Beyond Cause Marketing: Outcomes Library

#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
Cause marketing isn’t getting the job done and organizations need to do more to engage individuals to solve social problems.

A More Detailed Exploration:
Six months ago, CauseShift and X-PRIZE Foundation hosted the Beyond Cause Marketing 2010 Summit on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Over 125 innovators and disruptors gathered to develop new principles for how organizations can engage individuals to solve social problems. Participants included marketing and advertising professionals, corporate representatives, government staffers, nonprofit leaders, students and university researchers.

From the outset, the 2010 Summit set expectations audaciously high and challenged participants to enlarge their mental framework to see the practice of cause marketing fitting into a broader ecosystem bustling with new opportunities.

To frame the conversation, the morning began with a short welcome and went straight into the Conversation Gauntlet, which featured the same moderator interviewing six different innovators in a consecutive series of ten minute 1:1 conversations. The insights shared by a nonprofit founder, digital advertising executive, CEO of a crowdsourcing platform, corporate philanthropy advocate, expert on X-Prize grand challenges and a federal government innovator created a mosaic of perspective and understanding for what is now possible. We recorded it all and converted the interviews into written transcripts for public viewing.

For the remainder of the day, Summit participants divided into six breakout teams to process what they heard and generate new ideas based on the broader framework and new insights. At the end of the day, Summit participants presented a sizeable list of ideas for organizations to go beyond cause marketing and ways to implement them.

In the weeks and months following the summit, CauseShift considered how to summarize the findings of the day. By laying out all the ideas side-by-side, the team saw a pattern emerge for how these ideas could be encapsulated under three driving principles of success. The Report of Findings featured in the Outcomes Library summarizes and illustrate these findings for all aspiring organizations to consider and adopt.

How to View the Outcomes Library
To view the complete Outcomes Library and a list of 2010 Summit sponsors, partners, and attendees, you can visit:
http://beyondcausemarketing.com