Pick a Cause Your Employees Care About

As many others have previously said on this blog, cause marketing is a great way to make your customers feel better about doing business with you. I would add that cause marketing should make your employees feel better about working for you as well. I work for a relatively small company (27 employees) and twice a year we donate web design and development time to non-profits. We accept submissions from any 501(c)3 that completes the application packet and submits by the posted deadline. It's not a complicated packet and doesn't force the applicant to jump through too many hoops, but it does require them to invest some time in explaining how our donated services will impact their organization.

Once the application deadline has passed, a group of employees volunteer to review all the submissions and select one or two organizations to receive a website. This group of employees bases their decision not only on what makes sense strategically for the company, but on what the organization means to them. Once the recipients are selected, those employees have a sense of ownership of the project because it's an organization that they chose. When we launch the sites, our employees share the news through word of mouth and their own social media channels because they're proud of the work they did to help that non-profit.

Sometimes a member of that non-profit's Board of Directors is an executive at a for-profit company and they decide to contract with us for more work. Sometimes they don't. But having a work force that's proud to help their community definitely boosts company morale and ultimately helps your bottom line.