So here are some suggestions about how Pedigree's most recent adoption promotion could be built to involve consumers better--or said differently, how it might look if the for-profit side of Pedigree was working intimately with the non-profit. Remember that this promotion has at least three other partners: Celebrity Apprentice, Martha Stewart, and the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show on USA Network.

1. Tie contributions to the Foundation to in-store purchases of dog food--say, $.50 a bag. If Pedigree doesn't want to spend the money, bring in the partners to do it.
2. Stamp a code on bags of dog food that allows you to put your dog's mug on the Million Dog Mosaic and then either Pedigree or the partners pay the dollar to the Foundation.
3. If you don't buy the dog food first, you can go to the mosaic and pay $1 to put your dog's face on it. In exchange, you can download a coupon for Pedigree products. Either way, Pedigree finds a way to cover the whole million dollars, not just 1% of it.
4. Sign up Donald Trump to put is money where his mouth is. Rather than just force his minions to develop commercials for the Foundation (and Pedigree) that his viewers can vote on at the Pedigree website, Trump should pony up some money for every vote. In fact all the participants could afford it, let the losing team pay--or the winning one.
5. Put custom copies of My Angels Wear Fur by Devon O'Day (her stories of rescued and adopted dogs) in 25 lb. bags of Pedigree dog food. And, bind in invitations to the website, coupons, and a biography of the Pedigree Adoption Foundation.

In each of these cases, if a customer chooses to interact with the Pedigree promotion, they know they are contributing to the health and well-being of dogs that need rescuing. And, they come to experience something valuable about the brand.I'm sure a talented marketer or creative (after all, I'm neither) could come up with many more ways to encourage the Adoption Drive--if they were turned loose to work for both the for-profit and non-profit side simultaneously--and for that matter the marketing teams of Pedigree's partners.

Like Collins, Crutchfield and Grant examine several of the best performing non-profits and identify the (surprising) characteristics that make non-profits like Habitat for Humanity and America’s Second Harvest such effective organizations—making a powerful difference in the lives of Americans.

Of the six things “social sector organizations” do, this is one: Make markets work. This summary from page 21 which is quantified throughout the book:

Tapping into the power of self-interest and the laws of economics is far more effective than appealing to pure altruism. No longer content to rely on traditional notions of charity or to see the private sector as the enemy, great non-profits find ways to work with markets and help business “do well while doing good.” They influence business practices, build corporate partnerships, and develop earned-income ventures—all ways of leveraging market forces to achieve social change on a grander scale.

The Economist reviews

These included America’s Second Harvest, Habitat for Humanity and - much to the Economist's delight - the notoriously right-wing Heritage Foundation, a proof that this was a "serious piece of research, not the usual sentimental tosh that gets written about left-leaning NGOs" [sic!].

The Economist once again shows its contempt towards the NGO sector and its lack of understanding of its internal diversity. Kicking off with a series of scathing (and unreferenced) remarks about social enterprises, which seem to reduce the debate to a pathetic comparison between the successes of Google and those of the Grameen Bank (apples and oranges, anyone?), it then sings the praises of the 12 selected nonprofits for their excellent achievements (data, anyone?). The fact that social enterprises and nonprofits might not actually be one and the same thing, or that being based (as the 12 selected organisations are) in the US as opposed to Bangladesh might offer considerable advantages to - for example - making the most of market forces does not seem to be a relevant piece of information for the illustrious weekly.

The Economist is not alone in displaying a lack of understanding towards the complexities of the third sector, and of social enterprises in particular. Roger L. Martin & Sally Osberg - echoing Muhammad Yunus - have already made a plea on the pages of the Stanford Social Innovation Review for strengthening the definition of social entrepreneurship [PDF], but definitions are not enough when we are facing the challenges of applying them to different cultural contexts. We might reach an agreement on what a social enterprise might be in the US (therefore what parameters we can adopt to evaluate its success), but this does not mean we can apply this model to the whole world.

Aside from these important theoretical considerations, "where is the social-entrepreneurial equivalent of a for-profit start-up like Google or Microsoft [...]? where is the evidence of massive social change?" - asks an irritated Economist.

The answer is Kick-Start, a Kenya-based organisation that develops and promotes technologies that can be used by dynamic entrepreneurs to establish and run profitable small scale enterprises. As reviewed by the MIT's Innovations journal, Kick-Start has started 50,000 new businesses, generating $52 million a year in new profits and wages, and is directly responsible for a 0.6% increase of Kenya's GDP. See a good video by the Schwab Foundation on Kick-Start's successful water pump here.

Now, can someone at the Economist more interested in facts than in rhetorical preaching let me know if Google can be said to have had a comparatively similar impact on the US economy and on its social needs?