PDC FAQs             

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 Goals    Principles     Stages    Implementations    Actions

Goals


How Does Profit Donation Capitalism Benefit Our World?


1. By Directly Funding Causes and Charities

By offering consumers PDC alternatives to products sold by conventional corporations, Profit-Donating Businesses generate substantial and continuing additional revenues for popular causes like poverty reduction, education, health care, and environmental protection.

2. By Transferring Political Power from the Rich to the Public Good.

Important popular causes are often under-funded because rich individuals and corporations spend huge sums lobbying against these initiatives.  As consumers re-direct their purchasing power away from products sold by conventional corporations and toward products sold by Profit-Donating Businesses, the rich earn less revenue to finance their lobbying.  At the same time, PDB beneficiary causes receive more revenue to finance lobbying for increased public support.


3. By Empowering the Poor to Help Themselves.

When poor people throughout our world now buy products, the rich corporations who sell these products become richer, while the poor remain poor or become poorer.  PDC empowers the poor worldwide to help raise themselves out of poverty by buying products whose profit is used to fund the war against global poverty.  FAQs
 

Principles


What is Profit-Donation Capitalism?

Profit-Donation Capitalism, (PDC) is a new kind of capitalism that empowers consumers to direct profits from the products we buy to urgent, under-funded causes and charities.  Through PDC, profits are channeled away from corporations and toward important causes like poverty alleviation, health care, education and the environment. In this way, PDC redefines how and why consumers buy their products. 

Through PDC, individuals and philanthropic public service organizations create Profit-Donating Businesses (PDBs) that sell products, and donate 100 percent of the profit to important causes.  Dozens of successful PDBs now exist, like the ones listed here.  Thousands more can be created to compete throughout the world with conventional businesses for consumers dollars.  FAQs

 
How Does Profit-Donation Capitalism Fund Important Causes?

Consumers would choose products sold by Profit-Donating Businesses over the same products offered by conventional businesses so that 100 percent of the profit from their purchases can be used to fund the charities and causes they care about.

For example, a PDB called GeoDefender could donate its profit to organizations working to protect our environment.  It might sell a margarine product that is equal in price and quality to margarine products now offered by conventional businesses.  At supermarkets, many consumers would choose GeoDefender margarine over other margarines so that the profit from their purchase can be used to fund environmental initiatives.  FAQs


Will Consumers Buy Products from Profit-Donation Businesses?

To gauge how well Profit-Donating Business products would sell at supermarkets, the author asked 100 shoppers the following question:

"If your supermarket offered new food products that were equal in price and quality to the products that you now buy, and you knew that 100 percent of the profit from these new products would be used to end world hunger, would you buy these new products?"

92 of the 100 shoppers answered "yes," demonstrating extraordinarily robust public support for the PDC funding strategy.  FAQs


How Widely Can Profit-Donation Capitalism's Selling Point be Used?
 
The PDC selling point of donating 100 percent of product profits to causes and charities can aggressively compete against any product that can be matched in quality and price. For many of the hundreds of thousands of these products in today's market, a large share of consumers would choose a PDBs' products over those of competitors in order to help fund a variety of popular causes and charities. Fully implemented, Profit-Donation Capitalism can channel billions of new dollars to our world's important causes each year.  FAQs


What would Consumers Think about Profit-Donation Capitalism?

Consumers would likely value how Profit-Donation Capitalism enhances their daily shopping routine by providing them opportunities to fund important causes and charities through their purchases.  They would especially value the opportunity to support these causes at no personal cost by simply buying from PDBs the products they would ordinarily buy from conventional businesses, while paying the same price for the same quality.  FAQs


How Can Businesses that Give Away their Profit Stay in Business?

Many successful businesses, like those listed on this website, now donate all of their profit to causes and charities.  For example, over the last two decades, Newman's Own, a PDB established in 1982 by actor Paul Newman and author Alex Hotchner, has donated over $250 million to thousands of charities.  During the last twenty-five years, they has grown from selling one product, salad dressing, to offering more than forty-eight products.  Not-For-Profit organizations have also created PDBs to fund their work.  The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), earns $130 million yearly just from selling greeting cards.  FAQs



Stages 


How Can Profit-Donation Capitalism be Established World-Wide?

Establishing PDC throughout the world as an intelligent, compassionate, capitalism will require organization and collaboration.  Stages in this process would include:  1) Concept Dissemination and Promotion, 2) Organizational Leadership 3) Market Research, 4) PDB Ownership Solicitation, and 5) Market Promotion.   FAQs

 
1. Concept Dissemination and Promotion

Making Profit-Donation Capitalism a global reality will require extensive concept dissemination.  This website at www.profitdonationcapitalism.org is a first step that introduces PDC.  The next step is for philanthropists, not-for-profit organizations, academics and journalists to study the PDC concept and promote it to the international public.  FAQs


2. Organizational Leadership

While Profit-Donation Capitalism has been developing independently, as the PDBs listed on this site demonstrate, a centralized organizational leadership can more quickly spearhead the establishment of an extensive global network of PDBs.  This PDC leadership will need to recruit the personnel and obtain the funding to establish PDC throughout the world.  FAQs


3. Market Research

So that financial institutions, not-for-profit organizations and individuals can confidently invest the capital needed to create new Profit-Donating Businesses, market research will need to be conducted to answer questions such as:
 

How Can Market Research Be Inexpensively Acquired?

Profit-Donating Businesses have an advantage over competing conventional businesses in acquiring market research.  Because of their philanthropic purpose, and because their selling point of donating all profit is a relatively new concept within fields like economics, marketing, advertising, and not-for-profit management, PDBs can have the research conducted cost-free by the marketing departments of colleges and universities throughout the world. 

PDBs and academic institutions can establish "Research for Donation" alliances.  For example, a PDB selling products to fund for childhood education may contract with a university’s education department. The university's marketing department can then conduct the PDB's market research in exchange for some of the PDB's profit being donated to the education center.  Contractual collaborations between PDBs and universities can generate an extensive body of product-specific market findings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if conducted by professional firms.  FAQs

 
4. PDB Ownership Solicitation

Who Will Establish New Profit-Donating Businesses?

After research demonstrates wide public support for Profit-Donation Capitalism, philanthropists, not-for-profit organizations and political groups can begin creating new PDBs.  Philanthropists can create PDBs that would, over time, generate more revenue for beneficiary causes than their traditional direct donations.

Following the example of UNICEF, who since 1949 has generated over $1 billion from greeting card sales, not-for-profit corporations can create PDB "arms" to generate sales revenues.  Politicians and celebrities are also ideal candidates for establishing PDBs.  Owning a PDB that funds a popular cause could prove an important component of their public relations campaigns.  FAQs

 
5. Market Promotion

How Should New Profit-Donation Businesses Products be Introduced into Consumer Markets?

In most markets, selling products with little or no collaboration among competitors is necessary.  To ensure the greatest success of Profit-Donation Capitalism and of individual PDBs, extensive collaboration among existing and prospective PDBs is a wiser strategy.  The media now covers new PDBs who periodically introduce new products.  However, if several dozen PDBs orchestrated a simultaneous launch of new products to benefit one or more popular causes, media coverage would be far more extensive. 
 
To attract broad media coverage worth millions of dollars in publicity, the PDC organizational leadership should facilitate PDB collaboration in ways that include the following:

Implementations  

There are various ways to implement PDC.  The most simple strategy is for a very rich individual or organization to finance the establishment of several dozen new PDBs and orchestrate a simultaneous launching of several dozen products. 

In 1982, Paul Newman invested $20 thousand to launch a new product, "Newman's Own" salad dressing.  Outsourcing manufacturing and distribution, the company's entire staff was Mr. Newman and his friend, A. E. Hotchner working full time, a part time secretary and a part time bookkeeper. Soon after, they began to market new products like spaghetti sauce, (1983) and popcorn, (1984).

Following is a tally of their profits those first years, all of it donated to charity:

This data shows how quickly Newman's Own generated substantial profits, and how simple an operation it was during those first years.  A group of celebrities could successfully market food products using the Newman's Own model.  To learn more about how   Paul Newman's and A. E. Hotchner created Newman's Own, (defying the dire predictions of industry "experts") please refer to their 2003 book titled Shameless Exploitation in Pursuit of the Common Good.

Newman's Own made those huge early profits without any advertising.  Instead, he held several product launch events that generated enormous publicity world wide. 
 
Imagine 20-40 celebrities selling food products to fund global poverty relief under an international campaign.  The publicity generated from this orchestrated product launch would likely earn over $15 million in profit during the first year for each of the marketed products.

The celebrities would also be launching the wider campaign that would invite other celebrities, philanthropists, and not-for-profit organizations to market their own profit-donating products.  Not-for-profit anti-poverty organizations would launch a sister campaign.  This project would provide the expanding network of profit-donating businesses free worldwide publicity through websites and other venues.
 

Actions  There is much we can do to help promote PDC as a free-market capitalism whose profits more directly finance the important causes we care about.
 

Home     Author      

Please implement one of the following strategies, or e-mail our Homepage to a colleague, associate, acquaintance, or public personality.  FAQs

Television and Print Media

Television, newspapers, magazines and books are ideal media for presenting Profit-Donation Capitalism and the dozens of Profit-Donating Businesses now selling products and donating their profits to causes.  Because PDC is new, writers can expect work describing it to be highly marketable.  FAQs

Academic Research

Profit-Donation Capitalism is a new free-market capitalism academically relevant to political science, sociology, economics, not-for-profit administration, marketing and advertising disciplines.  The PDC concept can be introduced to academia through these fields, and offers excellent research/publishing opportunities for professors and post-graduate students in need of an original, leading edge, topic.  FAQs

Not-For-Profit Organizations

Not-for-Profit organizations working to improve life conditions on our planet can use PDC as part of their funding campaign.  Please refer these organizations to this site through  a hyperlink from your site, or through a comprehensive original presentation.  FAQs  

Internet Postings

The author of this website permits anyone to reproduce the material on this site in any format.  Post text from any page on this site, or publish the entire PDC site to any website you like. (click here for instructions on saving pages and downloading the entire site)

Activism

Politics is largely governed by money, affording corporations an enormous advantage over political action organizations and their causes.  By promoting Profit-Donation Capitalism and entering the consumer market with their own products, activist organizations can substantially expand the reach of their activities.  FAQs

Politics

Politicians are often less effective because to gain re-election they must compromise publicly supported initiatives to the interests of major campaign contributors.  By promoting Profit-Donation Capitalism, politicians can help create a new capitalism that helps them better serve the public good.  FAQs

Please e-mail this page to someone you believe will appreciate Profit-Donation Capitalism.

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