Having worked many summers with my painting contractor father, I’ve seen firsthand the transformative effect something as simple as a new coat of paint can have on a place — the change is sometimes so drastic and multifaceted that one could swear they’re holding a magic wand rather than a paint brush.

Now, Benjamin Moore Paints is partnering with Brad Pitt‘s charitable organization Make it Right to use the transformative power of paint to revitalize the Main Streets of America. The campaign asks consumers around the country to vote online for which 20 Main Streets should be renewed of the more than 100 North American cities nominated at www.paintwhatmatters.com.

Along with Make It Right, Benjamin Moore is partnering with local Benjamin Moore dealers, local municipalities, small businesses, and local Chambers of Commerce to get the effort underway. The paint company itself will provide the paint and supplies needed, and its color experts will consult on the best choices to enhance the architectural style, regional influences and historic references in each community. The company will also be hiring local professional painters, many of them members of the Painting and Decorating Contractors of America, further supporting local business. 

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Move over, Farmville. Virtual farming is out, and virtual plumbing (for a good cause) is on its way in.

As part of its annual Tap Project, UNICEF has partnered with Droga5 to create an app that turns your Facebook page into a virtual water tap. The project’s goal is to help raise awareness of the staggering number of people around the world who lack access to safe drinking water (roughly 800 million), while simultaneously raising money to help get clean water to those people.

According to UNICEF, just $5 dollars can give one child safe drinking water for 200 days. By donating those $5 dollars to the cause via PayPal or text message, Facebook users can now turn their pages into virtual taps carrying water to those in need (money-raising) and then choose two friends to whom they can link “pipes”, urging them create taps of their own (spreading awareness). Through this dual-action campaign, UNICEF hopes to “turn the world’s largest social network into the world’s largest water network.”

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We’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a particularly inspiring tale of PR working in the public interest.

Dick Lippin, founder of The Lippin Group (an entertainment communications and marketing firm famous for representing rock stars like Eric Clapton and Brian Wilson), lost his wife Ronnie, who PRWeek once called one of “Hollywood’s top publicists”, to a rare form of breast cancer six years ago. Motivated by the fact that reliable advice was so hard to come by during his wife’s illness, he then collaborated with the Tower Cancer Research Foundation to establish the Ronnie Lippin Cancer Information and Resource Line.

The project, funded by the Lippin Family Trust, recently partnered with the non-profit Cancer Support Community to expand its outreach by offering free in-person counseling services at CSC offices in Pasadena and West LA.

Lippin plans to expand the group’s services further in the future, and he says that “It means a lot to me and [my daughter] Alex that Ronnie’s legacy carries on in this way.”

All interested in supporting the group should check out its Facebook page and its page on the Tower Cancer Research Foundation site.

While the origins of No-Shave November, “Noshember” or “Movember” are debatable (some credit Plato while others blame lazy college kids with poor grooming habits), one thing about the viral month of scruff is certain — it has definitely caught on, and most of the time it’s all for a good cause.

According to the movement’s official Facebook page and accompanying website (both of which are associated with the American Cancer Society), “No-Shave November is a unique way to raise cancer awareness. The goal is to grow awareness by embracing our hair – which many cancer patients lose – and letting it grow wild.  Then, donate the money you normally spend on hair removal for a month to cancer research.”

While men seem to be the main target, women are also encouraged to quit shaving, cancel waxing appointments, etc.  (It’s November and it’s cold; why not?)

While we’ve yet to receive word on just how much money was raised (and how much hair was grown) this year, we think it’s safe to say that thousands of people got involved–and that they weren’t afraid to be creative.

Full disclosure: My significant other is a teacher, and he made a deal with his students–if they could raise $100 for the charity during the month of November, he would shave his beard and ‘stache into whatever ridiculous shape the kids wanted (and leave it that way for a week). While the donations won’t be tallied until next week, the students have already voted that, should the hundred-dollar goal be met, my beloved will be sporting the Batman symbol on his face for a full week. Click through for a preview:

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This week a LinkedIn editor’s personal story highlighted a significant and previously unreported problem with the American Red Cross’s uneven Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. Due to a technical “issue”, the organization’s online payment system charged “an unknown number” of well-meaning supporters twice for the same donation.

While the Red Cross claims to be “working quickly to resolve the issues” that affected “a small number of donors”, its spokespeople have yet to release a statement despite reports of efforts to contact each affected individual.

We shouldn’t have to say it, but this is not the proper way to address a potential PR crisis–however isolated it may be.

The longstanding aid group has already received a good bit of mixed-at-best media attention for its “slow” response to the Hurricane Sandy crisis. Lest we forget, the American Red Cross is not a nonprofit organization, and headlines about “raking in $150M in the name of the storm” do not boost the public profiles of prominent charity brands like this one.

Of course, technical snafus are an unavoidable part of modern life. But we classify this story as a PR Fail because the Red Cross didn’t mention it until the post surfaced on LinkedIn this week—and its reps have yet to offer any specifics beyond a claim that the issue affected “fewer than 1 percent of donors.”

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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s decision to cancel Sunday’s marathon after a few days of contentious debate left thousands of individuals with race plans and very low-body fat wondering what to do with themselves this weekend. What did these frustrated runners do? Many staged their own unofficial marathons–and quite a few simultaneously began organizing via social media to help the storm’s victims.

Twitter hash tags like #nycvolunteerathon and Facebook pages like “New York Runners in Support of Staten Island” earned thousands of followers in mere hours, providing information to help those interested in volunteering figure out where their efforts would be most effective. Other sites like the “Marathon of Relief” page also directed users to locations on the Internet and around the New York area where they could donate time, funds or goods to the recovery effort.

A revived Occupy also emerged after the storm with a new role: members of the movement created a spin-off group called Occupy Sandy that used its existing infrastructure to help raise funds and arrange volunteer shifts in areas of New York City that had been particularly hard hit by the storm.

In summary, the past week offered quite a few examples of people making the most of two less-than-ideal events: A huge storm and the cancellation of a major cultural event. The fact that they did it almost exclusively via social media–and that related feedback was overwhelmingly positive despite the countless headaches caused by the storm–is reason to feel a little better about the human race today.

Yesterday New York’s Central Park experienced one of its most notable events since the installation of Christo’s temporary art project The Gates in winter 2005: billionaire hedge fund manager John Paulson and the Paulson Family Foundation donated $100 million to the Central Park Conservancy. According to Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News, “It is believed to be the biggest single gift ever made to park land.”

The New York Times reported on the rationale behind Paulson’s philanthropy: at Tuesday’s press conference announcing the donation, Paulson said, “Central Park is among the most deserving of all of New York’s cultural institutions. And I wanted the gift to make a difference”. The funds will be evenly divided between the park’s endowment and capital improvements.

Paulson joined the Central Park Conservancy board in June, and he has supported the group for 20 years. According to Forbes, this gift far exceeds Paulson’s earlier philanthropic commitments, placing him “in a league with several of his most charitable peers atop New York City’s alternative asset management universe.”

Conservancy officials expressed delight at the bequest–president and CEO Doug Blonsky hailed the gift as “transformational,” saying it will enable the park to break its cycle of restoration and decline.

Paulson’s financial career has also experienced several ups and downs. He founded his hedge fund management company, Paulson & Co, in 1994 and became a billionaire in 2007, making most of his money by shorting subprime loans and effectively rooting for the collapse of the real estate market.

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Last week we joined a group of voices in questioning whether Breast Cancer Awareness Month and its primary sponsor, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, have lost a bit of focus in recent years.

Aside from the political squabbles that arose over the conflict between Komen and Planned Parenthood, many observers argue that what started as a movement to benefit the millions who struggle with breast cancer every year has descended into a celebration of consumerism marked by the official (and unofficial) promotion of products and services ranging from underwear to alcoholic beverages to streaming adult video (the website Pornhub.com, which features exactly the kind of content you’d expect, plans to donate one penny to Komen for every 30 views of one of its…breast-themed videos).

The question at the middle of this debate: How much of the money donated to Susan G. Komen for the Cure and associated charities goes directly toward real-world cancer research–and how much of it goes back into subsidizing the PR efforts of Susan G. Komen and its many related for-profit partners and properties?

A report filed last week by Business Insider concerned one of Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s most prominent promoters: the NFL. While the article isn’t quite damning, it does provide ammunition for those who argue that the NFL and other companies involved in the “pink” campaign may not be as generous as they seem.

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Despite some common misconceptions, 4-H is not just an agricultural club (although this PRNewser writer and former 4-H member did spend the summers of her youth happily raising vegetables and dragging impeccably-groomed sheep around a show ring). In reality, 4-H is a community of six million young people across America learning leadership, citizenship, and life skills. The H’s stand for head, heart, hands, and health, as demonstrated in the pledge that each member takes: “I pledge my head to clearer thinking, my heart to greater loyalty, my hands to larger service, and my health to better living for my club, my community, my country and my world.” Who doesn’t love that message? Now, retail leader and longtime supporter JCPenney has taken a pledge of their own.

4-H has been a part of JCPenney’s philanthropic focus throughout the company’s history–Mr. James Cash Penney himself was actively involved with the organization for almost 50 years. Now the company is taking their dedication to 4-H a step further with “JCP Cares“, a new charitable giving program encouraging customers to round their purchases up to the nearest dollar and donate the difference. This month, National 4-H Council is one of two featured charity partners (the other being Boys & Girls Club of America). August is probably a smart month to feature these two organizations, because families shopping for back-to-school attire will be especially attuned to messages promoting educational and cultural enrichment programs for American children. Read more

Principals at big-time NY/LA-based PR firm Sunshine Sachs don’t like to bring too much attention to themselves, but that hasn’t stopped them from scoring great headlines and sponsoring A-list events with a focus on noble causes like, say…reducing poverty rates around the world. (Did you know that more than 1.3 billion people across the globe live on the equivalent of $1.50 a day? We need to get out more.)

The firm’s latest announcement is significant in a couple of ways. They’re publicizing a massive September 29^th concert in Central Park with headliners Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Foo Fighters, and The Black Keys, but the details of the event are even more interesting: As reported on the Huffington Post, the show’s 54,000 tickets will not be available through the usual channels. Fans will have to “earn” their way into a raffle by downloading an app from the Global Citizen website and accumulating points by performing acts like donating to charities, signing petitions, or sharing information about global poverty on social media channels.

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