By Diane Haight, Senior Account Manager of Creative Services for Daymon.
Fuelled by growing awareness of social needs around the world, consumers’ desire to give back is at an all-time high. Americans gave over $373 billion to charitable causes in 2015, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
In the United Kingdom, nearly 80 percent of consumers support one or more charities, reports the Charities Aid Foundation. To support consumers’ growing philanthropic focus, retailers and brands are increasingly looking for new products and services to help make giving simple and seamless, which in turn can strengthen their own connection to consumers.
One way that grocery, discount and mass merchandise retailers often support charitable giving, particularly around the holidays, is through food donation bags and collection boxes at their stores, but they aren’t always making the most of these opportunities.
There’s a real opening for retailers to capitalize on the value of giving and to develop more robust campaigns around charitable food donations. Recently, we collaborated with a grocery partner and we worked together to develop a fully-branded box of non-perishable private label items that shoppers could purchase for $10 and then either leave at the register for the store to donate, or take to their own charity of choice.
A well-designed box stands out to shoppers and gives them all the information they need, like what’s in the box, its purpose and how much it costs. It’s much more effective than using plain bags or boxes. In addition, using private brand items to fill the box creates a substantial donation while keeping the total cost tolerable for most consumers. As a bonus, it also helps raise awareness of the retailer’s own brand.
This tactic can also help streamline efforts from an operational perspective for the retailer, giving their distribution centers an established set of items to pack, and their associates a single UPC to scan. Leveraging the value of private brands can also help lower the costs for the retailer, or even make the project cost neutral.More opportunities can result from these efforts than retailers might originally think. This can be a year-round component of a retailer’s charitable efforts it doesn’t have to just be done around the holidays nor does it have to be limited to food. For example, we also created a smaller USO-branded box for one of our retailer partners filled with health and beauty care items, such as lip balm and hand sanitizer. Consumers purchased the boxes for $5 and then the retailer shipped them to deployed troops overseas.
With the addition of customized in-aisle signage and social media engagement, these philanthropic donation boxes can strengthen a retailer’s ties to the local community. In turn, this can help drive the notion for consumers that the store is truly their neighbourhood retailer.
