Cause Integration

By Geoff Livingston, Founder of Zoetica Media. Read the Article in its entirety at Mashable.com.

Augmented reality promises a new level of interaction between people and data. Now, even the newest for-profit applications can turn heads by utilizing this new advanced technology.

The non-profit sector has started to experiment with augmented reality. One of Sunlight Labs’ early entries is their Recovery.gov mashup. Another example is Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum, which highlights virtual reconstructions of Satricum and the Forum Romanum. But while there are early leaders, non-profits generally lag behind in market experimentation.

“Several technical non-profits are currently experimenting with augmented reality,” said Nathan Makino, Chief Executive Officer of Immersive Tech, a non-profit focusing on the adoption of immersive technology. “Other non-profits support and participate at the International Symposium for Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)… Non-technical NPOs may need a few more years for AR to become mainstream enough to warrant its adoption.”

Read the rest of the article on Mashable.

Some examples of augmented reality in action:

Recovery.gov placed a layered virtual surface over Google Maps to highlight where US taxpayers’ recovery dollars have been going.

See: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/recoverygov-contracts-your-phone/

The Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam uses augmented reality to annotate live streaming of museum art that moves with the user’s movement of a camera affixed to an Apple computer.  Watch this YouTube video demonstration:

Have you seen any interesting examples of augmented reality in use by a non-profit or a cause-integrated company?

From the Harvard Business Review:

“David A. Smith, the founder of the Affordable Housing Institute (AHI) tells us that “markets alone will never satisfactorily house a nation’s poorest citizens…whether people buy or rent, housing is typically affordable to only half of the population.”

The result? Smith points to a “spontaneous community of self-built or informally built homes — the shanty towns, settlements, and ever-expanding slums that sprout like mushrooms on the outskirts of cities in the developing world.”

We started discussing the issue, examining the subject through the lens of reverse innovation.
Here are five questions Christian and I asked ourselves:

* How can organic, self-built slums be turned into livable housing?
* What might a house-for-the-poor look like?
* How can world-class engineering and design capabilities be utilized to solve the problem?
* What reverse-innovation lessons might be learned by the participants in such a project?
* How could the poor afford to buy this house?”

Read the article in its entirety on HBR.org.

Vijay Govindarajan raises numerous fascinating points in this article, and he ends by daring stakeholders to step in and solve the problem of pervasive third world homelessness.  He asks CEO’s, world leaders, head of NGO’s and non-profits.  My question to you is, can business solve this problem?  Or perhaps more pertinently, can’t business solve this problem?

The power of business has been leveraged to provide electricity across the world, instantaneous communication to anyone, anywhere with internet access, transportation worldwide, and of course technologies for solving a litany of first world problems (e.g. I don’t have a tablet computer, please invent an iPad).  With business capable of all this and so much more, why can’t business design a $300 house for the poor, funded in part through a micro-loan to the would-be owners of the house?

The plight of homelessness in the third world sounds like the calling of either a social entrepreneur or a business looking for a cause to add to its purpose.  Would a company Tyvek, Pulte, or KB Homes be willing to tie in a $300 home to the sale of a home, along the lines of a Buy One Give One model?  The answer to third world homelessness may be a lot closer than most people realize.  It could lie with a good idea and then a company brave enough to see that cause through.

Smart corporations are learning that there is tremendous value in a crowd of passionate, engaged and mobilized fans. It’s easy to ask Pepsi with their Refresh campaign, or Chase with their $5,000,000 in community giving that was distributed through Facebook voting for their expertise. But for other companies looking to tap into the euphoria of a social media crowd gone wild, perhaps the best way to earn one’s stripes is in looking at these competitions from the perspective of one of the winners. Nancy Lublin, head of the non-profit youth-mobilizing organization Do Something! has written a fantastic article on Fast Company about what it takes to win these competitions and bring the bacon home for non-profits and other do-gooders.

And yet, in the lesson she imparts to would-be changemaking breadwinners, much can be learned from companies seeking to understand how the crowdsourcing donations game really works.  In a nutshell, Nancy boils this strategy down to four simple points:

1. Choose the right game. In Nancy’s article, she speaks that it’s important for organizations to pick a competition and then do its best to win, rather than hop around from competition to competition hoping to find the golden ticket.  But the lesson applies equally for company’s looking to involve themselves with crowdsourced donating.  The lesson is that it’s important to have one element to the competition, something easily definable, that can be passed from person to person in 140 characters or less.  We live in a digital world, and if your competition is too complex to tweet about, you might miss out on some great applicants, and therefore some great social media buzz.  Obviously you are helping people in need with your  efforts, but I’m comfortable saying out loud that you want your company to achieve positive buzz as a result of your efforts.  So keep it tweet-worthy!
2. Rally your tribe.  Nancy talks in the Fast Company article about how it’s important to bring the people passionate about one’s cause together.  But what does that mean?  It’s important for companies to understand that tribes of passionate people exist, small and yet deeply galvanized communities that will respond to the right opportunities.  With this knowledge, crafting a good crowdsourced corporate donating campaign becomes more manageable:  create a campaign that taps into the desires of tribes:  tribe recognition and success of their movement.
3. Be tactical.  People will game the system with their supporters.  Do you want a campaign where people can vote over and over again, or where you test the charities on their ability to mobilize masses – one vote per person?
4. Show some love.  Be social and be human!  I talked in a previous post about how Kaiser Permanente quietly gave away $13 million.  Imagine the positive press they could have received if they crafted a PR campaign around the human responses to those donations.  Images of the kids helped.  Videos of communities rebuilt.  Show love means have the human touch.

But these are just one blogger’s thoughts.  For the original piece, and Nancy Lublin’s take (she is an inspiring and engaging individual, bold enough to approach Donald Trump in his office, and so her opinion is to be respected and heard) please visit the Fast Company article here

The world of cause marketing has benefited tremendously from the success of the Toms Shoes One for One model.  In short, Toms Shoes gives a pair of shoes away to a child in need for every pair of shoes their customers buy, every time a customer makes a purchase.  So every Toms Shoes wearer can be assured that by purchasing their pair of Toms Shoes, a child in the third world can wear shoes too.  It makes the buyer feel good, and it helps kids in need.

That said, Toms Shoes is far from the only company implementing the Buy One, Give One model into its business practices.  Here Cause Integration lists 5 innovative BOGO campaigns that give back in ways you might not expect.

1.  Glasses company Warby Parker through charity partner Restoring Vision gives glasses away to people in need in 24 countries throughout Latin America, Africa and South Asia.  According to Warby Parker, over 500 million people around the world don’t have proper access to vision care.

2.  Wine vendor CellarThief.com donates water for every bottle of wine they sell on their site, “turning wine into water” to slow down the 42,000 deaths that happen every week because people do not have clean water.

3.  Dog food company Darford International from British Columbia helps feed rescued dogs in Canada and the US by attaching a single-meal packet of dog foot to the top of each box of food with its Plus One campaign.  Customers can remove the packet and deposit it into a Plus One hamper near the dog food aisle; then local dog shelters pick up the food at retailers.

4.  Everytime a gentleman buys a tie from specialist company Figs, the company donates a school uniform so that African kids can attend school.

5.  Walt Disney theme parks gave volunteers a day at the amusement park in exchange for a day of volunteering.  How many? One million people volunteered.

Read more from Causerelatedmarketing.blogspot.com 1 | 2 | 3

So what is it?  Entrepreneurship.  Taking an idea conceived in a stroke of insight, and then planning and accomplishing in order to make the idea real.  At Cause Integration, it is this blogger’s belief that having awareness about social issues is crucial to developing solutions to social problems that confront humans all across the world.  And yet, awareness is while important a first step in a longer path towards furthuring human progress.  What comes next is the hard part, and it is the part that separates those who talk and those who act.  Talk is cheap.  Acting on the talk is being an entrepreneur.

At a TEDxEdmonton Conference last March, MIT lecturer Cameron Herold spoke about raising kids to be entrepreneurs.  And with a world recognizing that new business models can actually change the world through social enterprises, hybrid for-profit / non-profit businesses, and even innovative non-profits, it is evident that humans can now harness their creative capacities and entrepreneurial abilities in order to finally rid the world of the causes that remain to be handled – the global water crisis.  Poverty.  Female sex slavery, trafficking, and general oppression of women world-wide.

Yes, awareness is key.  But now is the time to, quite simply, do something.  And as Cameron Herold argued, society has been structured to teach kids how to be good employees, and to aspire to a high-paying and comfortable job.  At the same time, the status quo has left the world with much more work to do.  The answer in this blogger’s mind lies in applying the ideal of entrepreneurship, the values, the skills, the mindsets, the action – to bringing progress to the world and ultimately solving the issues that still face humanity.

Watch Cameron Herold’s approach to entrepreneurship, and share your thoughts on how entrepreneurship can be used to bring solutions to the social causes we highlight at CauseCast and on the Cause Integration blog.

While most of the world went about its business, something remarkable took place in Boulder, Colorado.  Specifically, 25 social entrepreneurs from across the world united in Boulder for a 10 week program that develops and empowers social enterprises with the greatest chances for real scalable global impact.  Called the Unreasonable Institute, the program starts with an open fund-raising platform – only the top 25 entrepreneurs who crowdsource the cost of their tuition ($6,000) are able to attend.  Then, entrepreneurs meet, dine, and live with 60 mentors from the pinnacle of the social entrepreneurship and social change fields over a 10-week period.  Selected names include Mike Del Ponte, founder of SparkSeed to Kevin Jones, chief organizer of SOCAP10, to David Bornstein, founder of Dowser.org and author of “How to Change the World“).  Imagine living dorm-room style (called the Unreasonable Mansion) with 25 brilliant people taking action to change the world, while mentors who have done it regularly drop by for dinner.

The Institute just finished up its inaugural 10 week program, and at every stage the Unreasonable Institute team made their Institute one of the  most webbed and connected Institutes yet.  From Unreasonable TV, an online television series highlighting the Unreasonable Finalists to  tweeted live updates and links to live-streams of presentations and events, the Unreasonable Institute used 21st century technologies at every stage (not to mention their crowdsourcing model for fundraising the tuition of the Unreasonable Finalists).

The program empowers  social entrepreneurs with sustainable ideas and scalable impact.  Selected ventures have a business model with opportunity to break even after year one, and with aims to reach an impact of 1 million people by year three.  From the Participatory Development Initiative, which aims to stop the tradition of honor killings in Pakistan to Mosaic Ventures, which is bringing micro-financing for clean tech to the US, to Kito International, which empowers street youth in Kenya by educating them and helping them become young entrepreneurs, what unites the Unreasonable Institute attendees are their passion and commitment to bringing their ideas to fruition.

NextBillion.net, one of the social entrepreneurship movement’s leading bottom-of-the-pyramid publications (focusing on the lives of the bottom 1 billion people in terms of income), had this to say about the Unreasonable Institute program itself:

“The most impressive undertaking, however, is the Unreasonable Institute itself.   The 20-something co-founders, Daniel Epstein and Teju Ravilochan, felt the pains of starting their own ventures.  Their experience inspired the launch of the Institute, which focuses on the two things any young entrepreneur needs the most in order to survive:  mentors and a support network of peers.”

NextBillion.net went on to describe: “The scene in the Unreasonable Mansion (aka CU-Boulder dormitory) looks a little something like this:  a whiteboard in the dining area announces daily workshops, talks, and visiting mentors, a sign-up sheet for one-on-one sessions with mentors lingers near the kitchen, a mess of couches and extension cords clutter the Bean Bag room, and the Fellows are everywhere, hunched over their laptops re-working business models, setting up meetings, emailing team members, and drafting proposals.  They’re a close-knit group.  And everyone – the mentors, the founders, the thousands of eyes watching the Institute – is excited to see what happens to their ventures post-Institute.  That, after all, is the true test of Unreasonable’s success.”

Learn more about the Unreasonable Institute at http://UnreasonableInstitute.org.  Applications for the 2011 Unreasonable Institute open in September, and we’re hoping that CauseCast CauseIntegration blog readers will be among the finalists!

Read the NextBillion.net Blog Post about Life in the Unreasonable Mansion

Pepsi’s Refresh grant-giving program has been featured on cause marketing blogs, the social media web,  and across the news as quite literally a landmark in a corporation re-inventing its brand through a high-quality, community-engaging cause marketing campaign. Their recognition is certainly earned; the program aims to give away a total of $20 million, in so doing funding community programs from laboratory equipment for AIDS research, a dental clinic for children with disabilities, and scholarships for community-service oriented musicians.

$20 million changes lives, and the buzz around Pepsi Refresh is well deserved.  But while Pepsi has been brewing positive coverage  about its community grants, the country’s largest not-for-profit healthcare organization, Kaiser Permanente, just gave away $13 million of their own with little social media fanfare.

Is this a case of non-profits under-utilizing the tools of social media because they don’t value the creation of a brand around doing good?  Do non-profits automatically fit into a do-good label and so then fail to see the need to publicize their good works?

Those questions remain to be seen (and we are eager to hear your feedback).  That said, the community benefit that Kaiser provided is undeniable.  Read about a few of their program’s noteworthy successes:

• The California WIC Association, that enables women, infants and children statewide to access healthy supplemental foods and nutrition education, received a $100,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente.
• The Food Research and Action Center received a $150,000 grant for the D.C. Hunger Solutions program, which strives to create a hunger-free community in Washington, D.C., by improving the nutrition, health, economic security, and well-being of low-income residents.
• The Oregon Food Bank, which serves an estimated 950,000 individuals annually throughout Oregon and Clark County, Wash., was awarded $330,000 over three years to support its long-term vision of an adequate, nutritious, locally available food supply for everyone.
• DC Central Kitchen received a $141,000 grant to fund the recycling of 2,000 pounds of surplus food each day and turning it into 4,500 meals for the hungry in the Washington, D.C.

• Share Our Strength, a national organization that works to end hunger and poverty in the United States and abroad, received $198,000 to support the “First Class Breakfast: Helping Maryland Students Combat Hunger and Obesity” program, which will help combat hunger and obesity by increasing the number of Maryland schools that provide breakfast nutrition programs.

For more about Kaiser’s $13 MM Community Grants effort, visit: http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/30222-Kaiser-Permanente-Issues-13-Million-in-Community-Benefit-Grants

Forbes.com has brought us some of the most imaginative and compelling corporate social responsibility campaigns of the past year. Some featured campaigns include Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, the famous Product (Red) campaign started by rockstar philanthropist Bono, Levi’s Jeans (with their Go Forth campaign), and even Twitter.

Some of our favorites.

Twitter has launched its own wine label to promote literacy because, as its founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams put it, “If you can’t read, you can’t tweet.” The social media website is collaborating with Crushpad, a San Francisco-based winery, and the nonprofit organization Room to Read in what they call the Fledgling Initiative. Customers can pre-order $20 bottles of pinot noir or Chardonnay and follow the wine making process via Twitter. The wine is scheduled to be bottled in August, and $5 for every bottle sold will be donated to Room to Read for literacy initiatives in India.

Tide’s Loads of Hope program started in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when Procter & Gamble teamed up with Feeding America to help New Orleans families. The campaign brings laundry facilities to places struck by disaster, and volunteers wash, dry and fold clothes for free. The mobile fleet contains machines that can handle more than 300 loads of laundry a day. It recently tended to communities afflicted by floods in Mississippi and Tennessee, and it has washed more than 33,000 loads of laundry since it started. Tide has also sold more than 65,000 vintage-style T-shirts to raise money to help families affected by natural disasters.

Macy’s “Believe” campaign draws on the famous 19th-century newspaper editorial that proclaimed, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” and said he “exists as certainly as love and generosity.” The campaign, created by JWT, New York, benefits the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Children write letters about why they believe in Santa and drop them in R.H. Macy Santa mailboxes; Macy’s donates $1 for each letter, giving $1 million both in 2008 and 2009 to Make-A-Wish for the first million letters it received.

Read about other highly innovative campaigns for corporate social responsibility at Forbes and PSFK.

Cause marketing is all about good matches.  In the same way you and your significant other have similar interests, it’s important that you find in your cause marketing partner shared values that make the connection more than mere lip service.  With that in mind, the connection between office supplies chain Staples and young people empowering non-profit Do Something! makes perfect sense.  Why?  Young do-gooders getting ready to go back to school need supplies to make their businesses happen and their dreams real.

Check out this PSA promoting the partnership, featuring celebrity Nikki Reed from the movie Twilight.

From BrandChannel.com Contributor Sheila Shayon:

Staples is partnering with the U.S. non-profit group DoSomething.org on its 2010 Give-Back Pack initiative, which is also being promoted by celebs including country music star Kellie Pickler, TV star/singer Drake Bell and pop music star Jason Derulo as “pack leaders.”

Do Something, which is also promoting its Staples partnership with PSAs featuring Twilight actress Nikki Reed, teamed with Sprint on its “Thumb Wars” anti-texting campaign earlier this year.

Running through September 18, fans can choose their “pack leader”—Pickler, Bell or Derulo—and go online for exclusive information and suggestions on planning Do Something 101 drives in their communities.

The three celebs will donate $1.00 for each member who joins their pack, up to a $5,000 ceiling. Prizes include a meet and greet with their idol at the campaign’s conclusion.

“The Staples/Do Something 101 School Supply Drive is an easy way for anyone to make a difference in their local communities. The back-to-school season is a perfect time to conduct this cause marketing campaign,” notes Don LeBlanc, Staples’ SVP of retail marketing, to MediaPost.

Read more about the Staples & Do Something cause marketing partnership at BrandChannel.com

Echoing Green, one of the top activators of social entrepreneurs in our country, has released some data on where social entrepreneurship is headed based on the sheer volume of applicants to their Echoing Green fellowship.  To all you aspiring social entrepreneurs out there, the rewards are significant – winners of the Echoing Green fellowship can count on $60,000 to $90,000 in seed funding for their social ventures in addition to access to partnerships, consulting from Echoing Green staff, and a network of over 450 established social entrepreneurs working globally.  And with the pedigree that comes with the Echoing Green fellowship, Fellows have gone on to raise more than $1 billion in capital for their social ventures.

The Social Entrepreneurship Change.org Blog pointed out 3 clear social entrepreneurship trends:

1. Social Entrepreneurs are starting early. 55% of applicants to Echoing Green are under 35.
2. Non-profit experience is normal but not required. In the eyes of author and social entrepreneur Nathanial Whittemore (founder of Assetmap, a tool to unlock social value in networks), statistics show more movement from the general business space into social entrepreneurship.
3. Hybrid organizations are experiencing growth. Social entrepreneurs are coming up with innovative, hybrid ways to form their business – not exclusively non-profit or for-profit, but rather a structure of both.

Excitingly, a full 50% of the applicants were of the Millennial generation.  With more Millennials than ever looking for meaningful work as an avenue for their world-changing creative expression, it is empowering to know that social entrepreneurship exists as a meaningful option.

Read the full article from the Social Entrepreneurship Change.org Blog.

Photo credit: Echoing Green – Social Change Starts Here