charity walk

3 Steps Before You Walk

Cause marketing is a $2 billion dollar business. That’s a lot of moola. Before you sign on to a charity walk it’s important to know whether your donation will pay for extra balloons at the finish line or something more meaningful.

“When you sponsor someone for a charity walk, you’re really writing three checks — one for the charity, one for the event-management company, and one for the benefits the walker receives, the T-shirt, the massages, and the meals,” said a spokesperson from the American Institute of Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group. “If it’s a very costly event, but you’re happy because you got some great perks, that’s fine. But, if you want to help the cause, you should find out how much will be left over.”

Last month Breast Cancer Action published 4 questions to ask before you walk for breast cancer.

Here are 3 more steps you can take to find out where your donation will go.

Rate of Growth of Cause Marketing from CauseGood

Rate of Growth of Cause Marketing from CauseGood

  1. Find out how much of your contribution will benefit the charity directly. According to the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, “at least 50 percent should be spent on programs and activities directly related to the organization’s purposes.”
  2. Ask yourself if the charity’s goals are clear? What tangible results have they achieved in the past year, the more specifics the better. Is the charity’s mission specific, like providing wigs to women receiving chemotherapy, or vague, such as eradicating breast cancer.
  3. Ask how successful is the charity in meeting its goals? If a charity spokesperson can’t tell you what they’ve done to forward the cause lately, choose a charity that can.

Avon’s Charity Walk of Shame

Corporate-sponsored charity walks do a disservice to many women. Look what just arrived in my mailbox…a pinkalicious mailer from Avon guilting women into walking on my behalf. “Will you walk? Or will you walk away?” Brilliant way to push our collective guilt/shame button. Thanks Avon!

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Thanks too for perpetuating misinformation about breast cancer for your company’s benefit. That’s awesome! Surely your savvy marketing team knows that the 1 in 8 stat is misleading. If your mission is to educate women about breast health, why perpetuate bad information? Breast Cancer Action considers the 1-in-8 stat one of the Top 10 Breast Cancer Myths. Here’s what BCA says:

“This much-quoted statistic is an individual’s cumulative risk over an 85-year lifetime. It does not mean that at any given point, 1 of every 8 women has breast cancer. Rather, it means that if all women lived to be 85, one in eight would develop the disease sometime during her life.”

Shame on you Avon for using this misleading statistic to scare women into contributing to your cause.