Recession Shmecession

People like goodness. They like good news and helping good causes and doing business with others who do too. Exposure to goodness makes people feel hopeful and inspired and generous. And this can be very good for business. As Tonic's own Senior Editor Caroline Walker wrote recently in The Huffington Post "wanting to re-frame issues in a good light isn't just idealism; it's responsible business and effective persuasion."

The Virgin Mobile FreeFest 2009 music concert, which I wrote about here, is a prime example of a business using good deeds — in this case giving a free concert and mounting a campaign to fight youth homelessness — to burnish its brand image. This strategy, called "cause marketing," involves creating "a marketing partnership between a business and nonprofit entity for mutual benefit," according to the Cause Marketing Forum.

A recent article in The NonProfit Times trumpets cause marketing as a winning option for nonprofits in this deflated economy. The article reports calculations from IEG detailing that “companies in North America are expected to spend $1.55 billion on cause partnerships during 2009, a 2.2 percent increase from the $1.52 billion invested in those programs during 2008.”

Some NGOs can even find themselves attracting more dollars than usual in the down economy as companies vie to display their caring on issues such as poverty, homelessness and hunger. The article identifies the example of the anti-hunger organization Share Our Strength, which has seen its revenue increase by almost 15 percent during the past year, all because of cause marketing programs with companies like AT&T and Hickory Farms.

Share Our Strength may be pulling in more money, but the frayed economy also means that the organization is confronting more hungry children than before, so every penny is needed. If it weren't for those cause marketing dollars, who would feed them?

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng