Charitable Ideas For Your Company.
Written By Tom Howard.
One of the most rewarding things I ever did after buying my company actually came from a marketing idea. I love ideas that help you grow your business but give back to the community at the same time. I had a lot of billboards in my area. My company had grown a lot and it made sense at that point to boost brand recognition through a billboard campaign. The issue with billboards is that if you don’t change them out and put up new content, people will get used to seeing them and they won’t leave an impression on the person seeing the board. You have to keep the content fresh or it won’t leave an impact. I had started to run out of ideas for new content though.
The head of marketing from ServiceTitan came to visit my shop to do a shop tour and learn more about the trades. While he was there, I told him about my conundrum with the billboards. He told me to have some kids draw things and put that on my billboards. Maybe they could try to draw my logo or something. I thought it was a neat idea and would totally make a kid’s day but I didn’t know which kid or kids should do the drawing and then I got a great idea.
There is a children’s hospital in my area. The hospital has a cancer ward where parents bring them children from hundreds of miles away to be treated for various types of cancer. The kids have to undergo chemo therapy for months at a time and miss school and can’t hang out with their friends. We went to the nurses and set up a contest. We told them that we were going to run a contest and whoever drew the best billboard, we would pay to have their billboard posted in our area and give them a picture of it. The only rule was that they had to write our company name on it “Lee’s” and other than that they could draw whatever they wanted. 14 kids participated. We got drawings of rainbows and robots and unicorns and all kinds of things. We had plenty of billboards to do one or more for every kids’ drawing.
We put a navy blue strip down the left side of each billboard with our actual logo in the bottom left corner and the logo of the children’s hospital above it. (Valley Children’s Hospital) Then in the upper left, it said the kids first name and their age. (Sarah, Age 9) Each parent signed off on us being able to use that information. We could not post anything about what ailment they had or anything about any medical condition. We did post a page on our website explaining what the progream was and why we did it.
Then we made a certificate for each kid that said “Lee’s Honorary Marketing Executive”. We also took pictures of every billboard for each kid. We included a picture of the staff at our company with a thank-you card for helping us with our marketing. Then we then went and made gift baskets for the kids. We got a nintendo switch for each kid that they could play while being in the hospital. We also got them games for the switch. The billboard company found out what we were doing and made scale replicas of each billboard to give to each kid that participated with their billboard on it.
The kids were thrilled. Some of the parents took pictures of the kids with the switches and the games they were playing. It literally brought me to tears.
