How To Do Well AND Do Good In Business
By Mindy Tyson McHorse

I’d like to close out this year at The Writer’s Life with one more giving trick.

It’s a relatively new approach to business … but it’s happening all over the place, and the positive results it brings means this technique is here to stay.

But first, I want to recap the lessons in giving we’ve covered this week:

• On Monday, we talked about Dan Kennedy’s trick for feeling rich before you actually get there.
• Tuesday was about giving other service providers a chance to share their skills so you can have more time to improve your own expertise.
• On Wednesday, I wrote about how to improve your motivation, creativity, and productivity through regular, detail-focused giving.
• And yesterday, you read about ways you can improve lives and give to others through your writing talent.

Today, I want to reveal a profound way to do good in the world while improving your business reach and even increasing profits. It’s called cause marketing.

Cause marketing goes by a lot of aliases, like corporate citizenship or brand awareness. You see it all around you and probably participate without knowing it.

Officially, it’s a partnership between a nonprofit and for-profit entity that promotes a social or environmental cause. It benefits both entities and does some good for the world in the process.

Yoplait’s “Save Lids to Save Lives” is a pretty well-known cause marketing campaign. That’s the one where you mail yogurt lids back to Yoplait. Then, the company donates 10 cents for every lid they receive — up to $2 million — to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation.

When businesses decide to stand for something and join forces with nonprofits who represent a specific cause, incredible things happen.

For the business, cause marketing means better brand recognition, higher sales, happy shareholders, and greater employee retention, among other things. For a cause-driven entity like a nonprofit, cause marketing brings a boost in awareness, elevated funding, and an improved ability to deliver results.

Essentially, magic happens.

It’s something to be aware of, as the new year unfolds. As a freelance writer, you’re highly likely to encounter cause marketing in some form, regardless of the niche you write for.

Start looking around you. Any time you see a company sharing information about their involvement with a nonprofit, it’s likely to be driven by a cause marketing partnership. Details can be found on websites, on product merchandise tags, in emails … all over, really.

Think about cause campaigns you’d like to get involved with, and about ways you can use your writing skills to further the good causes you feel passionate about.

We’ll keep you posted on the best ways to approach this new form of marketing and how to write so good cause campaigns take off like gangbusters. But, it all starts with clarity — being clear about what’s being supported, how it’s being supported, and why you (or your client) want to support it.

Do this, and you’ll have a professional way to support the causes you believe in while still enjoying the freedom and joy of the writer’s life.