Charity CHAMPs – get involved with microphilanthropy now!

Nowadays every company is trying to be a good corporate citizen. There are several corporate charity campaigns that I’ve talked about on this blog or on the Charity CHAMPS twitter account (@charitychamps) – Cadbury’s campaign to send bicycles to Africa, Dawn giving $1 back per bottle of dish detergent sold to environmental causes, Moxie’s giving a $1 to Breakfast For Learning for every dessert trio ordered. But I’m seeing many more campaigns that I have not blogged about. In fact, I’m seeing these campaigns everywhere, which is a good thing, but the concept of giving back product revenues to charity is becoming slightly over-done in my mind.

So it refreshing when I found this email from SAS the other day:

Dear SAS User:
SAS is committed to your satisfaction! We are interested in learning about your opinions and experiences with SAS and SAS software. Your valuable feedback will be used to develop and improve SAS products and services we offer.

Please allow approximately 10 minutes to complete this survey. In appreciation of your time and effort, SAS will make a donation to your choice among three non-profit charitable organizations if you complete this survey ….

SAS Market Research

Of course, this email has been sitting in my inbox for some time now, so it’s not really new (my inbox is just really backlogged), but it’s definitely the first time I’ve been enticed to complete a survey for charity. And I get to choose out of 3 non-profits? Pretty good! Too bad I’m so late to the game – the survey’s now closed and now I’ll never know what the donation amount offered was.

I don’t necessarily think that this campaign is doing more good than other ones just because it’s different, but I do like seeing new ideas in action. Donor fatigue is a huge problem, and innovation never hurt anybody.