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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Local Corp. has branched out in several directions in an effort to leverage its local platform. It has recently acquired Krillion (retail and product search) and Rovion (rich media platform and integration). Another major effort is its development of Spreebird, a deals company being built on top of its acquisition of Southern California’s Screamin’ Deals.

Spreebird has been mostly differentiated in the deals space by its profit share with local schools or charities. Users can designate which school or charity they want to designate 10 percent of the deal’s net proceeds for. To date, $650,000 has been donated, or 10 percent of its net profits.

The site, after roughly six months, has now unveiled a new look that gives it a stronger visual ID that is more feminine (more than 80 percent of its users are female). The site has also revealed a new tagline: “Shop Smarter. Make a Difference.”

Senior VP Malcolm Lewis tells us that the site is really focused on providing a better shopping experience, and isn’t limiting itself to typical deals entitles such as restaurant and spa deals. A recent deal, for instance, sold several hundred sets of bath towels and bedding, he noted.

Deals are being highly targeted based on a number of algorithms for location, purchaser history and the popularity of the deals category. The algorithm will recognize buying patterns, he said.

Spreebird is also set to move beyond deals, which is just one of six promotional categories that he envisions (but won’t reveal). The site is also very mobile-centric, with a “significant percentage” looking up deals via daily alert emails and mobile browser, although the percentage actually buying from mobile is much smaller.

In all, Lewis envisions that Spreebird isn’t trying to be a generic deals site. He thinks the site could compete as a strong premium niche, “like Volvo.”

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