It won't get a funeral or an obituary. It won't even get a headstone. If it did, it would read something like this.

In the long history of business, corporate charity is just a youngster. It survived a relatively short time, but during that time, billions of dollars will have flowed from corporate coffers into the bank accounts of community charities. These, in turn, will have used those funds to solve social and environmental problems and build or rebuild communities. The sad irony of corporate charity's demise is that its own brother, driven by market forces, will eventually be the cause.

Many are surprised to learn that corporate charity didn't exist legally in the United States until 1953. That was the year the Supreme Court established that corporations could give money to the community in the same way that other "persons" could. This was a big step, as it unleashed the power of corporate wealth in the pursuit of social and environmental issues in a way that until then was done only by individuals and government, if at all.

The beginning of the end of this noble experiment came just three decades later, in 1983, when Corporate Charity's younger half-brother, "Cause-Related Marketing", was born. That's when American Express released its Statue of Liberty restoration ad campaign. With it, they almost single-handedly created the practice of intentionally improving a company's image and, more importantly, increasing sales by donating to a cause the customer cares about.

In a stroke of marketing genius, the company linked its profits to the fate of an American icon. It pledged to donate one cent for every use of the American Express card and a dollar for every new card issued. The company experienced a 28% increase in card usage over the same period of a year earlier and ultimately raised $1.7 million for the project.

Did executives at American Express sit around the mahogany table lamenting the fate of one of America's greatest landmarks? Maybe. The genteel practice of corporate charity would have dictated quiet, dignified support, the success of which being almost irrelevant.

Instead, cause-related marketing came screaming into the board room, demanding the company get something in return for its efforts: publicity and image enhancement -- pure gold in the modern economy -- and more sales. It dealt what would be a fatal blow to its older sibling by shifting the mindset in corporate America away from the mushy softness of "charity" to the business-savvy world of strategy.

From that day forward, companies felt the heat of competition as they came up with ever more sophisticated ways of supporting the community while serving the company