Tag Archives: BOGO

If Businesses Can’t BOGO and NGOs Are Crushing Entrepreneurship, Where Does That Leave Us?

If you caught my poll earlier this week asking what areas you find meaningful in the cosmos of business and social responsibility, you know that I’ve been thinking hard about how to make the biggest impact.  On one hand, there’s the CSR approach, which I’ll generalize as reaching more people but having less direct impact […]

Should Your Business Use an e-Commerce Philanthropy Platform? What You Can Gain and What to Be Wary Of

Yesterday I wrote about some of the ways that small startups with limited resources can create a social mission.  Today, I came across a tool that makes it easy for your company to try out a buy-one-give-one model called B1G1. Traditionally, buy-one-give-one refers to like products. TOMS Shoes and Sunnight Solar are great examples. Every […]

Can AT&T Count Its TOMS Shoes Commercial as CSR?

AT&T’s commercial featuring TOMS Shoes was so publicly enjoyed that AT&T introduced a 60-second version of its 30-second spot. The commercial profiles TOMS Shoes–a for-profit company that donates one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased–and founder Blake Mycoskie who uses his AT&T Blackberry to conduct business from around the […]

5 Ways to Create a Socially Responsible & Profitable Company

Recently, I had the opportunity to proselytize socially beneficial business models to a crowd of upstart entrepreneurs with varying levels of interest in social responsibility. I spoke with upstart entrepreneurs about five ways they can incorporate cause into their business, regardless of its size. Although the methods range in their levels of commitment and implementation […]

This Blog Helps Sell BOGO Lights for SunNight Solar

Go Green Solar founder Deep Patel is a solar energy aficionado, social-good actor and reader of this blog. Patel recently spoke about a plan he’s developing, which would bedeck the Hollywood sign with solar panels to capitalize on the sign’s solar energy real estate and drive energy back into Los Angeles’ grid-tie system. As I […]

Buy a House, Give a House through LJ Urban

It requires a double-take. The buy-one-give-one practice now includes houses. California eco-design firm LJ Urban constructed an eco community of 35 LEED ND Certified homes in an urban pocket of Sacramento. It’s aptly named Good. For every house sold, LJ Urban pays for the training of a local mason to build sustainable domiciles in Burkina […]

You Don’t Have to be a Big Company to Give Back

The NOW Project, a Los Angeles-based jewelry and apparel company, practices a different breed of “Buy-One-Give-One.” Through Yoga NOW, for every NOW jewelry product purchased, the company is donating one yoga class to an at-risk child. Initially, the founders had planned to give away 50% of profits to select causes. But rather than wait until […]

The BOGO Business

There’s a slow sprouting of Buy-One-Give-One businesses, where, for every product a consumer purchases, an identical product is donated to a person in need. We have Nick Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child, TOMS Shoes and, my latest discovery, the BOGO Light by SunNight Solar. The BOGO Light generates clean LED light from rechargeable solar-powered batteries. […]