General Mills and Box Tops 4 Education

General Mills has been an Optimist Company since long before it was trendy to integrate philanthropy into a marketing plan. The Box Tops 4 Education website doesn't even brandish the General Mills logo or any trademark cereal characters. The program is so entrenched that it's apparently not sexy enough to warrant much mention in the blogosphere (although here is one mom blogger's plug for it, plus a newsletter post from an Alaskan school). Yet it's so effective that General Mills has given $200M to primary schools in a simple purchases-for-cash program in 11 years.