Getting cause-marketing and non-profits to embrace social media

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month.  And so many great things are being done to support it: Pink Ribbon night @ the Toronto Maple Leafs, Pink M&M sales, HBC Signature "Think Pink" Point blankets, KitchenAid Cook for the Cure and of course CIBC's Run for the Cure.  All amazing initiatives!  But I had to find out about them by going to the CBCF website.

Here's what I want.  I want CBCF and its corporate sponsors (CIBC and Ford, this means you!) to invest in using distributed social media to get the word out.

• For my friends who ran in Run for the Cure, there should have been a widget that they could have placed on their blogs for donations.
• To KitchenAid who has videos of TV Chef Christine Cushing talking about Cook for the Cure, put them on YouTube (or some other video service) and make them embedable and blogable.
• Maple Leafs ... first of all, put something on your website about it, but then create a great blog badge that hockey fans can place on their blogs.  Maybe a special link so that fans who buy tickets through it get something special.

But here's the thing I really want a corporate sponsor to take and run with.  Matthew Oliphant has created Pink for October - a grassroots initiative where bloggers turn their sites pink for the month of October.  Next year, I want to see all corporate sponsors of Breast Cancer awareness to do this - turn their websites pink for a month.  And then to create resources for bloggers to do this as well.  Fund a design contest for blog templates.  Create a matching-donation program: for every blog that goes pink, you'll donate $1 or $5 or $10 - whatever.

I want to see more use of the incredible publishing power that each individual blog represents; how can we get corporate Canada on board?  What's the barrier?  Is it simply an issue of know-how?  Is it a control issue?  Lack of imagination?  Where are the agencies in this?  The Red Cross does it for blog badges and PSA ads. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had an amazing "Pledge to See the Film" widget program.  AccuWeather has a number of blog widgets that they offer - now, not a non-profit, but a strong example nevertheless.  We need to be studying these examples and engage our customers (our publishing peers) to help us spread the word about causes we, as corporate marketers, embrace.