Earlier this year I wrote about the expanding relationships between non-profit and for-profit organizations. Historically, these relationships have been either adversarial or based on corporate philanthropy and cooperative marketing. Today, however, we see more in-depth collaborations, based in the reality that no one group can meet our social and environmental problems in isolation. These new partnerships, such asWWF and Coca-Cola or EDF & Wal-Mart, are transformative and have the potential to forever strengthen the way that companies and NGOs work together.
Such collaborations do not, however, negate the necessity of more familiar and traditional approaches. For instance, cause-related marketing, which really gained momentum in the 1980s with the American Express effort to restore the Statue of Liberty, is still a relatively new concept. While cause-related marketing campaigns do not have the depth of multi-year and multi-faceted collaborative partnerships like those mentioned above, they are full of merit. Indeed, cause-related marketing is one of the principal ways that companies express their social responsibility (to the tune of about $1.08 billion in 2005). It is not a question of cause-related marketing orphilanthropy or transformative partnerships or non-profit policing of corporate activities. All approaches are necessary to find solutions to the systemic sustainability challenges we face.
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