cancer friends by clicking the link.
http://www.3m.com/us/office/postit/research/largest_pink_ribbon.jhtml
The 3M company, maker of Post-it® Super Sticky Notes, is donating
$1 to City of Hope Cancer Center for each of the first 75,000
people who sign up through their web site, and they will be
constructing a 70-foot pink ribbon made from 75,000 Post-it® Notes
in New York's Times Square during the first week of Breast Cancer
Awareness Month in October 2004. As the 3M page linked in the
message quoted above explains:
3M, the maker of Post-it® Super Sticky Notes, will donate $1 to
City of Hope Cancer Center for each of the first 75,000 people who
sign up to show that they are "sticking up for @[email protected]@$! cancer." City
of Hope is one of America's top fifty cancer hospitals according to
U.S. News and World Report. The 3M donation will help further the
groundbreaking research conducted by City of Hope.
The World's Largest Pink Ribbon will stand over 70 feet tall and
consist of over 75,000 pink Post-it® Super Sticky Notes. By
entering your name, city and state on the website, you will not
only be supporting City of Hope through the 3M contributions noted
below, but also be represented by one of the more than 75,000
Post-it® Super Sticky Notes making up the World's Largest Pink
Ribbon.
This giant ribbon will be unveiled in New York's Times Square
during the first week of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October
2004.
About all we could add is to this a fuller explanation of what's
involved in these types of charity promotions.
Companies will often donate money to charities, not quietly and
behind-the-scenes, but in a very public way intended to generate
publicity for themselves (and the causes they support). A common
scheme in this vein is to tie the amount donated to some type of
consumer participation activity. For example, Company X decides
they're going to donate $100,000 to the Benevolent Charity Fund, so
they announce that for every box of Product X sold, or for every
time someone comes to Company X's web site and clicks on a link,
they'll donate $1 to the Benevolent Charity Fund. Company X gets
lots of good publicity, the Benevolent Charity Fund gets plenty of
public exposure, sales of Product X (or visits to the Company X web
site) shoot up, consumers feel good that they're helping to support
the Benevolent Charity Fund (without having to donate any money of
their own) everybody wins!
In most cases, though, the targets are set low enough to guarantee
they'll be reached quickly. Announcing that your company will
donate $1 to charity for every unit of product sold, up to a limit
of $100,000, can be rather embarrassing if you only end up selling
8,000 units, so companies establish easily-reached goals. Companies
nonetheless continue to enjoy the publicity benefits of such
programs for quite a while afterwards, because most consumers don't
know the targets have been reached and keep buying the companies'
products and visiting their web sites under the mistaken impression
that they're contributing to charity by doing so. (This is
especially true when companies advertise cut-off dates for their
charity programs or emblazon their product packaging with
promotional announcements even though the contribution targets
may have long since been met, the fact that the cut-off dates are
still in the future or products with promotional packaging are
still on shore shelves can mislead consumers into believing that
the charity campaigns are on-going, even after those campaigns have
effectively ended.) A 75,000-click goal, like the one 3M set in
their July 2004 announcement of this promotion, is one easily met
within the first few days (although the 3M campaign officially runs
until 15 September 2004).
We don't mean to dissuade anyone from participating in 3M's program
to support the City of Hope, or to suggest that 3M is doing
anything less than donating money to a good cause. Readers might
want to know that their participation in such promotions is
generally symbolic rather than functional, though.