Fight Poverty Globally and Support Women and Girls with a Click

Written by Jan Jaben-Eilon Tuesday, February 08 2011

In the past year women and girls in the African country of Malawi have opened businesses and attended school, all thanks to ordinary people who have simply gone to the website, www.joinmyvillage.com, watched a video, and clicked.

Through an innovative program called Join My Village, the General Mills Foundation partnered with CARE not only to raise money to help the females of Malawi, but also to encourage consumers to learn about poverty issues around the world and become involved.

“We do other ‘cause’ marketing,” says Beth Kuenstler, director of partnership development at CARE, “but this is unique. "Consumers going to the website can click on a link that will send $2 toward the program or they can choose to make a donation that will be matched. In either case, they will see, through videos or other visuals, how the money is helping. “People get a report back on what the money does, making everyone a philanthropist. CARE has never done this with any other partner, and most of the time if a consumer gives money to CARE, they don’t receive this kind of report.”

The program was launched in September 2009 at the Clinton Global Initiative annual conference. In the first year, the partnership recruited more than 6,500 members to joinmyvillage.com, enabling the donation of more than $350,000 through online activities. This money, along with initial seed grants from the General Mills Foundation, provided 155 scholarships for girls’ education, built nine new homes for female teachers, and helped 1,800 individuals start or support their businesses through village savings and loan associations.

The plan for 2011 is to donate $900,000, of which $500,000 will come from General Mills and $400,000 from Merck, which joined the partnership last year. That money will enable another 336 girls to attend secondary schools, build at least 11 more homes for teachers, and bring in at least 1,500 new businesses to the savings and loan program.

The impact can be huge for a country in which typically only one in three girls finishes primary school.

Kuenstler notes that communities benefit more when money is invested in women instead of men. For every dollar invested in women, 80 cents goes back into the community because the dollars go straight into the family, providing food, education, and health care for the children. “This makes the community stronger,” she says.

The Join My Village program represents the company’s first real effort to broaden its charitable giving activities outside the United States, says Jeff Peterson, director of innovation and strategy for the General Mills Foundation.

Malawi was chosen not only because it’s one of the poorest countries in the world, but also because it has a stable government. Moreover, General Mills had funded some smaller programs in Malawi in the past and was therefore familiar with the country’s challenges and opportunities.

CARE was chosen as a partner because, “as any corporate funder or charitable vehicle, we are extremely dependent on experts in whatever field we seek to advance. This applies to all nonprofit partners. We’re not experts in poverty elimination,” Peterson says. CARE had a proven track record and, like General Mills, a “belief system in investing in women and girls.”

In fact, Peterson says, the company’s Betty Crocker symbol of the 1940s and 1950s, “was one of the first strong women that held authority and credibility for providing for the family.”

So far the partnership is using social media to spread the word about Join My Village. Through the Facebook campaign it launched last year, it enlisted more than 100,000 followers through its “causes” application.

This year, General Mills welcomes the involvement of Grammy award winner Lee Ann Womack, who will publicize Join My Village when she goes on tour with George Strait and Reba McEntire. “She’ll be inviting 100,000 country music fans to join and donate to Join My Village,” says Diana Beckmann, senior director of development, corporate engagement at CARE.

Eventually, General Mills will leverage its retail brand assets for this cause as well, just as it did with Yoplait’s Save Lids to Save Lives campaign for breast cancer.

This year, however, the company wants to increase on-the-ground storytelling through videos, blogs, diaries, and Facebook. At the beginning of the year, Beckmann visited Malawi for two weeks. She remembers sitting at a savings and loan meeting in which two sets of mothers and daughters had decided, separately, to attend the meeting. They were surprised to see each other there and also proud of one another for attending.

Jan Jaben-Eilon was a founding staff writer of the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Since then, she has been the international editor of Advertising Age magazine and has written for such publications as The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Journalism Review, and Consumer Reports. She is the author of soon-to-be-published (There is) Life After Cancer. Jan and her husband have homes in Atlanta and Jerusalem.