Celebrating a year of marketing for good

Over the past 12 months we've built up a marketing force across 30 countries, collectively supporting over 350 causes. We decided to celebrate the occasion of our first birthday by reviewing some of our highlights from year one, and sharing some of our plans for year two.

Year One - Building a platform for collaboration

Our Causes

Our open platform has enabled us to develop an unrivaled collection of exciting opportunities for marketers to make a real difference. While it’s satisfying to get some of the big name charities on board, many of the most exciting sign-ups are from start-up social ventures with first-in-kind business models or ideas. Like Wheelchair Laser Tag. Marketers find it almost irresistible to want to help our causes get to the next level of development.

Our Marketers

Our marketers typically have 10-15 years of professional experience and include many award and multi-award winners. Tapping in to that pool of talent and expertise is proving invaluable to our causes time and time again. Take the case of European Disaster Volunteers who approached one of our marketers for help making a success of a seasonal campaign, and ended up securing her services pro bono for 6 months.

Team

We’ve steadily added to our core team through the year. This has included substantially adding to our web development capability and taking on a chief-matchmaker to provide facilitated matching to catalyze new connections across the platform.

Ambassadors

Our Amabassador network is literally a line-up of some of our personal heroes across the voluntary sector and the marketing profession - and if you are not yet supporting Pimp My Cause one of them WILL find you...

Partnership with The Triodos Bank

The Triodos Bank specializes in sustainable finance and moved quickly to support Pimp My Cause while still in its first few weeks of activity. If more banks worked like Triodos, the current economic landscape could look very different.

Nexters

Being picked out as one of the most promising social ventures in the UK by the Nexters programme was a great recognition - and opened the doors to support from a new network of people and organisations whose aspirations resonate strongly with our own.

UnLtd

UnLtd have provided us with grant-funding, advice and support - and watch this space for further collaboration on its way in year two as we extend our ability to support their own network of social enterprises.

Bond

In 2012 we have been ramping up our interest in international development. Once such example has included teaming up with Bond, the membership organisation for development NGOs to deliver training in participatory approaches to marketing for around 30 of their member NGOs.

Join Our Core

The last days of year one saw us invited to participate in the semi-finals of the Ben and Jerry’s Join Our Core competition to find the top social ventures from across five countries.   We pitched in the Dragon’s Den, were interviewed by the brilliant Lucy Siegle and saw two of our member causes successfully make it to the final in Uganda.

Year Two - Achieving impact at scale and crossing new frontiers for marketing

The Pimp My Cause pro bono platform is now fully robust and ready to scale. So our first goal for year two is to empower more marketers to contribute more talent to more causes. Our plans include working with a top agency to raise awareness and support among the marketing community and to collaborate with professional organisations to harness their networks of marketers and expertise in marketing for good. For example, we are working with The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) on how they may be able to lend support to our project.

James Sutton, acting chief executive, said “What the team are doing at Pimp my Cause is a fine demonstration of how professional marketing can have a positive impact on society and we’re keen to be able to support them in any way that we are able to. I look forward to discussing how this may take shape in the coming months”

Many causes raise donations on the basis of passing virtually the full value of those donations directly on to their beneficiaries. Yet we understand that investment in the right marketing creates a multiplier effect, leading to a greater social impact. And this can be even more true when causes develop social enterprise models to drive their funding. In year two, we plan to look a lot more closely at how marketing can be used to multiply cause impact many times over and working to find new ways to build breakthrough cause marketing plans and access new ways of funding those plans.

Building on our expert interview series, where we bring in top experts like Doug Richard from the Dragon’s Den to advise our causes, we plan to develop new initiatives to foster thought leadership in the subject of marketing as a force for good. We plan to go further in harnessing the intellectual capital of the marketing work achieved through Pimp My Cause and to developing new ways to share that knowledge and insight across the platform and the sector.

We also see great advantages for corporate marketing teams in collaborating with us and our causes. Working with our causes can lead to breakthrough opportunities for brand citizenship as well as increasing staff creativity, morale and community “mind-share”. Learning how to develop social and environmental benefits is increasingly relevant to the day-job.

One thing will not change in year two. Everything we do is built on the basis of collaboration. So if you think marketing can be a force for good and have some ideas of your own - why not get in touch?