Future:Media:Change

blogging the intersection of media, technology and the global good

Cookies for Good?

7 December 2009 View Comments

Former management consultant Emily Dubner created Baking for Good, an online bakery that sells cookies and brownies, donating 15% of the proceeds to a nonprofit of your *choice. Is this an innovative example of pubic-private partnerships or just a gimmick?

I have a few problems with this business model and a suggestion on how to make it into something nonprofits could actually use. First off the founder does seem to have good intentions. I’m not begrudging her effort but I have a few issues with the implementation. The model that Baking for Good uses allows you to choose among a handpicked list of nonprofits. This method of course limits the amount of nonprofits that can participate in the initiative and there is no transparency on the process of how these organizations are selected.

I think a more innovative solution would be to take more of a bottom up CafePress model. Nonprofits would be able to select among a list of cookies and baked goods, name the cookies and sell them on the web site. The website would become a platform that provides the tools for nonprofits to create their own baking for good campaigns.

The company would benefit by increasing their potential audience by tapping into the networks of all the participating nonprofits. Nonprofits would get the baking expertise and platform to create another fund raising outlet, especially as the holiday season rolls around.

Emily

How to further organize the charities as we grow is a great question and one we're definitely thinking about. We hope to always have a good system for classifying/tagging as well as have a good search feature. There are other sites out there that let an unlimited number of organizations sign themselves up, which seems to create a somewhat messy, hard-to-navigate system, so hopefully we can avoid that by building and maintaining the database ourselves. Ideas welcomed!
amilh

Hey Emily,

Thanks for reading the post. Glad to hear other business models were considered when you were developing the site. One of the things that might help nonprofits would be to have clear terms on how you choose the organizations that can participate in the program. In this model if a large number of charities sign up, would it get confusing for individuals purchasing baked goods to pick among the hundreds of potential charities?

Thanks again for taking the time to go over baking for good, it's a very cool idea!

cheers,
amil
Emily

Hi Amil,

Thanks for your write-up on Baking for Good! You raise some key issues that we carefully considered during the design phase (and that I continue to think about often). I want to share my reasons for ultimately designing Baking for Good the way I did.

The Baking for Good goal is simple: to raise money for great causes by giving 15% of every purchase to a charity the customer chooses. We wanted our site to be just as simple for both charities and customers to use.

After thinking through what it would take for an organization to create and maintain its own page, I designed the model to take care of the backend work for them. Especially when many charities are already utilizing numerous other social media outlets including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and their own websites, I wanted to make sure that using the Baking for Good site did not absorb valuable resources within the charity. I also worried that if charities did not have the capacity to maintain their site, our site could become full of inactive pages – very frustrating for all involved!

Further, taking care of the backend for our charities allows us to help them make Baking for Good "their own" by creating customized campaigns that work with their style, their calendar, and their existing communication networks, rather than requiring them to work with ours. Just yesterday, I met with the executive director of one of our organizations. Since our launch, she and her team have developed and implemented an entire strategy for their Baking for Good efforts, including giving Baking for Good cookies as favors and auction items at an event, ordering Baking for Good products as a thank you for donors and volunteers, and sending a dedicated email campaign, all with the goal of encouraging their membership to think of Baking for Good at the holidays.

Having just launched in September 2009, we are still working on expanding our list of causes. The process for adding charities is easy and inclusive:

1. Customers or organizations email us at causes@bakingforgood.com.

2. We then work with each organization individually to explain the Baking for Good concept, develop their page, and brainstorm ideas for how we can help them promote it.

New organizations are reaching out to us every day, and we're thrilled at the interest we've seen from the nonprofit community. It's truly encouraging to know that organizations believe in our model and want to be involved with Baking for Good.

Thanks again for your post, and I do hope you'll let us know about a nonprofit you are passionate about so that we can work to add it to the site!

-Emily, Founder & CEO, www.bakingforgood.com