Every year, consumers in the hundreds of thousands purchase exotic animals such as tigers, snakes, monkeys, and parrots as pets. Millions will also pay to see these animals perform in circuses or parks.

Unfortunately, many of them are acquired when they are young, heartwarmingly cute and easy to control. Then, as all animals must, they grow up and many owners find themselves unable to keep the full-sized wild animals in check. Performing animals that rebel against cruel treatment are frequently killed.

These animals often end up euthanized or forced to live, bored and without stimulation, in deplorable conditions. That’s why Born Free USA advocates in favor of laws restricting ownership and business uses of exotic animals, mobilizes resources to help rescue these creatures from abusers and runs a large primate sanctuary in Texas.

Born Free USA is just one of the two million worthy causes that consumers and our brand partners’ loyalty program members can support through Kula.com. Each of these organizations addresses a serious societal issue, and every month we’ll be profiling some of the causes that need our support – and yours – today.

This month, we’ve profiled three of our causes: Gardens for Health, Bridge House and Dream Project.

• Gardens for Health – You’ve probably heard that old proverb about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to fish. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Gardens for Health takes this saying to heart and puts it into practice. The group provides nutritional and agricultural education and supplies – including seeds and livestock – for rural dwellers in Rwanda, where 35% of child deaths are attributable to malnutrition. Gardens for Health understands that emergency food aid is only a short-term solution to hunger, and works with local health clinics to deliver assistance where it’s most needed. The organization also runs a large farm in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, where it grows food for donation as well as seeds and teaches locals how to tend crops and produce yields that feed families, provide trade items and help break the generational cycle of poverty. So far, 630 families have enrolled in Gardens for Health’s programs.

• Bridge House – Human fallout from the economic crash and subsequent recession can be seen in every American city: growing numbers of homeless on the streets, people losing homes and jobs, whole families living out of cars. Kula’s hometown of Boulder, Colorado, is no exception. Five days a week, Bridge House serves up breakfast and lunch for the area’s homeless and working poor, providing a safe space to be during daylight hours and shelter in bad weather. The organization also helps those who have fallen on hard times – it provides basic health care and mental health services, rental assistance for working poor clients and connects clients with a wide selection of other organizations that provide similar services. It also runs a great “Ready to Work” program, which places homeless adults in transitional jobs and assists them in finding housing and more permanent work. Last year the nonprofit served 60,000 meals and connected over 700 people with medical and employment services.

• Dream Project – In any country, there are families that have been locked in a cycle of continual poverty for generations, usually due to a lack of the educational and employment opportunities that enable those in these situations to break free. Based in Colchester, Virginia, the Dream Project focuses its efforts on helping impoverished children living in the Dominican Republic get the up-to-date education they need to realize their own potential and open up more opportunities to achieve a more prosperous life. The organization runs four Montessori preschools, summer schools and summer camps for at-risk children and several libraries, computer labs and community centers. Every year, the Dream Project helps give about 3,000 kids a real shot at a better life.

Want to support to a worthy cause of your choice? Simply visit www.kula.com, register by creating an account, search our cause database by keyword, category, or by location top up your account and start donating. Doing good can be that quick and easy.

Next month we’ll turn the spotlight on another three great causes that Kula is supporting and that you can too.  To learn more or register today, please visit https://www.kula.com/causes.

“Would you like to donate a dollar to help children who are suffering from cancer?” asked the cashier at my local grocery store.

Upon hearing that question, I had a vision of a small, young child lying in a hospital bed, thin, pale and balding from chemotherapy – but still flashing a gap-toothed grin. A close friend of the family has a child that is fighting the disease. It’s a cause that is dear to my heart so I tell the cashier to ring up the donation along with my grocery purchases.

Now had the cashier solicited the contribution simply by mentioning the name of the cause, it’s quite possible that I would not been moved and declined to donate. But the cashier touched my emotions by getting to the heart of the matter: innocent children are going through the pain of cancer. Would you like to play a part, even a small one, in helping to ease that pain?

Aside from the fact that no one wants to get judgmental looks from fellow shoppers waiting in line, emotional appeals to shoppers in the checkout lane are very effective. So effective, in fact, that America’s top 63 brick-and-mortar and online checkout charity programs – including EBay’s, Wal-Mart’s and McDonald’s – raised $358.4 million last year.

Emotional Connections Lead Consumers to Open Their Wallets

According to research, 69% of those who give, both to checkout programs and to charitable initiatives in general, do so because they feel a personal or emotional connection. That’s why it’s a smart strategy for companies to know what customers care about and engage them through those cause affinities.

As if we needed further proof that consumers today are more cause-conscious than ever, the recently-released 2013 Cone Communications/Echo Global CSR Study shows nine of 10 consumers would boycott companies they see as socially irresponsible. Nearly 62% of them use social media to engage with favorite brands’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and 87% say CSR influences their shopping decisions.

Clearly, knowing what moves customers matters, even to the world’s largest corporations like Disney which has promised to switch to sustainable paper products because it knows that environmental causes are among the most widely supported by people of all ages.

The idea that companies can better connect with their loyal customers through relevant causes, earning their goodwill and repeat business, was the guiding principle behind Kula’s founding. And it’s the feeling that drives Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing™ (CLM). When companies help their customers to help others by channeling unredeemed rewards into donations to the causes that touch those customers’ hearts – just like the grocery store touched mine – they can earn goodwill and loyalty in return.

With so much information about our world’s challenges constantly at consumers’ fingertips, cause-consciousness is only going to grow.  Knowing what causes your customers care about and communicating your support for those causes – as well as making it easy for customers to give – gives brands the power to build powerful, self-reinforcing loyalty relationships that stand the test of time. 

Social Capital. What is it? The formal concept of social capital was first introduced by L.J. Hanifan, West Virginia’s State Supervisor for Rural Schools, in a scholarly paper he published in 1916.

He defined social capital as “the tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit.” He also concluded that the community as a whole benefits from the cooperation of all its parts.

It’s this belief in social capital that drives all the best cause marketing we see on a daily basis. The Harvard Business Review recently published an insightful article that explores how social capital works to connect companies with consumers who go on to become brand advocates – who promote the brand to others, bring in referrals and provide constructive feedback.

The author advises companies looking to forge stronger ties with customers through cause marketing campaigns to be mindful of keeping “social norms” and “market norms” separate, using this example from the Boston Marathon bombings:

“Suppose one of the stranded runners in Boston had offered $50 to one of the local residents who gave him a ride, under the rationale that it’s about what a taxi would have cost. That would, of course, have been highly offensive: it would have introduced a market norm into a decidedly social situation.”

I can’t imagine too many of us would take offense at having an attack survivor offer them $50 in exchange for some help. These people just experienced a horrific event and most of us wouldn’t expect them to be worrying much about social graces. Of course they get a free pass along with everyone’s best wishes.

However, I also can’t imagine too many of us would actually take the money. Most of us would have helped the stranded runner simply because it would have been the right thing to do: a social norm.

So using the above scenario as an example, a traumatized runner offering money isn’t offensive, but it would have been offensive for the other person to take it. Helping the runner would have been, as it should, its own reward – social capital.

To Work, Cause Marketing Must Be Genuine

I think this also speaks to the topic we covered in a recent Kula blog post, “Causeify” Your Marketing Campaigns and Stand Behind What Your Company Cares About. ” The blog discussed the booming “causeification” of marketing and the pitfalls companies need to be aware of in order to support causes without alienating customers. That’s because increasingly cause-conscious and clued-in consumers can tell whether a cause is being supported or exploited.

And when exploitative cause marketing hits the headlines, the company takes a damaging PR hit, making the whole exercise moot, since not even the cause got to benefit.

But if a company is making a genuine contribution and not only communicates that but also takes the next natural step and enlists customers in its efforts – through participatory cause marketing on social media, for instance – everyone wins and builds up some social capital in the process.

Real Support for Causes Yields True Customer Engagement

Picture it: a popular restaurant chain:

• Follows through on its pledge to donate 75% of profits from a special line of menu items to a nonprofit that trains promising at-risk high school juniors and seniors for careers in the culinary industry.
• It uses Facebook, Twitter and a mobile app to share the individual success stories its donations have made possible.
• It encourages customers to further support the cause.

In response, education-conscious patrons, who can easily access the campaign on their mobile devices, contribute their own resources while building awareness of both the company and the cause across their social networks.

That’s the power a well-thought out, genuine and inclusive cause marketing campaign can have. It organically draws customers’ brand and cause advocacy while giving them a chance to get involved with causes they care about.

This is what Kula does through its Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing™ platform: companies can use it to build stronger connections with their customers by allowing them to convert unused rewards into donations to causes they care about. Consumers can also give directly to their preferred nonprofits through at Kula.com.

Because when we build social capital we make our communities better.

What’s the most memorable cause marketing campaign you’ve ever seen? Have you ever participated in a cause marketing promotion? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

Over the past year, the marketing world has been abuzz with talk of gamification. What’s gamification you ask? It’s the integration of gaming elements or gaming mechanics into marketing campaigns.

Companies across many industries have increasingly tapped consumers’ reasons for enjoying games – the rush of a challenge, the thrill of figuring something out, the pride in beating opponents – to create fun and engaging experiences for their customers. In other words, companies are using (or trying to use) gamification as a customer engagement tool.

At the same time, another phenomenon has also been gaining traction among marketers: linking campaigns for products and services with support for social causes, which I saw very recently referred to as causeification. It’s more commonly referred to as cause marketing.

It’s everywhere today, being used by companies large and small. According to a recent MediaPost article, 80% of Fortune 250 companies have branded cause marketing programs, while researchers expect cause sponsorship, a form of cause marketing, to reach $1.7 billion this year.

Why are companies investing so heavily in cause marketing? Because supporting causes matters to their customers.

Research firm eMarketer reported that “a growing number of consumers considered ‘social purpose’ the leading purchase driver when quality and price were equal.” And 76% of American Internet users approve of brands doing well while doing good, a 33% increase since 2008.

Cause Marketing: Driving Customer Engagement – When Done Right

Here’s an example of great cause marketing: since 2006 Pampers, the popular Procter & Gamble diaper brand, has teamed with UNICEF to provide tetanus vaccines to babies. For each pack of diapers purchased, Pampers donates one tetanus vaccine to UNICEF’s Maternal and Neonatal Tetanus Elimination Program.

So far, Pampers has donated 300 million vaccines. That’s a lot of diapers sold – and a lot of babies and mothers helped. Not only that, a campaign focused on babies’ needs makes perfect sense for this brand.

However, as cause marketing grows more ubiquitous, some companies are rolling out “bandwagon” efforts that don’t really do that much to support causes. The MediaPost article I mentioned earlier cites an example of an unnamed grocery chain that boasts of its commitment to consumer health – by saying it sells lots of apples. The processed junk food it also sells goes unmentioned.

Phenomena such as pinkwashing (selling pink breast-cancer themed products that do little for the breast cancer cause) and greenwashing (deceptive marketing of products to make them seem more environmentally-friendly than they are) tend to make consumers suspicious of cause marketing campaigns as a whole, because of their lack of transparency.

Increasingly savvy and skeptical consumers are tired of it. For example, a 2012 survey found that 93% of consumers say they’ve switched to energy-saving behavior at home but are less willing to pay more for “green” products than they were in 2008.

That’s why KULA makes it a snap for consumers to make up their own minds about which causes to support, by connecting them to our database of over 2 million vetted nonprofits.

This also makes it very clear that cause marketers must ensure their campaigns are providing a genuine social benefit. They also need to clearly communicate to their customers exactly how their purchases are benefiting causes.

Bad cause marketing hurts both causes and the companies who invest in those campaigns. When done right, however, cause marketing can build huge customer goodwill as well as long-lasting engagement and loyalty.

And that’s something we strive for every day at Kula, whether you’re one of our business customers or a cause-conscious consumer who understands that no matter how many points, miles or dollars you have to donate through our online giving platform, you are making a difference individually and collectively to over 2 million causes and the communities they serve in every corner of the globe!

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing last week, the Kula team sends its heartfelt wishes to the survivors and anyone that was impacted by the senseless and devastating event.

As I wrote in a post last week, although a tragedy such as Boston’s bombing shows the very worst of our human nature, it also shows how ordinary people come together to support their communities and their fellow citizens.

The federal government as well as state officials, relief organizations and corporations swooped into action, providing emergency medical care, bringing in supplies to assist the injured and stranded, as well as setting up websites to help collect donations.

One of those sites, JetBlueGives, was launched last week to help rally relief funds. Proudly powered by Kula and developed by our partner JetBlue Airways, until May 17, the airline will be collecting donations from its TrueBlue members and customers – of which JetBlue will match up to $100,000. The funds raised will go to The One Fund Boston, created by the city’s mayor, Thomas Menino, and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick to provide assistance to those affected by the bombings.

In just over a week, The One Fund has raised $23 million to provide much-needed services, including food, shelter and medical care, to the bombing’s victims. And, as of Monday, April 22, JetBlue, alongside its customers and crew, has raised $25,000 toward that cause.

We applaud their incredible support as well the following campaigns that are helping Boston’s relief efforts:

• The Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund is collecting donations to send staff and volunteers to assist bombing victims. What’s really special about this initiative is that it also sends in Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were wounded in battle to provide emotional support and guidance to those injured in the blasts. They, more than anyone, understand what those severely injured are going through.
• Singer and songwriter Neil Diamond, whose hit song “Sweet Caroline” has been played at all Boston Red Sox home games for over a decade, pledged to donate all royalties from the song – sales of which have skyrocketed since the bombing – to The One Fund.
• Several cities in the US and around the world have organized races in solidarity with, and to raise funds for, bombing survivors. “Run for Boston” events have taken place in New York City, St. Louis, San Francisco, London and Thessaloniki, Greece, among many others.

The above initiatives are a testament to the cause-consciousness of today’s consumers, who increasingly want to do business with companies that share their values – and relief following disasters such as the Boston bombings, is one of the most widely-supported causes according to Nielsen. 

In today’s “always connected” culture, technology is making it easier than ever to remain cause-aware empowering consumers to act upon their concerns from anywhere and at any time. It’s also making it easy to respond to the world’s unmet needs – for food, for clean water, for shelter, for healthcare, for peace – with a few simple clicks.

If you haven’t already done so, please show your support for the Boston Marathon bombing victims and their families by visiting JetBlueGives today. Remember, you don’t have to be a member of the airline’s frequent flier program to donate.

The Kula team’s thoughts are with the victims, survivors and families of the Boston Marathon bombings that took place earlier this week.

As we continue to absorb and process the news of this horrific event, there is some comfort in knowing that, when a tragedy like this shows the worst of people, in the aftermath, people can also show us the very best we’re capable of.

Longstanding relief organizations such as the Salvation Army – which quickly deployed 30 volunteers via four mobile kitchens to help dispense food, drinks and emotional support to survivors – have been stepping in. Bostonians have been rushing forward to offer complete strangers stranded in their city (authorities evacuated nearby hotels) the use of their guest rooms, sofas and even cars.

Through its Kula-powered site jetbluegives.org, our partner JetBlue is pledging to match up to $100,000 in donations from members of its TrueBlue loyalty program to The One Fund Boston, which is providing assistance to bombing victims and their families.

These responses stand as a reminder of how highly cause-conscious we are today. And as consumers, we don’t just show it in the wake of disasters. Increasingly, we show it in the purchasing decisions we make, day in and day out.

Cause-Conscious Consumers: Demanding Social Responsibility from Companies

As if we needed yet more data to support this, but a new survey by Good.Must.Grow. found that 60% of US consumers think buying goods from socially-responsible companies is important. And 30% said they will buy more goods and services from such companies this year, an 18% jump from 2012.

This trend is even more pronounced in the world’s large emerging markets, where 80% of consumers say they would switch to a brand that supports a cause.

Of course, brands everywhere have been aware of a wider consumer base that has been growing increasingly cause-conscious for years, and have responded by joining forces with nonprofits for mutually-beneficial cause marketing campaigns.

Here’s a sampling we’ve compiled from around the world:

• Earlier this year, Ford India launched a pilot cause marketing program that worked with local authorities and nonprofits to deliver medical services to rural villages – while creating a positive perception of the Ford brand. The Sustainable Urban Mobility and Uncompromised Rural Reach (SUMURR) initiative dispatched a Ford Endeavour SUV across rocky terrain, delivering health professionals to set up temporary medical camps that, as of early March, had helped over 1,600 women and children in remote mountain areas receive sorely-needed care – at a time when Ford is pushing to expand sales operations in India to 500 by mid-decade.
• In 2012, the British grocery giant Tesco seized upon cause marketing to drive sales of Halo, its own brand of feminine products. In a campaign playfully dubbed “Show Us Your Knickers,” Tesco invited women and men to customize a pair of underpants and submit their efforts for a chance to win £500 in Tesco vouchers – and pledged to donate 15% of Halo product sales to a selection of nonprofits working to promote women’s physical and mental health, as well as domestic violence and teen pregnancy issues.
• In Mexico, Bonafont bottled water is joining forces with environmental conservation group Pronatura in support of a project to restore 5,000 hectares of mangrove forest – which serves as feeding ground and nursery for many marine species and as a barrier against storm surges – in Oaxaca and Chiapas. Bonafont will donate part of campaign-branded water sales revenue to the reforestation project and will donate a mangrove tree for every new “like” on its Facebook profile.

Clearly, companies in every continent and region have realized that, in a hyper-linked age when it’s easier than ever to be cause-aware, it makes sense to connect with consumers by partnering with nonprofits that have a positive impact.

Kula.com: A New Way of Connecting You with The Causes You Care About Most

That cause awareness is what led Kula Causes to build a new online giving portal that empowers individual donors to search our database of over 2 million nonprofits and causes from around the world – and donate according to their personal cause-related affinities.

One example of a great cause we connect donors to is Global Refuge International, a Colorado-based organization that works with partners in the developing world, helping to provide healthcare, shelter, food and other basic needs to victims of disease, famine and war.

The best part of the new Kula site?  There are thousands more to choose from – addressing issues including food security, environmental sustainability, human rights, education, disaster relief and wildlife conservation. In fact, we think that there is a cause that just about everyone will love and want to support!

So have a look at our new website at www.kula.com  - and tell us what you think.

Better still, why not register and start connecting with the causes you care about today?

The internet, social media and mobile devices have irreversibly impacted our day-to-day lives. Most would agree these types of technology have made everything from our daily communications to the way we consume news, shop, pay our bills, access music and be entertained a whole lot simpler and much more efficient.

Thanks to technology, we can deposit checks without having to go to the bank, we can keep in touch with our friends, relatives and colleagues from near and far – and even create business plans and presentations at 35,000 feet in the air.

The data-processing capabilities of both desktop and mobile devices are growing rapidly and devices are becoming more streamlined (remember the first bricklike mobile phones?). At the same time, the 24-hour news cycle accessible on those devices is helping consumers to become connected to the causes they care about and in doing so, more cause-conscious. And these two trends are increasingly dovetailing to create a “new normal” of quick, easy tech-enabled charitable giving.

One example is Network for Good, which has channeled over $800 million to more than 80,000 nonprofits across the world since its founding in 2001.

According to the organization’s Digital Giving Index 2012 Year in Review, while four percent of consumers gave online in 2002, that number boomed to 65% of consumers in 2012. Between 2011 and 2012, overall online giving grew by 18% while donations made through branded (as opposed to generic) Web sites and social media jumped 20% and 21%, respectively.

That’s a lot of growth!

New and innovative ways to harness the “always on” power of today’s technology continuously emerge and following are a few examples we think illustrate this progression particularly well:

Social Media Empowering At-Risk Youth

During the 2012 holidays, luxury carmaker Lexus launched its “Check In for Charity” drive, wherein any participants checking in through Facebook or Foursquare between December 1 and January 2 triggered a $10 donation to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, an organization which provides enriching afterschool activities for at-risk youth. The initiative raised $200,000 for the nonprofit.

PayPal Philanthropic Efforts Going Mobile

Online payments giant PayPal’s “Give at Checkout” program enables online shoppers to donate money to various nonprofits when they complete a purchase. While PayPal has been doing this for years, the company recently optimized this feature for mobile, making it a snap for consumers to give whenever and wherever they are. It also conducted a survey of consumers who gave to Haiti earthquake relief efforts and found that 25% preferred to donate through text message and 24% preferred giving through Web sites.

The Winning Circle: Charitable Choices Driving New Levels of Brand Loyalty

The concept of doing well while doing good – through social enterprise – has been gaining traction in both the business and philanthropic worlds and the result of which is a company like ours. Through our Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing ™ (CLM) platform, companies with loyalty programs can make it easy for their members to convert any unused points, miles or other rewards into donations to the causes of their choice from among over 2.5 million nonprofits the world over. The customer goodwill companies earn boosts loyalty, which in turn boosts repeat purchases and rewards earned – which increases aid to causes large and small. Think of this as a winning circle.

As the rates of mobile adoption soar across the world, and with technology keeping us aware of the causes that need our support, the trend of digitally-enabled giving is only going to grow.

What are some of the best online giving initiatives you’ve seen and why? We would love to share your views in the comments section below.

“The way we’ve been taught to think about giving and charity and the nonprofit sector are actually undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world.” – Dan Pallotta, Founder, AIDS Ride and Breast Cancer 3-Day.

I found these words, spoken by Pallotta during the recent TED 2013 conference in Long Beach, California, particularly inspiring because they speak to what KULA is all about: in essence, doing well while doing good.

And he’s right. At the core of Pallotta’s presentation is the hard fact that, as a society, we’re not conditioned to think about nonprofits as businesses that can grow, so they are hobbled by an obsession with “overhead” in the wider donor community.

As a result, nonprofits can’t use competitive salaries to lure top talent, and they can’t devote the necessary budgets to advertising and fundraising – this is considered overhead that is not being spent on the cause.

But overhead is part of the cause – and if competently managed it can lead to more successful fundraising efforts and overall nonprofit growth, which means more people helped and likely mission accomplished.

Mixing Nonprofits with Profitability

The idea of melding charity with business has been gaining traction. In fact, we wrote about this back in January in a post called Lessons From NRF.  During the NRF’s annual retail conference, The Container Store’s CEO Kip Tindell told attendees that “charity alone won’t save the world. It actually takes…business and capitalism to do that as well.”

At KULA, we really get this. In fact, it’s our whole reason for being.

That’s why we offer companies a chance to build powerful and meaningful customer loyalty by allowing their loyalty program members to tap into a huge dormant resource – the nearly $16 billion in rewards that go unredeemed each year – and steer it toward the causes closest to their hearts.

Democratized Giving In Action

Here is a typical scenario: Jane Doe is a member of her favorite supermarket’s loyalty program, and she has a certain amount of points she knows she won’t be able to redeem. As a chemistry teacher, Jane strongly believes that more initiatives are needed that promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) studies among young girls.

So Jane uses the loyalty program’s online platform to find a local nonprofit that promotes STEM courses for girls and converts her available points into a cash donation to that organization – quickly and easily. She experiences the emotional “glow” of doing something for a cause she cares about and shares her donation with her social networks.

And her goodwill toward the company that made her donation possible increases exponentially, which means she returns to buy again and again and again – and steadily donates future points to education-related causes.

Philanthropy may, indeed, be “the market for love,” as Pallotta put it. But changing how we think about nonprofits and embracing the idea of making money while supporting causes is far more likely to help those nonprofits grow enough to effectively tackle the big social problems we all want to see solved.

What do you think about the concept of doing well while doing good? What are some of the best social-enterprise efforts you’ve seen? I welcome you to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

In 2006, U2 frontman and activist Bono and politician Bobby Shriver hit on the idea of creating a cause marketing campaign that could enlist the help of almost any consumer brand in order to raise funds for fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa. 

By December of 2012, companies as diverse and well-known as Apple, Nike, Motorola, American Express, Starbucks and Microsoft – as well as many other global brands – had launched Product Red campaigns, raising over $200 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. 

It’s one of the largest cause marketing campaigns, ever. Of course, the above companies couldn’t have done it alone. What made the success of the greater Product Red campaign possible was, and still is, the rising cause consciousness of consumers all over the globe. 

A Nielsen study published in 2012 found that two-thirds (66%) of consumers would prefer to buy from companies that have some kind of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative in place. It also found that almost half of consumers (46%) would be willing to pay more for products or services from socially-responsible companies. 

These consumers aren’t just buying from brands they see as “purposeful,” either: they’re also advocating for these brands, promoting them to friends and family. In another study carried out by Edelman, 72% of respondents said they would recommend a cause-supporting brand over one that doesn’t engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. 

Nielsen also reported that the majority of consumers (66%) prioritize environmental protection and sustainability. The next most popular causes were science, math and technology education (56%), wiping out hunger and poverty (53%) and disaster relief (52%). 

It’s very clear these consumers aren’t simply buying from brands they see as “purposeful,” either: they’re also advocating for these brands, promoting them to friends and family. And, increasingly, this advocacy is happening through social media channels and on mobile devices. 

Technology, connectivity and our voracious  desire for “always on” news and information has empowered cause-conscious consumers to inform themselves about what is happening in the world – at any time and from any place. And now, companies with loyalty and incentive programs can also empower their customers – by giving them a wealth of choice in causes to support.

That’s Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing™ in a nutshell. It allows companies to earn loyal customers’ goodwill and repeat business by making it easy to convert unused points, miles or other rewards into cash donations to causes that truly matter to their customers. 

When companies incorporate CLM™ into their loyalty programs, they build stronger emotional connections with customers by putting the power of charitable choice in their hands. And, because CLM™ links loyal customers to over 2.5 million causes, that choice is almost limitless.

Our philosophy? 

Reward your customers with that type of power and they will reward you back – with meaningful, long-lasting brand loyalty. 

Stay tuned for more insights on how to empower your program members through cause-related loyalty marketing initiatives. 

It seems that today’s loyalty programs aren’t inspiring a whole lot of brand-love…at least, according to a recent study from Deloitte. 

The concept of rewarding customers for their repeat business goes back to at least the late 1700s. But it’s airlines – along with hotels – that pioneered the modern loyalty program or “points for rewards” model that we’ve come to know. But, despite these companies’ vast loyalty experience, the US fiscal crisis of 2008 and the ensuing recession have had a profound effect on buyer behavior.

During an economic crunch, most consumers find themselves forced to focus more on hunting for the lowest possible prices than on racking up rewards. 

So, it’s not too surprising that Deloitte’s researchers reported that:

• About 30% of hotel loyalty program members are at risk of switching preferred brands;
• Hotel loyalty program members spend nearly half their annual hospitality budgets with rival brands.

And if loyalty’s pioneers are having these issues today, we know they’re affecting the loyalty industry as a whole.  But companies with loyalty programs have options for fighting the recession’s effect on loyalty. Brands that are experiencing diminished loyalty can turn things around by embracing two trends that naturally reinforce each other: cause consciousness and mobile technology/social media. 

Cause-consciousness among consumers is more prevalent now than ever before. eMarketer recently reported that “a growing number of consumers considered ‘social purpose’ the leading purchase driver when quality and price were equal.” And 76% of US Internet users said they approve of brands making money as a result of social purpose, a 33% increase since 2008 (according to Edelman’s 2012 Goodpurpose study).

Social Sharing: Turning Consumers into Cause Advocates

Furthermore, today’s consumers are not only hooked on social media – considering the massive membership numbers of Facebook (over 1 billion) , Twitter (over 500 million) and other platforms – they are also accessing social sites primarily through their mobile devices. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, recently announced that the number of mobile Facebook users had surpassed that of desktop users – and that his is now “a mobile company”.

How do these trends reinforce each other, you ask? Mobile and social make our world’s challenges, whether on a local or global scale, more visible than ever, and today’s cause-conscious consumers are increasingly using mobile to donate to nonprofits online. They’re also using social platforms to share their contributions, and instantly advocate for their preferred causes.

This is a powerful mix that companies can leverage to boost customer engagement, loyalty and, ultimately, ROI in an era where loyalty programs must innovate to stand out from the pack.

And how can companies innovate? Well, for one, technology has made it possible for brands to enable their loyal customers to convert unused points, miles or other rewards into cash donations to causes chosen by the customers themselves – the foundation of KULA’s Cause-Related Loyalty Marketing™ platform.

With CLM™, participating nonprofits – and there are over 2.5 million of them – can build detailed profiles, like those found on Facebook , where they can tell their stories through articles, videos, photos and other media postings. And consumers share their charitable activity with their own social networks, essentially promoting these causes to everyone in their online sphere.

Brands that adopt CLM™ also benefit by differentiating themselves from regular loyalty programs and by forging meaningful emotional connections that drive customer loyalty, a must during tough times when consumers have to watch their wallets.

Consumers’ use of social media – as well as their mass migration to mobile devices – has gone from being just a trend to being the “new normal.” That’s not going to change, and neither is the growing demand for corporate social responsibility. This makes it clear that combining causes with technology is the ideal prescription for building a newer, and stronger, type of brand-love.