GO CATS GO! (Let's make a Wildcat difference!)

I wrote this email recently and sent it out to my NU networks to show all the great work that Northwestern Alumni are doing to help kids around the city in hopes that some folks will decide to help us out this holiday season. Can you take a few minutes to send a similar note around to your friends, family or colleagues to let them know about why you care about helping at-risk kids through tutoring/mentoring? OR if you happen to be a Northwestern alum like me, go ahead and copy my message verbatim if you'd like and send it around. You'll be surprised how many people will listen.

Happy Holidays!

Chris
_________________________________________________

Hello Wildcat!
My name is Christopher Warren and I'm a recent Northwestern grad--class of 2008. Being the world-class institution it is, NU has a lot to be proud of: a tradition of academic excellence, top-notch faculty, 3 beautiful campuses, an undefeated basketball team and a bowl-bound football squad to boot! GO CATS! However, what I'm most proud of is the difference it's young alumni are making in the lives of young people right here in Chicago.

Cabrini Connections, The Tutor/Mentor Connection is a Chicago nonprofit organization that connects at-risk youth growing up in poverty with networks of caring adults that are committed to their success. They are a particularly effective organization due to their unique global/local strategy, which operates a single, model program in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood while strategically supporting the growth and operation of similar programs throughout the city, from the far south-side all the way up to Evanston. Despite recent challenges presented by the economy they have a proven record of success over the past 18 years, which owes much to the consistent support of generous individuals in the Northwestern University community like yourself. In fact, a whopping 3/4 of their full-time staff is comprised of Northwestern alumni, who recently brought a group of promising high-school students from Cabrini-Green to visit our campus!

The strength of our Northwestern education and the networks of people that we've met there have put us on the path to success. As a student leader at Northwestern and beyond, you are in an enviable position, surrounded by people and resources that kids growing up in the isolation of urban poverty can only dream of. Can you join me this holiday season in sharing some of that with a donation to help us continue building networks of support for inner-city kids? If you cannot give now, please consider forwarding this email along to 5 people in your NU network so that together we can continue to make a positive Wildcat impact on lives all around the city.

Happy holidays and GO CATS!

Chris Warren

Former Northwestern University Public Interest Program Fellowand Cabrini Connections, Tutor/Mentor Connection Volunteer

25 of our students on a Campus

Visit at NU this past October

Former NU running back

and all-star Cabrini Connections

supporter Tyrell Sutton

Recent Northwestern graduate and Video Club

Coordinator Shu Ling Yong teaches digital

film editing techniques to our students

Fundraising: Cause Marketing 3

So in my quest to find out more about cause marketing, I've found a plethora of resources on a website called...big surprise here... www.causemarketingforum.com This is an excellent resources for folks like me who want to find out more without having to wade through tons of MBA marketing jargon. I've found their best practices section particularly interesting. With articles such as "The Ten Commandments of Cause-Related Marketing", case studies and conversations with cause marketers on both the nonprofit and corporate sides of these partnerships, this site is a great resource.

As someone with little business or marketing background at all, poking around on this site was a fairly eye-opening experience. For instance in The Ten Commandments of Cause-Related Marketing the author, Kurt Aschermann, Chief Marketing Officer and Managing Director of Corporate Opportunities Group at the Boys & Girls Club of America, emphasizes the mutual benefit of cause-marketing. He points out that, though there may be some money to be had through traditional philanthropic requests such as foundation grants and workplace giving campaigns, the real money in a corporation is in their sales and marketing departments. Thus, if a non-profit can make the case that a cause-based partnership is good for business and not just pure charity, a whole new world of resources opens up. For Aschermann, who has had incredible success securing over $100 million worth of resources from a wide variety of companies, cause-related marketing is a simple partnership. Successful partnerships occur when both sides understand what they have to bring to the table. Knowing the unique value of our brand as a nonprofit and our ability to execute and our ability to articulate this to the corporation is what makes partnering with us worthwhile to a corporation.

For us, we bring 30+ years of experience in the youth tutoring/mentoring community and our position as a convener of leaders of over 150 tutoring/mentoring programs around the city. Given our leadership role in the Chicagoland tutor/mentor community, and our organizational history, corporations looking to maximize their impact through a city-wide strategy would benefit from engaging with our organization rather than any individual standalone program. We also have tools such as our Interactive Tutor/Mentor Program Locator that make it easy for companies to visualize potential leadership strategies using GIS mapping and determine the most effective course of action. Our focus on providing easily accessible, useful and constantly updated online resources via our numerous websites, means that we have a much higher level of visibility than other programs as can be seen by our high levels of web traffic and the fact that our websites and blogs are among the first hits that come up when you google keywords such as "tutor", "mentor", "golf benefit" and many many more. Plus our reputation as an organization dedicated to building not only our own organization but ensuring that comprehensive youth programs like ours across the city have the resources they need means that we have the kind of reputation that corporations looking to improve their image would want to associate with. Finally, our particular cause, helping inner-city kids succeed, is one that needs little justfication or explanation to most people. The grand majority of people understand the need for programs like ours and perceive them as necessary and beneficial without further explanation. For all these reasons and more, it seems that Cabrini Connections, The Tutor/Mentor Connection would be the ideal partner for corporations looking to form cause-marketing partnerships. Now we just need to get on their radar. Any ideas?

Fundraising: Cause Marketing Part 2

So, as promised, here's round 2 of my fundraising series. In this post I want to talk about one way in which we're starting to utilize cause marketing concepts and professionals to benefit our organization. I want to start with the person who introduced me to the term "cause marketing" in the first place, Alla Ioffe, recent DePaul University graduate and founder of the socially conscious Chicago-based events company Pallandrome. We connected through Meagan, our Media Outreach intern who recommended that I chat with Alla about getting Cabrini Connections onboard a potential fundraising event, which has now materialized into a Sunday Funday Party that will take place on Sunday, Sept 20th from 11am to 2pm.

The event, which is completely organized by Alla's firm, will take place at the Windy City Fieldhouse (2367 W Logan Blvd) and will bring together approximately 500 children and their parents for a day of fun, games, snacks and marketing opportunities for companies looking to showcase their back-to-school related goods and services in front of affluent parents and their kids. Like past events, such as her Just Be Cause green business showcase, which took place at the Funky Buddah Lounge not too long ago, her fundraising model is ingenious. She comes up with an idea of an event that will be attractive enough to people to pay to attend and then charges sponsors for tables at the event so that they can promote their products in front of this large, engaged pool of potential customers. Then she donates a chunk of the proceeds to a good cause, like Cabrini Connections.

So at this upcoming event, young families will be lured by the prospect of relay races, food, bounce houses, games and prizes and will pay to come to the Windy City Field House. At the same time, sponsors eager to market their products to parents whose children are running, bouncing, eating, playing...etc will pay for tables in the Field House, providing an additional income stream, plus some added draw for the parents since there will be informative presentations about how to pack healthy lunches, sustainable living, how to encourage kids to live healthily...etc. Plus we, as the showcase organization, will have an opportunity to tell our story and connect with all the attendees, not just the affluent parents who might support our cause, but the socially conscious businesses who may be interested in partnering with us to provide volunteers, publicity, dollars or other types of support.

Therefore Alla, as a cause-based marketer/events planner, serves as the lliason between our non-profit, and the corporate world, connecting us in a mutually beneficial way that provides us with both dollars and positive public relations opportunties while providing the same for the sponsoring organizations, who pay for the opportunity. Since in this current economic climate many nonprofits like ours are trying to sustain our programming with contracting donor bases, dwindling foundation funding and cutbacks in government grants, we should be looking out for opportunities like these to provide much needed general operating funds. For this reason it's particularly important to understand the growing trend of cause marketing which is not only supplementing traditional corporate philanthropy but in increasing cases, replacing it. Stay tuned for part 3.

Fundraising: Cause Marketing

Happy Monday faithful readers! I apologize for the radio silence, I've been dedicating all my time recently to fundraising in order to try to keep our program afloat during this difficult time. However during this time I've found out about a couple things that are worth sharing that both have something to do with...surprise...FUNDRAISING!

So, in my quest to encourage people who support our program to reach into their personal networks and tell the story about what we do to potential donors, I've found that people rarely understand the true ability of their networks to help organizations such as ours. So many times, I find myself explaining that being a mentor is not the only way to help our program make a difference in the lives of inner-city kids and that especially at this juncture, securing the financial resources we need to sustain our program in the short term is perhaps more important. One way I've been trying to get people to support our program is through identifying fundraising opportunities at their workplaces, either through corporate foundations, employee-matching funds or internal giving campaigns. Since the decision to give or not to give is so-often dependent upon personal relationships between the grantor and the grantee, which unfortunately I often find myself lacking, we have had some success using our volunteers and others as middlemen/representatives of our cause to approach their superiors and put a familiar face on our requests for financial support. However, though we try our best to impart on our volunteers a through understanding of their ability to help fundraise and build other resources for our organization, we understand that as volunteer mentors, they are already giving their time and that not everyone is willing to go the extra mile and become an evangelist for our cause at work and in their day-to-day lives. For this reason I was extremely excited to discover that there exists a whole job field dedicated to bridging this gap between non-profit organizations and for-profit companies for their mutual benefit. These people are called cause marketers and according to the journal On Philanthropy, cause marketing sponsorship by American companies is growing at a rapid rate. For example last year 1.52 billion dollars was spent by American companies on cause marketing campaigns.

To make this more concrete, a 2006 study demonstrated that 89% of young American consumers would switch brands of a similar product if a different brand was identified as supporting a "good cause". Additionally this same study found that a majority of people would prefer to work for a company that is considered to be "socially responsible". Based on this and other research with similar findings, companies have been expanding workplace giving programs and "cause-based marketing" in order to retain employees and build market share, while also supporting non-profit organizations that are doing good. One example of a cause-based marketing campaign would be our ongoing "One Dime At A Time" campaign at Chicago-Area Whole Foods stores where if customers bring their own bags, Whole Foods will donate 10 cents to our organization.

Campaigns like these are designed to not only bring valuable dollars to non-profits like ours, but to increase awareness about our program, while at the same time providing Whole Foods with positive public relations, improved customer relations and additional marketing opportunities (because we are also publicizing the campaign). I'll be expanding on this idea throughout the week discussing cause-based marketing more in depth, and our past, present and future experiences with it. Stay Tuned!

Helping Cabrini Connections with iGive

Hey everyone. I just wanted to share something that I just found out about, it's called http://www.igive.com/. Basically it's a way to have a certain percentage of the money you spend online donated to a charity or organization of your choice. By using http://www.igive.com/, which is super easy to set up (i just did it in just a couple min), you can donate somewhere between 1 and 6 percent of your total bill to Cabrini Connections. The great thing is that it doesn't add a single cent to the amount you spend because http://www.igive.com/ has already negotiated partnerships with thousands of different online retailers. Also, though you can certainly search for goods and services directly from their website, http://www.igive.com/ has a small downloadable online shopping window that pops up when you're on a website of one of these companies that have relationships with http://www.igive.com/, so you don't miss the opportunity to safely and easily complete your transaction through igive to ensure that part of your money goes towards helping a charitable organization such as Cabrini Connections do good.

So, next time you're about to buy something on Amazon, reserve a hotel room or buy an airline ticket, be sure to do it through igive so that a percentage of your purchase will go somewhere where it will really make a difference.