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Some 20 schools from across the country are expected to receive $500,000 each from Kohl’s Department stores. The $10 million program seems  generous, but is drawing criticism for the way the Menomonee Falls-based company is choosing the winners – based on the results of an online voting contest. Critics say the “Kohl’s Cares” contest falls short of philanthropy because  it required massive efforts from schools to win. None, by the way, are from Wisconsin.

Kohl’s is expected to choose the top-20 vote getters from an online poll it conducted on Facebook. To vote for a school, participants were first required to mark that they “liked” the Kohl’s Facebook page, and then they could cast up to 20 votes – but no more than five votes per school. Because voters could vote for more than one school, groups of schools, particularly Jewish and Christian ones, banded together to propel each other up the rankings.

the kohl's department store at bayshore town center in Port Washington

Voting closed on Sept. 3, and according to the contest’s Facebook page, Kohl’s Cares netted about 11 million votes. The page says the top 20 schools are still being reviewed (along with their plans for the money) to ensure compliance with contest rules. As of Tuesday, about 2.75 million people were listed as “liking” Kohl’s.

Inger Sole, an associate professor of communications at the University of Illinois, says the contest is an example of what is called “cause marketing,” a strategy by which a company improves its image by allying itself with a worthy cause. “The idea is to create good customers relations,” she says, and the contest likely cemented bonds with a wide range of voters.

“It’s sort of pathetic that schools have to spend their resources and their energies to get people to go to this website and vote,” she says. “There are so many schools that are underfunded. (Kohl’s is) taking advantage of that slippage and introducing this as a desperate measure.”

The top school was Lake High School in Millbury, Ohio, which was destroyed by a tornado in July. It pulled in 163,395 votes. There was only one other public school in the top 20, a 500-student elementary school in Northridge, Calif., that placed 12th with 143,537 votes. The rest were largely small religious academies. A total of 12 of the schools were Jewish, and the remaining six were Christian.

In the Milwaukee area, two Christian schools (St. Marcus Lutheran School and Pius XI High School) and the public Mitchell Middle School in Racine formed a strategic alliance. They created a special landing page instructing voters to support all three schools, and like many other such alliances around the country, they offered a giveaway, an iPad to a lucky voter.

And during the final week of voting, an administrator from each school – Marcus Superintendent Henry Tyson, Pius Principal Melinda Skrade and Amber Lamers, assistant principal at Mitchell Middle School – worked from the roof of St. Marcus to stir up buzz. Tyson also spent nights there. In the end, the schools cracked the top 40 but didn’t rise high enough to qualify for funding. Still, it was no small feat given the competition. In a similar effort, the principal of a New York City high school slept outside the school in a tent for several nights to drum up support.

St. Marcus is located on Milwaukee’s north side and participates in the city’s voucher program. Sara Gehl, a development associate for the school, says staff reached out to the school’s donors and the church’s members for votes. Staff also took laptops to fish fries, Milwaukee Brewer games and other events and solicited votes.

Gehl says the school is currently overcrowded with 420 students and raising money for an expansion that will allow it to enroll up to 600.

Other private schools followed similar tactics, dipping into alumni and donor lists and starting chain reactions of friends telling friends. “As it is right now,” Tyson says in a YouTube video filmed on the St. Marcus roof, “none of the money is staying here in Wisconsin. It’s all going to New York, to Florida and California and places like that. We need your involvement, your friends’ involvement and your friends’ friends’ involvement.”

Among the Milwaukee Public Schools, none made the top 20, but some ran their own get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Kris Collett, spokeswoman for the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association. She says the union has no official position on contests like Kohl’s Cares but sympathizes with the views of critics who say such contests ask too much of schools. “It shows the need for resources for schools around the country if schools are making that kind of effort,” she says.

According to Stole, American Express is credited with originating cause marketing in 1983 when it promised to contribute a penny for every credit card transaction to the Statue of Liberty restoration. The tsunami of publicity and customer sign-ups that followed delivered a tremendous return on the company’s $1.7 million contribution. She estimates that U.S. companies now spend over $1 billion on such programs.

And much of what companies spend on cause marketing is also tax deductible as a charitable donation. “It’s not going to cost Kohl’s Department Stores $10 million. It’s a tax advantage,” she says of Kohl’s Cares.

But the returns for cause marketing are  diminishing, Stole says, as it becomes less surprising to the public. Social networking could be its new frontier, however. She worries that such programs distract from the need for dedicated, reliable public funding.

Collett says the union is less concerned with Kohl’s Cares and more concerned about “public policy and making sure state finance formulas are fair.”

A request for comment from Kohl’s was not returned.

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