Where business and community meet
Helping Out Locally bridges the gap between local businesses and the amazing communities that surround them.
Can't Find a Charity?
How this came about and why you should implement it...
A few years ago, one of our contractors, Jacob Carr of Nottawasaga Mechanical in Wasaga Beach Ontario, asked us to build some email submission forms in his website so that customers could fill them out and have their submissions counted as votes. When we asked him why he was doing it, he said that he was so tired of throwing money at marketing that didn’t produce results, he figured he’d rather give the money to charity instead. He decided to create a contest in his website where he could have a few local charities compete for a $1,000 cash prize by simply getting their supporters to visit his website and vote for their charity. The rules were that they could vote as many times as they wanted to—but only once per day. At the end of three months, the charity with the most votes got the prize.
As simple as this contest was, we saw his web traffic increase from an average of 30 visitors a day, up to well over 120 visitors daily—all local! Jacob later told me he doubled his service business in the first year after he started doing it—without doing anything else different in his company. What Jacob had discovered, was that instead of trying to drag customers into our world by advertising and marketing, by positioning his company within the traffic of what his community was already passionate about, the engagement with the community this created caused his company’s brand to explode.
In July of last year, when Google released its Local Services platform, it became apparent that the landscape would be drastically changing when it came to getting leads from local search. At that time, we decided we needed to totally expand our programming focus to make our websites less dependent on Google for success and find a way to use the web to engage our clients’ communities more. Because of this, we took Jacob’s program and reinvented it.
Since we never take a product to our clients that we haven’t thoroughly tested and evaluated, we have spent over 13-months of testing to get this right. During that time, the program has gone through many improvements, changes, and additions that I’m sure you will appreciate as you read on. Best of all, we have automated almost every part of it to make it easy to implement and scale. You can read about how the entire process works here.
As a company, we are extremely excited to finally launch it, not only for what it will do for our clients, but for all the great local organizations that will benefit from it as well - dave
David Squires - President, Online-Access
As simple as this contest was, we saw his web traffic increase from an average of 30 visitors a day, up to well over 120 visitors daily—all local! Jacob later told me he doubled his service business in the first year after he started doing it—without doing anything else different in his company. What Jacob had discovered, was that instead of trying to drag customers into our world by advertising and marketing, by positioning his company within the traffic of what his community was already passionate about, the engagement with the community this created caused his company’s brand to explode.
In July of last year, when Google released its Local Services platform, it became apparent that the landscape would be drastically changing when it came to getting leads from local search. At that time, we decided we needed to totally expand our programming focus to make our websites less dependent on Google for success and find a way to use the web to engage our clients’ communities more. Because of this, we took Jacob’s program and reinvented it.
Since we never take a product to our clients that we haven’t thoroughly tested and evaluated, we have spent over 13-months of testing to get this right. During that time, the program has gone through many improvements, changes, and additions that I’m sure you will appreciate as you read on. Best of all, we have automated almost every part of it to make it easy to implement and scale. You can read about how the entire process works here.
As a company, we are extremely excited to finally launch it, not only for what it will do for our clients, but for all the great local organizations that will benefit from it as well - dave
David Squires - President, Online-Access
WITH HELPING OUT LOCALLY, EVERYONE IS A WINNER!
After contacting us about your interest, here's what you need to know to get started...
Part 1: Before you Start
- Choose a name for your contest
- Decide on the amount of money you're giving away
- Choose three local organizations
This name is what your contest will be called. The Online-Access team will create three badge options for you to choose from to use for the duration for your contest. Below are a few examples of what others have done:
Make a decision on how much money your business will be donating (the amount for which the charities will compete). Naturally, it goes without saying, choose a sum worthy of the "buzz" you want to create. You may even possibly look for creative ways to find other businesses that will match what you're giving and participate, too.
Remember, the whole benefit to this is the community involvement, so make sure the causes you're choosing are local. I encourage you to involve your staff; make this a team effort. Your staff may be aware of local causes that you may not be aware of. Also, including your staff makes this a group effort and expands your reach and impact.
Create a formal letter explaining what you are doing (example here), how much money you're putting up, how much their cause means to you, and how you would love the opportunity to support and promote them though this contest. Explain how, by working together through linking, social media, and local functions, you will be working to promote their cause to your customer base and they, in turn, will energize their own following to visit your website and vote. When choosing your local organizations or charities, make sure each cause is different from the other so you reach the broadest potential audience.
Create a formal letter explaining what you are doing (example here), how much money you're putting up, how much their cause means to you, and how you would love the opportunity to support and promote them though this contest. Explain how, by working together through linking, social media, and local functions, you will be working to promote their cause to your customer base and they, in turn, will energize their own following to visit your website and vote. When choosing your local organizations or charities, make sure each cause is different from the other so you reach the broadest potential audience.
Part 2: Setup of Contest
- Confirm your contestants
- Review contest offer and content
- Mailchimp integration
After sending your formal invite letters and making a formal phone call to the local charities/organizations that you choose, make sure you have gotten expressed agreement to participate from each of them before moving onto further steps. Once they are all confirmed, please provide us with their web address, facebook page address, representive's name, and their contact information.
Come up with an offer that is given out to the voters. Review the default content that we have in place as well as selecting/customizing your automated messages.
Email Templates
Voting Page Template
We use MailChimp to collect all of the voter email lists for each contestant. You will need to have a MailChimp account to collect voter emails. If you don't already have one, we can create one for you. If you do, we will need the login information to set it up.
Part 3: End of Contest
- Order 'big checks' for award presentation
- Announce winners
- Send voter lists to organizations
Order a big check to use for pictures with your winners. You can go with a cardboard version or a dry-erase one that you can use over and over again. We recommend using Big Check Store, but feel free to work with any printing company of your choosing.
Email your winners individually and set up a time to present the check and take photos. Collect photos and use them for social media announcements and your website's winners page.
Send each organization the contact information provided by those who voted for them. If you need assistance pulling the list, please contact us.