Contributions and Charitable giving.
How many times are you asked to provide a check or free services or discounted services?
I want to tell you how we handle that.
I am Ron Ramsden, I am a DYB coach, also a painting contractor up here in New England.
It's been a business; you have to expect people to ask you for contributions.
If you are a convenient store, a painting contractor, or you are the bank, someone is
going to ask you to write a check.
What we like to do is we do write checks when we feel the need and we can afford to write
a check.
Sometimes you get recognition, and we are not always looking for recognition, we are
giving from our heart, and when we believe it needs to happen.
But we also have some pretty cool services we offer, which is painting.
Not everybody can paint, not everybody has a crew, you don't need to have a crew to
offer these services.
And they tell you a couple of times, we do offer it, we do offer it a couple times here,
as a campaign, and the campaign as some of you might have heard of Paint It Forward.
I want to walk you through the different steps of painting it forward and how we go about
getting people to nominate other people, and that's how we get people to figure out who
we want to give this charitable donation to.
And our charitable donation is labor and paint, at no cost to the recipient.
There is no set amount, you could give $1,000 worth of labor and material, or you could
give $5,000.
We found out sweet spot to be $3,500, you can send a crew in there for a couple of days,
and work wonders with our paint.
So, let me walk you through first how you nominate someone, and how you get people to
nominate.
We go and we fill out a Google form, you can make Google forms on Google, we ask for people
to nominate other people, organizations or other charities.
Occasionally, we will get someone nominate someone in their own family, and it's usually
a wife nominating a husband, the husband has fallen into hard times, it maybe injury, sickness
or something like that, that financially in the house needs a little help.
So, what we ask is the person nominating, of course, their name first, all their contact
information, because if we have more questions that we have to narrow the field down to choose
one, sometimes we have to ask additional questions.
And if they are awarded the contribution, we have to know how to coordinate it, you
need all that information, and make that a must fill out.
Secondly, we want to know who they are nominating, what organization, person, or charity.
From there, we ask for the charities information, address and things.
If the charity has a website, we would like to check that out too, but it is anything
else, we then ask for a paragraph or two, or story on why this person should be chosen.
Sometimes you get a one or two line answers and sometimes you get 2 or 3 paragraphs and
sit down when you are reviewing these, because some of them are really [inaudible 03:10]
and it is really hard on some occasion to get a decision, because you just want to give
your services to everybody, so I want to warn you about that first.
So, what we do is we get the nomination pages.
And how do we get the word out?
The word goes out through all our networking groups, we ask at the end, usually, does anybody
have an announcement?
We use that time for our announcements, we also might want to print out something about
it, if you want to put a flyer together or our 60-second commercial during our BNI networking
events, we always mention it then.
And what I usually do is mention it a few times coming up into it we usually start
this nomination process, about 2 months prior, to choosing somebody.
Also, any other networking event.
Then we want to post it on social media: Facebook, wherever else you can put it, we email this
to all our clients.
All your clients email list, put a MailChimp campaign out there and make sure you get it
out to them.
and then you can take the link to that Google form and add it everywhere.
And then you want to remind people to nominate, because people have best intentions, but they
don't always jump on it right away.
So, you might end up with 5 nominations, you might end up with 30 nominations, our average
is probably 8 to 14, 8 to 15 nominations at any one time.
Some of them, it's not easy to pass, but there is so much more need in some places.
So, I just want to let you know what we do next.
We then narrow it down to about 3 different people or organizations, and then we start
really digging it into finding out what they are doing, maybe make some phone calls, emails
and ask some additional questions.
Recently, we chose an organization called Debby's Treasure Chest.
Debby's Treasure Chest is in the city, right next to me, that helps a lot of needy families,
this is actually their second time being nominated, the first time we were overwhelmed and we
did chose somebody else, but this time they haven't had any work done in their facility
for a long time, it is basically where people drop off clothes and things for needy people,
they sew it, they clean it, people come in and they give them cloth sizes, toys for the
kids, books for the kids, backpack, this is a totally non-profit organization, nobody
takes any kind of salary, and they have been overwhelmed lately, so we decided that this
would be a great time, we contacted the person who nominated them, let them know they won,
they were very excited obviously, and we had to find out a time to present them, the winner.
You can walk in the office and say, congratulations, and everybody is happy.
But this is the time that you can get a little media coverage from this, every now and then
you have to pat yourself on the back and this is the time we pat ourselves on the back and
we show the community that we are giving back.
So, we go in, we used to bring balloons, flowers and things like that, that was really great,
we stepped it up a little bit this time and I want to show you how.
So, we had a check made out, it is a good-sized check, it's basically a white wood, this
one happens to have a frame on it, you can write right on it.
So what we did is, we write Debby's Treasure Chest on it, we had $3,500, and we brought
this in, in a big bag, actually used a Home Depot black bag, because it fits perfect around
us, and we were able to present them with that, during a get-together they had with
about 40, 50, 60 people there.
And they did take some pictures, the media was there, actually the police department
was there taking pictures, they were a part of it, so we actually got a lot of press,
not that we were looking for, but it's nice to get it.
So, a sign like this, a white board, check mate out this, this is about $100, your local
printer can do something like this, the guy who does all my engraving, printing and things
was able to put that together for me.
So, this was a great eye catcher and it got a lot of wow factor.
So, now what we do is, we've given them the donation, now we have to act on it.
So, what we do is, then we make an appointment with them and then we can go over colors with
them ahead of time, if we have to bring in a color person to give us a hand, we do, if
they don't know their colors, and then we can coordinate it on our time.
So, maybe it is a Saturday, maybe a crew would like to donate the day, not all the time that
my crew wants to give up their Saturday, very understandable, some of my crew's spouses,
significant others work on Saturdays, and they are at home with kids, or helping other
people, so I totally understand that, it is my decision to give the charitable donation
away so we tend to do it during the work week, on a Thursday or Friday, if it bleeds over
to Saturday, also do it, we make sure it happens.
On this one, it just happened to work out that we are doing it next month, and we are
going to be doing it not on weekends, because they can actually control the foot traffic
in certain areas, so they are giving different offices for us to paint.
So, we are going to make this fun, we are going to take more pictures, we are going
to have shirts made up, with our paint it forward, our logo, Debby's Treasure Chest
giving back on the front of it, we are going to give it to all the staff there, so they
all have one, we will all have one, and we will get some great media coverage out of
it.
So, that's how we give out back to our major contributions, in the painting field in my
area, we do get some press, we will actually then take the pictures from that, front that,
we are going to write up our own article and then we will send it over to the local newspaper.
Local newspapers also love when you give them everything on a silver platter.
The people writing for the newspaper, they can't be everywhere, they can't take pictures,
but if you can provide all these for them, you are more likely to get put into the paper.
So, we have those free newspapers, those will be happening, our page newspaper, that would
be happening, and also we are going to post this on all of our social media channels,
and as well as send this out as a MailChimp campaign, just to let them know that we gave
back.
We sent one out when we got awarded this, we had a picture and the title was giving
back to our community, a nice picture, a nice paragraph or two underneath it, and that's
all we did.
So, great way to give back to the community, I just wanted to share how our process is.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me at ron@dybcoach.com, or find me on Facebook,
I would love to chat with you.
Have fun, give back, it feels so good when you can help other people, thank you, have
a good one.
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