Cause Marketing - Most Popular

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Social Innovations

Catalytic Philanthropy

By Mark R. Kramer 13

Despite spending vast amounts of money and helping to create the world’s largest nonprofit sector, philanthropists have fallen far short of solving America’s most pressing problems. What the nation needs is “catalytic philanthropy”—a new approach that is already being practiced by some of the most innovative donors.

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Social Innovations

The Hidden Costs of Cause Marketing

By Angela M. Eikenberry 18

From pink ribbons to Product Red, cause marketing adroitly serves two masters, earning profits for corporations while raising funds for charities. Yet the short-term benefits of cause marketing—also known as consumption philanthropy—belie its long-term costs. These hidden costs include individualizing solutions to collective problems; replacing virtuous action with mindless buying; and hiding how markets create many social problems in the first place. Consumption philanthropy is therefore unsuited to create real social change.

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Social Innovations

Millennials MoveOn

By Lee Bruno

To propel young folks to the polls, a political organization mixed Web 2.0 tools with social science savvy.

Douglas Holt - Marketing for Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship efforts need marketing as much as any business enterprise. In this audio lecture, Oxford business professor Douglas Holt asserts that there is a systematic way to learn from the marketing success of companies such as Apple, Harley Davidson, and Coca-Cola.

Social Innovations

Party’s Over

By Marcia Stepanek

"There's no question: with public trust in CEOs and corporations at rock-bottom and the change mantra out of Washington (and Davos) and this week’s TED2009 still freshly potent, cause-wired social entrepreneurs have never had a better opportunity to boost traction globally for their Web-powered ideas."

Thomas M. Siebel - Using Marketing Techniques to Fight Meth Abuse

The abuse of the synthetic drug known as methamphetamine has become a top crime problem in the United States, and now a global epidemic. In this audio lecture, part of the Stanford Social Innovation Review's conference on evaluation, IT leader and philanthropist Thomas Siebel discusses the nature of meth addiction as well as the efforts of the Meth Project, a large-scale prevention program aimed at reducing first-time meth use through public service messaging, public policy, and community outreach.

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Social Innovations

Cultivating the Green Consumer

By Sheila Bonini & Jeremy Oppenheim 15

Consumers say they want to buy ecologically friendly products and reduce their impact on the environment. But when they get to the cash register, their Earth-minded sentiments die on the vine. Although individual quirks underlie some of this hypocrisy, businesses can do a lot more to help would-be green consumers turn their talk into walk.