The Cherry Creek Neiman Marcus in Denver was the sponsor of Fit for the Cure on Friday. September 12.  A little blurb in the paper announced that customers could receive a complimentary fitting in a Wacoal or DKNY bra and Wacoal would donate $2.00 to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

I had no luck finding more information on the Wacoal or the Neiman Marcus site.  Neiman’s site under the Company Overview only stated, “Community and Philanthropic Information – Please call us at 214-741-6911 for community and philanthropic queries.”

In my opinion, the involved companies are missing an opportuntiy by not being more transparent and letting people know they are doing this program.

In the Tuesday, September 9 edition of the Denver Post, there was a little blurb in the business section about Boulder’s Celestial Seasonings and two new antioxidant green teas being introduced for October’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Today I went to their website to learn more and was pleased to see the pink ribbon displayed prominently on their home page with a link to more information.  Turns out Celestial Seasonings has selected tto support he National Breast Cancer Foundation through the sale of two new teas. 

Their website states, “Introducing two new antioxidant-rich green tea blends to coincide with Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Cranberry Pomegranate Green Tea and Tropical Grapefruit Green Tea.  We are proud to partner with the National Breast Cancer Foundation in their continuing efforts toward improved education and prevention for women across the country.

Celestial Seasonings dedicates this new selection of delicious, antioxidant–rich green teas to women everywhere who exhibit strength, dedication and courage in their fight against breast cancer, and to everyone who is making a difference working toward the goals of helping women presently diagnosed with breast cancer and finding a cure as soon as possible.”

Clicking on the web link to the National Breast Cancer Foundation on Celestial’s site, took me to another page on their site which gives some educational information about breast cancer, discusses the partnership and gives a link to the Foundation’s own site.  

Celestial Seasoning’s site states:  “Every three minutes, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States. That adds up to more than 200,000 new cases of breast cancer every year, and despite advances in prevention, these numbers increase annually.

Still, there are good reasons for hope. According to the American Cancer Society, the five–year survival rate for localized breast cancer has increased from 80% in the 1950s to 98% today. Increased awareness of the need for early detection plays a crucial part — the National Breast Cancer Foundation estimates that 70% of all breast cancer cases are first detected during breast self-exams.  Celestial Seasonings and the National Breast Cancer Foundation — Partners in Spirit and in Action.”

When I went to the Foundation’s website…I could find no mention of Celestial Seasonings in the partners section or among press releases (latest there was from May 2008 – the Foundation needs to do some serious website updating!)

Guess I need to go buy some more tea!

I got an “personalized” email today with the Starbucks Gold News.  At the bottom, they provided me a visual of the amount of money my dividend amounted to – which will be donated to the nonprofit I selected when I signed up.  So the dollar amount ($3.07) for last month is not large based on how much I spent at Starbucks.  However, that they track it… AND let me know…is a great way to keep me hooked in and feeling good about my cappuccino addiction!

What I would now like to see from Starbucks (and hopefully they will do this in the future – the program is only a month old) is how much has been raised TOTAL for the two nonprofits customers can choose to support by donating our dividends.

So, if you are doing a cause marketing promotion with your customers…what are you doing to update your customers periodically – both about the piece they have contributed to the cause you are supporting as well as how much you have raised overall… of which their piece is only a small part?  If you are not sharing that information, you could end up losing business down the road.

The big news hit yesterday…IKEA is coming to Denver (well, actually Centennial)…FINALLY!  I can smell the Swedish meatballs and lignonberry sauce already.  As you can tell, I am huge IKEA fan – have been since 1990 when I lived in Crystal City, VA for a couple years working for the U.S. Agency for International Development and had my first experience with the IKEA at Potomac Mills.  Having lived in Finland as an AFS exchange student for a year and then 10 years later for another year as Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki…IKEA (although a Swedish company) it is as close as I can get to the Finnish experience here in the U.S. most of the time.

Several years ago at the Business for Social Responsibility annual conference, I ended up sitting with the head of community relations for IKEA for a meal – by accident.  Thought I’d died and gone to heaven as I am such a loyal fan – kept trying to figure out how to offer my services for product instead of my usual fees…  Anyway, at that time they were in discussion about developing a partnership with Save the Children, a group I was also working with to develop systems to evaluate the impact of their domestic youth programs so we had a very interesting discussion. 

Later, in 2006, I learned that one of IKEA’s key partners was UNICEF and I wrote a post about that partnership as I thought it was very fun that they had an endless loop video detailing the partnership for customers playing on the TV in one of their living room displays in the Bloomington, MN store. 

Check it out!

Over the weekend I was in San Francisco attending Brendon Burchard’s Nonprofit & Corporate Partnership Seminar.  It was intense – over 27 hours of training in 3 days – but VERY good.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to partner with businesses and/or nonprofits – especially the big ones!

I first heard of Brendon at Christine Comaford-Lynch’s Rules for Renegades Summit in Irvine, CA last spring.  Brendon was one of her speakers and the main reason I chose to attend her Summit.  I was intrigued to hear Brendon speak as I had never heard of him before and wanted to learn more about his approach to partnerships because of my own work in this area.  Well…he was certainly high energy, a great speaker…and he had great content.  He talks about partnerships at the graduate level and uses business/marketing speak while doing it.  I knew I could learn a lot from him so signed up for the 3 day intensive.  It did not disappoint!

Brendon is his own best example of leveraging partnerships to grow his business exponentially over the past three years.  He wrote a great book, Life’s Golden Ticket, which I have read and really enjoyed.  And the level of strategy he developed to launch and grow book sales is impressive.  He established partnerships with three major nonprofits – Junior Achievement, Kiwwanis, and the YMCA – serving over 30 million people.  To oversimplify it, he offered them a percentage of his book sales in return for leveraging their distribution networks.  And that’s just where it starts – he speaks for them and about them, has helped develop leadership curriculum, has helped them develop partnerships with each other, and the list goes on and on.  His partners love him and he is one of their strongest promoters.  It has been win-win-win-win…..

If you want to do high level partnerships, this seminar is a must!

I was in Nordstrom in Circle Centre Mall in Indianapolis last week and noticed a flyer at the cash register for a promotion I want to share with you.  It’s the first time I have seen this approach to cause marketing.  In cause marketing, a company usually commits some percentage or dollar value to a cause when you purchase a specific item. 

So in this case, Not Your Daughter’s Jeans and Nordstrom have added a twist to cause marketing! The Nordstrom flyer states, “NYDJ will donate $1 to Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation for every customer who tries on a pair of Not Your daughter’s Jeans.  No purchase necessary!”

No purchase necessary??  All you have to do is try on the jeans for NYDJ to donate!  That’s a new one to me!  The promotion is running until Dec 31 so go try on some jeans!

The website gives additional information including the fact that NYDJ has committed to donating at least $500,000 to the Komen Foundation.