Jeremy Melnick had no idea that an employee at one of his Chicago-area hardware stores had lost a grandson to cancer. The employee told his story for a short video featuring staff members who shared how they felt about the company’s fundraising campaigns to support a local children’s hospital.
“I didn’t know about his loss and I didn’t know his grandson was treated at a CMN hospital,” Mr. Melnick says, referring to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, a nonprofit that raises money for pediatric hospitals around the country. “It’s such a sad story, but we are glad he shared it because this is all about the connections, us doing something together as a business that is meaningful.”
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Jeremy Melnick had no idea that an employee at one of his Chicago-area hardware stores had lost a grandson to cancer. The employee told his story for a short video featuring staff members who shared how they felt about the company’s fundraising campaigns to support a local children’s hospital.
“I didn’t know about his loss and I didn’t know his grandson was treated at a CMN hospital,” Mr. Melnick says, referring to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, a nonprofit that raises money for pediatric hospitals around the country. “It’s such a sad story, but we are glad he shared it because this is all about the connections, us doing something together as a business that is meaningful.”
Mr. Melnick’s eight stores, all Ace Hardware franchises, participate in point-of-sale campaigns that Ace sponsors to benefit Children’s Miracle Network by asking shoppers to donate at check-out counters. As at thousands of stores and restaurants nationwide that raise money for various nonprofits, customers might be asked to give a few dollars outright, put change in a coin-collection canister, or round up the cost of a purchase, with the extra going to a charity. At Ace stores around the country, which raised $2.7 million for Children’s Miracle Network in 2016, customers can also support a selected charity by buying candy displayed at the register.
According to Engage for Good, a cause-marketing trade group, 73 point-of-sale campaigns in 2016, including Ace’s, raised at least $1 million each. The total of $441 million for 2016 was up from 2014, the last time Engage for Good conducted its biannual survey. The recent results were “a surprisingly positive achievement,” the group’s latest report says, “given the doom-and-gloom of bankruptcy declarations, layoffs and store closings afflicting so many brick-and-mortar retailers.”
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Indeed, point-of-sale campaigns remain a popular fundraising technique for charities large and small. Plenty of stores and other businesses remain committed to the practice, despite great uncertainty in the future of the retail industry and in cash-register transactions.
In this challenging environment, The Chronicle asked officials at some of the companies and nonprofits running the most successful point-of-sale campaigns for advice to charities looking to improve their own efforts. Here are some ideas that stood out:
Make it personal.
Getting employees — and cashiers, in particular — to feel personally connected to the cause goes a long way in motivating them to ask customers for their support.
To educate and motivate Ace employees, Children’s Miracle Network distributes “What’s your why?” cards for the staff to fill out and post in their break rooms. Employees might write that they can relate to the cause because they have a sick loved one or that they appreciate working for a company that is philanthropic. Children’s Miracle Network also promotes company involvement by establishing connections between stores and the local hospitals, such as hospital tours or store visits by patients and their families.
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“It’s putting a face to the cause that works best,” says Dan Olson, who owns Ace Hardware stores that raise money for the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
Ross Stores, whose discount department stores around the country run point-of-sale campaigns to benefit Boys & Girls Clubs of America, turned to one of its store managers to inspire her colleagues. The manager of a store in Oklahoma was featured in a campaign kick-off call with 700 other managers from around the country. She told the story of how she had attended her local Boys & Girls Club growing up and, through a career-training program sponsored by Ross, got her first job as a seasonal employee.
“Her fellow managers are hearing how Boys & Girls Clubs touched the life of one of their own colleagues,” says Chad Royal-Pascoe, a national vice president who runs the nonprofit’s corporate and cause partnerships. “That’s priceless.”
Pick the right partners.
Employees and customers will be more likely to participate in fundraising efforts when the cause-company partnership makes sense. In business speak, that’s called “mission alignment” or “brand fit.”
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Video-game retailer GameStop surveyed its employees a couple of years ago to find out which causes they cared about most. After learning that autism was at their top of their list, and taking into consideration the large number of families affected, the company started a point-of-sale campaign in 2016 to benefit Autism Speaks. It raised nearly $1.2 million.
When the American Lung Association introduced Lung Force, a lung-health campaign for women, in 2014, the charity identified what officials called a perfect corporate sponsor: CVS Health. The company had just ended the sale of tobacco products at its pharmacies around the country. CVS’s point-of-sale campaign raised $6 million for Lung Force in 2016.
“The stars were aligned,” says Susan Gloede Swan, the lung association’s national chief development officer. Store employees, she says, are willing and educated ambassadors for the cause when the annual campaign rolls around because they are getting the lung-health message from the company year round.
Respond to business concerns.
Nonprofits should be ready and willing to adapt to the needs and priorities of their company partners.
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When CVS started raising money for the lung association in 2014, stores featured the posting of “pin-ups,” small paper cut-outs with Lung Force’s blue swirly logo. The approach had been a mainstay of Children’s Miracle Network and many other successful fundraisers. But some CVS stores complained they didn’t have enough space to display the pin-ups, so the charity and the company decided to change the solicitation strategy and instead ask customers to simply make a straight donation of cash at the registers, of $1 or $3 or more.
“We had to maneuver around the stores’ needs,” says the lung association’s Ms. Swan. “The icons are what we were counting on to draw attention to the campaign, so we came up with other ways that were more viable,” including, she says, playing campaign ads on the in-store radio stations.
Go parking lot to parking lot.
Results improve as the number of consumer touch-points increases. That means: Make signs, lots of them, and put them everywhere.
Mr. Royal-Pascoe, at the Boys & Girls Clubs, says the best way to ensure that “customers interact with your brand” before they get to the check-out counter is to do a walk-through of stores with an operations manager. “Going parking lot to parking lot,” he says, will identify where signs — wall signs, window decals, aisle-floor stickers — should be placed and where other attention-grabbers, such as signs featuring promotions tied to certain products, would be most visible.
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The question to ask, Mr. Royal-Pascoe says, is “What are all the different pieces of real estate we can possibly have?”
Employees themselves might be part of that real estate. Some CVS stores have their employees wear turquoise t-shirts and buttons for a week while the annual Lung Force point-of-sale fundraiser is underway.
Don’t get in the way of transactions.
Businesses say the customer experience is paramount: Make sure the point-of-sale solicitation is quick and efficient.
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Offering the option for customers to round up a purchase price on credit-card or cash transactions is an increasingly popular way to collect point-of-sale donations because it is fast and easy. And to keep things moving, some stores that use a Yes or No option for donations on credit-card terminals allow cashiers to turn off the prompts to speed up lines at busy times.
But the speed and ease of transactions often depends more on cashiers’ training. A well-informed cashier can quickly answer a customer’s questions about the fundraiser or the charity, and know when to move on when a customer shows no interest.
The Boys & Girls Clubs makes pocket-sized guides for cashiers that include a short, handy script for requesting a donation. During a point-of-sale campaign last summer at Lowe’s, employees were given cards with quick facts about the charity, small enough to fit into a pocket of the vests that are part of their uniform. A one-sentence answer to a customer who asks why she should donate: “They are right here in our community and are a safe and fun place for kids to go when school is out.”
Stay on top of new technology.
Nonprofits and businesses need to know how to capture the attention and dollars of shoppers who are increasingly making fewer purchases through traditional cash-register transactions.
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E-commerce has the potential to raise a ton of money for charities, but “brick-and-mortar still reigns supreme in point-of-sale fundraising,” says the Engage for Good report. Creativity and experimentation will continue to drive in-store consumer support for nonprofits.
Children’s Miracle Network is testing the use of a donation prompt at self-check-out terminals in some Wal-Mart stores for customers buying at least $10 worth of products. The nonprofit is also considering ways to work with businesses, like Sam’s Club, that have their own mobile payment apps, and what to do with third-party mobile payment systems, such as ApplePay, which also keep shoppers from check-out lines.
“People can just walk in, get what they want, scan their phones, or just push a button right on their phones, and walk out,” says Mr. Sweat of the Children’s Miracle Network. “How do we insert ourselves into that?”
Ideas include having the apps add a donation prompt or making bar codes available throughout stores that shoppers can swipe with their phones to make a gift. Mr. Sweat and other cause-related marketing experts are also thinking about approaches that might work as stores experiment with beacon technology, which uses Bluetooth technology to identify a shopper’s location and to send phone notifications.
One recent innovation doesn’t stray much from the old-fashioned approach of using coin jars for charity. Through DipJar, introduced a few years ago as a way to leave cashless tips, nonprofits can collect donations anywhere, including at the cash register. A chapter of the Susan G. Komen cancer group has placed DipJars — small units with a credit-card reader that deducts a gift of a predetermined amount — next to cash registers at a handful of New York City gyms. The nonprofit also uses them at events and is considering additional placements.
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“Point-of-sale fundraising is such a huge thing in so many stores, with the pin-ups and on the pin-pads,” says Devon Ott, director of marketing and communications at Susan G. Komen Greater New York City. “The DipJars are just another way to collect donations, but they are so simple and fast and portable.”
And, she adds, “We all want to be where someone is already spending money."n