Newsletter: Charity Partnership Gone Awry May Topple Prime Minister 🇨🇦 ; Release the Kraken for Charity 🦑 ; Businesses Ramp-Up Round-Up Programs to Address Coin Shortage 🩳
Let's talk about the Read for Purpose Book Club 📚for a bit this week.
Whenever we announce our next book, hundreds of you click on the link to get the book. This is great, right? But when the day of the actual book club meeting arrives only a few of you show up.
This makes Megan and I sad - especially Megan. She openly wept at last week's book club meeting. It was really, really sad (and awkward). I even got a little weepy... 😉😂
Maybe we are not picking the right books and you are losing interest. Maybe it's tough to read a book in one month. Maybe the meeting time isn't working for people's schedules. Reply to this email and let me know what your challenge is.
- - -
Megan and I thought we would try something different for August. Instead of a book club, we're going to try a Learning Club.
So instead of just a book, we'll choose a topic and recommend a book, a podcast and a few articles so you can choose how you want to engage with the topic. No time to read the book? Just read a couple of the recommended articles. Don't feel like reading? Listen to the podcast. Don't like the resources we suggested? Find your own and share them with the group at the meeting.
This month's learning topic is...🥁...the future of retail. Of course, we're most interested in talking about the future of retail as it relates to our favorite topic, corporate partnerships.
Here are the suggested readings:
Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption [Book by Steve Dennis. Buy it locally if you can! 😃]
Steve Dennis On The State of Retail And Shopping [Six Pixels of Separation Podcast, July 12, 2020]
The Pandemic Will Change American Retail Forever [The Atlantic]
How Social Values Are Impacting Consumer Behavior [National Retail Federation]
The next book club meeting is Thursday, August 27th at 4.pm. EDT. Join our Facebook Group here, which will have all the details about signing up.
If you don't show up to this next club meeting, Megan and I will probably cry so hard we'll start an electrical fire with our computers. Things could get pretty, pretty bad. You wouldn't want that...would you? 🥺
✍️ Partnership Notes
1. Ball Park 🌭launches a social media campaign to help baseball stadium vendors who are out of work. Also, here's a round-up of other cause campaigns involving Major League Baseball.
2. Release the Kraken! for charity.
3. Have you been following the drama around Canada's Justin Trudeau and WE Charity? This is such an instructive case study from Vice on what to do - and not to do - when it comes to corporate partnerships. Also, check out the slides they included from WE. They are pretty good at showing the value of partnering with the organization.😬Update: Major corporate sponsors are starting to distance themselves from WE Charity.
4. One of the best ways to grow your partnership program is through referrals. Here's how to ask for them (plus free email templates).
5. Businesses are ramping-up charity round-up programs to help address the coin shortage.
🤑 Marketing Your Cause
1. Which content format are you using most effectively to generate partnership leads? ⬆️
2. Please gently click on this link. There's a puppy inside! 🐶
3. Never doubt the influence of a powerful chart. "Charts are arguments."
😎 Cool Jobs in Cause
1. Manager, Digital Communications, Center for Corporate Citizenship (Chestnut Hill, MA)
2. Corporate Alliances Manager, Make-A-Wish (Remote)
3. Corporate Relations Officer, Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA)
Have your cause-related job featured here for FREE. Hit reply to this email and give me the details and a link to the position.
🧠 🍌 Brain Food
1. How a small nonprofit came back from the brink in the Great Recession. Make sure to read the comments! [Paywall? I can email this to you.]
2. Hospitals are asking patients for money. Patients are "repelled" by these solcitations.
3. This week's gahhden photo is a stunnah! Orange 'Ethel Shepard' and red 'Chicago Apache' daylilies, purple Verbena bonariensis, pink Angelonia 'Serena Rose', and a mophead hydrangea in the background! 💥
Have a question (garden questions welcomed!), comment, or just want to say hi? Just hit reply or head over to Twitter.
