What Club Penguin Can Teach Media Companies

(Note: This post has been updated, clarifying that the listed charities are those that received last year’s donations. This year’s recipients have not yet been announced. –DW)

may  If you are not an active member of Club Penguin, then there’s a pretty good chance you are also not, say, a ten-year-old girl. But if you happen to have a ten-year-old daughter, as I do, you may well also be carrying a recurring $5.95 charge from the social networking site on your credit card statement each month.

From my cursory oversight, it seems like the main draw the game exerts on its loyalists is the opportunity to waddle around, collecting tokens to dress up your penguin, and collect furnishings for his or her igloo. If, by this point you are wondering why a supposed “media analyst” is asking you to devote some of your valuable mind-share to a ‘tween social networking site like this one, there is some method to my madness.

That’s because, this year, for the second holiday season in a row, Club Penguin, which is now owned by Disney, is asking its members to “donate” some of their tokens to “real world causes that matter to them,” according to a company press release.

In last year’s drive,  three groups split $1 million, courtesy of the “virtual charity” engaged in by Club members. The three were The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which works to prevent pediatric HIV infection and to eradicate AIDS in children around the world. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which works to protect the planet and help build a future where people live in harmony with nature, and Free The Children, whose primary goals are to free children from poverty and exploitation and free young people from the notion they are powerless to affect positive change in the world.

The money is distributed by the New Horizon Foundation, which was started by three Club Penguin founders.

So, the media industry question here: How can your company more closely associate its brand with charity during hard economic times? We’re all aware of the many canceled Christmas parties, executive bonuses, dividends, layoffs and other cutbacks sweeping the media world.

But what many execs may overlook is that one way many consumers (including information consumers) react to troubled times is to remind themselves that there are many others in far worse shape than they are. Although it’s too early to asses whether aggressive marketing strategies undertaken by retailers (like Macy’s “Letter to Santa” campaign this year), prove to be beneficial to their bottom lines, at the very least they are positive brand-association efforts that resonate with consumers.

Media companies of all sizes and types could do worse than consider the way Macy’s and Disney executives associate their products with this pent-up desire to help the less fortunate. It may seem an odd choice for a media company, as opposed to a retail outlet, but not so at a time we are trying to transform our companies into institutions better-rooted in their communities, and as the socially responsible institutions we’ve long argued them to be.