Episode 200: What Fundraising Teaches Us About the Power of Promo
We’re learning lessons from the world of fundraising and we have three guests on the skucast from two different organizations.
One organization is PromoKitchen and the other, Promocares. Each organization recently worked on separate fundraising initiatives. Today, we interview some of the participants involved, as a way to help bring awareness to their work but also, to explore their experiences as a teaching moment for us.
We explore:
The power of merch to elevate brand awareness
Using merch to raise funds
How branded products provide recognition for donors
Rallying your tribe toward a good cause by creating limited-edition merch drops
The marketing tactics that help propel great campaigns (like using sneak peeks of merch on social, newsletters)
Creating FOMO
And how to integrate a shop experience to not only make it easy but to emotionally connect with an audience and ignite enthusiasm around a cause.
PromoKitchen is a 501c3 non-profit, an all-volunteer organization build and led by pros in the business. PromoKitchen represents a cross-section of the industry: suppliers, distributors, and service providers. They focus on best practice sharing through their Podcast, educational events, and networking events and they have two mandates, education and mentorship.
Kate Plummer is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Clearmount. Kate joined Clearmount over 12 years ago and has since carved a unique position in her business and in the industry as a thought-leader and voice of conscientious creativity. Kate is Vice-Chair of promokitchen.
Ashley Colautti is the Senior Enterprise Account Manager at commonsku she spent over 12 years working as a distributor before her role at commonsku she now helps large distributors assess their workflows and current systems to uncover pain points that can cause a bottleneck in productivity.
An unsung hero in this story but one of my favorite people in the world is the uber-talented Kathy Cheng of Redwood Classics. From Kate’s initial idea to create a fund-raising merch drop, to Kathy’s creativity and beautiful work creating a one-of-a kind apparel piece exclusive to PK, to Ashley’s productivity power, they launched an entire experience from concept to market in less than a week.
After my chat with the PromoKitchen team, I talk with Kari Cowden of Promocares.
PromoCares is an organization that inspires, educates, and provides actionable strategies to encourage social and environmental responsibility in the promotional products industry. They wanted to create an annual fundraiser for causes they could support and this year they chose Nami, Wake County as their charity of choice. NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.
PromoCares wants to raise awareness around the stigma of mental health and its connection to sleep deprivation, by bringing attention to the connection between mental health and sleep deprivation. They created a fundraiser called Sleep in 4 good, it’s a brilliant idea because as we all face new challenges in a post-pandemic world and particularly as our industry is facing a lot of sleepless nights right now due to supply chain issues and HR challenges and more … it’s a perfect initiative. You can learn more and donate at promocares.org, they are raising funds through Nov 8th, the day when Daylight Savings Time ends, brilliant, and you can join them for their happiest of happy hours at 6pm ET on Nov 8th which you should be able to attend with no problem because you’ll be well-rested.
Karie Cowden is the President and founder of Connect the Dots Promotions, she is one of our industry’s most admired mentors, she was a PPAI board member and her experience is vast working as both a supplier and a distributor, in our chat we talk about how promo played a pivotal role in changing the dynamic of one organization’s fundraising efforts, a project that Karie and her team won a PPAI golden pyramid award for.