including NGOs, industry partners, supply chain, and customers
• Seeing is believing. Trust must be signaled and then verified, i.e. labels, ratings, industry recognition.
• Developing an understanding of customer concerns creates deeper relationships and trust.
• Partnering with NGOs to address relevant social and environmental issues is also critical to trust. “The overwhelming majority of the informed public say they would be more likely to trust a company that partners with NGOs to solve global challenges such as climate change, poverty, or disease…” (2010 Edelman Trust Barometer).
• Failures in any the areas of the TRUST schema lead to reputational and financial risk–even more so when a company’s core strategy is based on social and environmental promises.

*Caroline Duell decided to certify Elemental Herbs as a B Corporation because the certification was a visual symbol of what her business stood for.

What’s your experience with building trust in your company? Alternatively, as a customer, has a specific incident earned or lost your trust in a company? Does it only take one slip or is it a compilation of openness, listening and reporting?

Social mission is a business strategy that differentiates your company from competitors, drives customer loyalty and advocacy, draws and retains employees and saves you money. There’s a tendency for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs to think they can’t leverage this as a business strategy until they are bigger, richer or more known. But they’d be wrong. It’s not how much you give but how (and that) you give that makes the difference. Your small business or fledgling startup camped at the kitchen table can reap the benefits of a giving program on even the smallest budget.

I invited business philanthropy and cause marketing consultant Maggie F. Keenan Ed.D to Cause Capitalism to talk about what a giving program is, how to start one, when to begin and how it will benefit your business.  Maggie is the owner and Chief Giving Strategist at givingadvice and author of Small Businesses Give Big: Why charitable giving is a great business strategy! She defines ‘giving strategy’ as giving back through financial donations, in-kind products, time cause marketing campaigns.

Click the player to listen to our conversation or right-click and save to download.

• Business that give back share four commonalities: (1) they feel a sense of purpose to help their community; (2) their giving is a reflection of their personal, family or business values; (3) they make giving (regardless of how much) a part of their business from the beginning; (4) they let the rewards of giving flow back into their business without seeking results.
• Begin giving now.
• Have a plan that guides your giving program. One of the common mistakes that Maggie sees is businesses that don’t have a plan in place. Think about trying to run a business without a knowing your market or customer base. Giving is a business strategy, so treat it like one and have a plan–read on to see how.
• Decide where you want to give. To determine what cause or organization to support, look at where you’ve donated in the past. What issue do you want your business to help solve? What cause can you commit 100% of yourself to? In addition, the cause should have some connection to your business or customers. Find a balance between the two.
• Decide how you want to give. Maggie advises companies to use a mix of financial donations, cause marketing and employee-led fundraising events or volunteering to form their giving strategy.
• Decide when you want to give. Look at your cash-flow. If you business slows in the summer, that’s the time to do fundraising events and employee-volunteer programs. When sales pick up during the holidays, you can roll-out a cause marketing program.
• Your giving strategy should be managed and measured like every other aspect of your business. Institute processes for it and think about how you can make it turn-key.
• We’re tired of hearing how much you’ve done. How are you advancing the cause you’re passionate about? Maggie is emphatic when she says that your messaging needs to be “cause-centric, not ego-centric.”  There are no pointers for making your message cause-centric because commitment to a cause can’t be faked. Fakers talk about what they’ve given or how much they’ve done. Passionistas talk about why the cause is important and why they are excited to be supporting it.
• You don’t have to share you numbers. Small businesses may feel chagrined (or deterred) by the amount they can contribute. But it’s not about the amount, it’s about your commitment to a cause and your ability to engage your employees and consumers in the cause (e.g., cause marketing campaigns that use percentage-of-sale or pinup tactics or event fundraisers).
• Maggie sees giving not as a business obligation but as a benefit.

Thank Maggie or tell her what you think of the interview on Twitter.

His first customer was a slim-legged exotic dancer from Bourbon Street. His second, a Catholic priest in clerics. Both came to George Cosntances’s Indonique Cafe to drink high-end teas. George and his wife Daya ran the Magazine Street cafe for 16 months until Katrina hit, emptying the city of people and molding stocked tea leaves. After Katrina, George moved his family to Connecticut and his focus to those who had been less lucky. His story is about including those at the bottom of the supply chain and reinventing a business with a passion for tea and a compassion for people.

The crannied effects of Katrina now ripple through Darjeeling and Assam, India, where the majority of Indonique’s tea is picked. Through his T42 program George takes 10% off the top of his sales (not profits) and gives this to Mercy Corps to invest in tea growing communities in India. A $10 box of tea sends $1 to Mercy Corps, which invests 89 cents of every dollar (a high efficiency ratio).

George and I talk about how his background in geology and paleontology shapes his business, how he won over Mercy Corps and why sending 10% of his profits to Indians whom he will never meet wasn’t a choice, but a compulsion. After a limited run as a successful storefront and tea distributor in New Orleans, George is reinventing Indonique as an online commerce site.

Excerpts are highlighted below. To download instead, right-click and save.

• Trained as a geologist and having worked for two decades as a paleontologist, George views the world in terms of evolution. Rather than trying to tear down the system of capitalism and building something entirely new, he wants to take capitalism and change it slowly so that it evolves into something better than what it is today.
• George isn’t willing to wait (and realizes he doesn’t have to) to make his living and then do good, opting instead to have both in his business and life now.
• After his family drove out of New Orleans and into Connecticut, George was struck by his fortune of having a family and someplace to go. It changed his perception of fortune and gave him an urgency to help others. He looked at Indonique’s supply chain and “didn’t need to look far to see the problems.”
• From this, he launched T42 to reinvest in the lives and communities of the Indians who pick Indonique’s tea.
• Building a better and stronger business mandates that “No one is left out of the project stream. If they do well, I do well.”
• After determining that he wanted to include tea growers in his business, George assembled an informal team of advisors, who promptly talked him down from his first idea to something that he could execute more immediately.
• He began by researching NGOs with a strong presence in the tea-growing areas of Darjeeling and Assam. He looked for good return on his dollar and an understanding of the region, which led him to Mercy Corps.
• Before approaching Mercy Corps, George submitted a formal business plan. His advice is to approach a potential non-profit partner as a business partner and to get their attention the first time.
• One incentive he offered Mercy Corps was open accounting. At any time, Mercy Corps has total access to Indonique’s books.
• He made actual contact by calling the local Mercy Corps office in Cambridge, MA, and finding an internal champion there.
• George used the Small Business Administration’s SCORE program for guidance and services.
• Indonique does not charge a premium to fund its tea pickers, instead it forgoes a marketing budget.
• Honesty has helped George. When he needs something or doesn’t know something, he asks for help and finds it.
• Unexpectedly, some suppliers have shied away from Indonique, anxious that their poor labor practices will be exposed through the T42 program. Conversely, George wants to work with them, not punish them. His solution is to go further down the supply chain and support the individuals who pick the teas, starting a chain reaction from the grassroots that benefits all stakeholders.
• It’s not always easy. Indonique is a business and it doesn’t get a pass on hard times regardless of its owners’ good intentions. The transition from a beloved community-based cafe to an online e-commerce site has been tough. George is using blogs and humor to connect with tea-drinks and coffee drinkers just waiting to be turned.

You should tell George what you think of the interview on Twitter

Even the best cause marketing campaigns and employee volunteer programs don’t give your company the social mission necessary to distinguish it in the eyes of competitors, potential employees and investors. Still, these initiatives are terrific tools that I fully encourage you to use, which is why I invite experts here to teach them. However, if you have the best hand-crafted furniture and lighting, but your house lacks a floor, you’re not paying attention.  A social mission is integrated in all elements of a business from marketing to resources to employee policies to shareholder dividends.

I asked Salah Boukadoum, co-founder of Soap Hope, an online retailer of natural body care products, to talk to us about his radical business model and how it puts money directly in the hands of non-profits, funds micro-loans, provides low-cost marketing and gets him revved for work each day.  His ideas and ambition for the Good Returns business model are fascinating and thus far proving to work.      To download instead, right-click and save.

Key points:

• Salah and his co-founder Craig Tiritilli hypothesize that a self-sustaining organization can have social good as part of its mission.  To test this model of ‘Good Return,’ they created Soap Hope (formerly, they ran a successful B2B software firm in Dallas).
• At the end of each year, Soap Hope  invests 100% of profits into partner organizations that provide micro-loans to women in poverty all over the world. One year later, they the investment is returned without interest. During this year, non-profits are able to use the capital to grow their infrastructure, expand services, etc.
• If Salah and Craig’s hypothesis is true, then every company of a similar size would earn their shareholders higher returns on capital if they operate under a Good Returns model than they would otherwise because 1) customers will choose a company with a social mission over one without, price and quality equal, and 2) the company can forge relationships with non-profits that aid in marketing and networking.
• Soap Hope does not donate profits. It’s a true for-profit company that pays dividends to shareholders. The difference is that they delay they payment by one year to invest the profits in a non-profit partner.

• Soap Hope’s marketing costs are proving to be substantially lower than a company without a social mission even though many of Soap Hope customers aren’t even aware of the company’s social mission the first or second time they purchase products.
• In the next five years, Salah and Craig aim to recruit 99 additional companies to the Good Returns model (which doesn’t mandate that these companies invest 100% of profits, but that their model is built around a social mission), to generate $1 million in micro-loans and to create a series of templates that guide other for- and non-profits in creating deep partnerships.
• Since Soap Hope launched in December 2008, it’s grown 25% month over month. Salah expects profitability in year two.

Salah goes deep into his beliefs about the power of business and Soap Hope’s business model. I really encourage you to listen to our conversation.