Not to be cynical about it, but charity has always been great for business. “Charitable marketing,” or “altruistic marketing,” has been embraced by many of the leading brands, from McDonald’s and Ben & Jerry’s to the National Football League.

It works even better at the local community level. More and more of our local marketplace companies are jumping on the bandwagon by donating a portion of their proceeds to charity — usually around 10 percent, or equivalent.

BiddingforGood, an effort developed by Family Education Network founder Jon Carson, has worked with 6,400 companies to run auctions for charities. Oodle, under the leadership of Craig Donato, got a jump on the bandwagon a couple of years ago by letting used good sellers assign their proceeds to their choice among a list of 1,000 charities.

More recently, we’ve seen Local Corp.’s SpreeBird assign 10 percent of its net proceeds to local schools or charities: an effort that has already sent out more than $700,000. Similarly, Mogl.com, a diner loyalty program, assigns 0.5 percent of every restaurant tab to its “donate a meal” program, as well as the donation of free meals to incent new signups. The effort has already amounted to 50,000 meals from the start-up. Go Jon Carder!

NextJump’s OO.com is also pushing hard on the cause marketing front. It assigns a loyalty WOW point for every dollar assigned — a loyalty factor that encourages customers to buy in network. Today, in conjunction with Father’s Day, it is partnering with Best Buy on a $10 for $20 deal, with proceeds designed to push 00.com’s donation to Donors Choose, a poor schools program, over the $1 million. The effort has affected 127,000 students in 472 schools in less than six months.

NextJump CEO Charlie Kim tells us that the charity effort and other company efforts all add up to the same thing. “Basically, it is incentive currency,” he says. “It incents behavior. They are going to buy things anyway.”

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NextJump has launched a beta version of OO.com, a consumer-facing destination site that seeks to leverage its relationships with merchants, national marketers and local marketing entities including LivingSocial (deals), Restaurant.com (restaurant deals) and now Grubhub (restaurant order out). The site boasts 16,501 offers in 184 cities, and is divided into “national” offers, “limited time” offers and “everyday” offers.

NextJump has been quietly developing as both a promotions leader for 30,000 merchant partners and as a rewards and personalization facilitator for 90,000 enterprise databases, among them brand name marketers such as The Tribune Co. (ChicagoShopping, Shop By The LA Times), MasterCard, Dell, Borders, Barnes & Noble.com, AARP Discount Club and others. The 225-person company, which has raised $45 million since its inception in 1994 as a coupon company, also powers Yahoo deals.

OO.com — a cyber-shortening of its “Overwhelming Offers” brand — marks a new chapter for the company. With 10 million customers from its various corporate clients and access to corporate databases that have 100 million, the destination site uses NextJump’s “WOWpoints” rewards program and personalization technology as key differentiators.

CEO Charles Kim tells us that the rewards systems have proved to be a logical next step for businesses seeking to building on customer acquisition efforts such as deal a day. The ideal mix “should be 20 percent acquisition, 80 percent loyalty,” he says.

We’ve argued that efforts such as multi-visit punch cards and instant deals may be part of the next wave. Kim would argue that points programs should be added to the list — if they are well-executed. But many points programs “are very difficult to use,” he says. “They create disloyalty, not loyalty.”

NextJump is offering 50 of our readers some reward points to try out the system. Sign up for OO.com and use code: yvghprmk1. You’ll get 500 WOWPoints.

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