Marketing Mix Report Report created by: Karly Acker Caroline Kimball Danielle Mishkit Zach Taylor In association with the Cabot Community Marketing Challenge
Sponsor Marketing Mix Report Sponsorship brochure: We have developed a sponsorship brochure, which will help give potential sponsors donors, and volunteers an incentive to donate to CEFS. This booklet will outline the tiers of different sponsors, donors, or volunteers. It can be used to help potential sponsors to visualize their commitment and their inclusion in helping to solve the problem of food insecurity in Chittenden County. The booklet will outline separate tiers of involvement based on monetary donations, sponsorship commitments, and volunteer hours. Each donor, sponsor, or volunteer has the opportunity to work towards being a 5-star donor (or sponsor/ volunteer) to the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf. Movement up the tier ladder is a result of the poundage of food donated, the monetary dollar amount donated, or the number of hours volunteered. The booklet will give sponsors/donors and volunteers more incentive to donate what they can, and challenge themselves to do more. Promotion: Donate a Plate Event: During 1 week this Spring, we will target local restaurants to donate a certain portion of the profit of one of their meals to the food shelf. Three informational materials will be given to the restaurants for the purpose of promoting the campaign. First is a brief outline describing how we want the restaurant to implement this plan. Second is a flyer that describes the Donate a Plate campaign and what its purpose is as well as a list of the restaurants participating. Third is a flyer simply giving information about CEFS. The latter two flyers will be given to employees to familiarize themselves with our cause and campaign and can also be offered to customers at the hostess stand or be included in the menus. CEFS will announce the restaurants that are participating before the campaign starts in order to let target audiences know where to go to participate in the campaign. In order to build motivation for these restaurants to participate, an award will be given to whomever accumulates the largest donation over that week, therefore it can be expected the restaurants will provide their own promotion for the campaign on their website or in a newspaper ad. Grow a Row: We will target gardeners and farmers in the Chittenden County area that are capable of growing an extra row in their crop. The extra row will be donated in full to the food shelf to help ease the pressure of running out of fresh produce. We will be at the farmers market this winter as well as the first one this spring to spread the word as well as inform the farmers as to what it is we are doing and what we intend to do. Personal face-to-face conversations with local farm owners will be key increasing these connections. Providing each farmer with informational materials about the problem we are trying to address will help to get the potential produce donors on board. We hope to develop a logo to help brand the event to make it recognizable among local farmers, thus increasing awareness. A partnership with the Intervale will be helpful for the Grow a Row event as the Intervale has a prominent voice in the gardening/farming community. Having informational materials in the hands of people at the Intervale will help gain credibility, and increase awareness among the farmers in Chittenden County.
Product: Donate a Plate: In order to achieve the desired goal for this campaign we will provide the restaurants with flyers about the food shelf, flyers about the event as well as an instructional pamphlet outlining how the restaurants should implement this campaign. The how-to for the restaurant to implement Donate a Plate will provide a standard for all restaurants sponsoring this campaign so target audiences can start to recognize how this annual event works. The two informational flyers given to the restaurants can be provided to employees so they can converse with the customers about the campaign and can also be provided to customers who want to know more about either the campaign or the food shelf itself. Grow a Row: We will provide each official grow a row sponsor with promotional and informational materials about the event to be present at each of their farms or gardens. Additionally, we will provide them with a proper sign up, outlining the types of fresh produce CEFS will need and when. This will help the grow a row sponsors to plan ahead, and feel included in the full process. Providing follow up emails or newsletters throughout the growing season will be helpful in keeping the grow a row sponsors engaged. This will also help CEFS stay connected with their sponsors, to have a better understanding and prediction of what produce will arrive and when. Price: Donate a Plate: Donate a Plate week will be a creative campaign to increase monetary donations to CEFS. Additionally, this event gives local restaurants in the area a way to contribute to a cause and to a local non-profit. We are asking for each restaurant to donate a percentage of the profit from one meal to CEFS for one week in March. This is a convenient way for restaurants to donate. All they have to do is keep track of the number of Donate a Plate meals they sell that week, and donate the agreed upon percentage to CEFS. As an incentive to participate in the event, Donate a Plate will be a competition among the restaurants in the area to see who can raise the most money for CEFS. The winner of the Donate a Plate event will receive the Donate a Plate plaque- a giant dinner plate engraved with the year, and the Restaurant name. This plate plaque has potential to be donated by a strategic partner, possibly Gordon Stamp & Engraving, Vermont Trophy and Engraving, or Mace Engravers, all in the area. Grow a Row: This campaign is designed to increase the amount of fresh local produce given to the food shelf. We are asking different farms and gardeners to donate one row of their fresh fruits or vegetables to the food shelf. They can do this as a one time donation or as a long standing relationship between the food shelf and the farmer or gardener. This gives the audience the freedom to choose the level of commitment they want to contribute. In return for their cooperation and donation CEFS will send a personal thank you. Also, CEFS can provide public thank yous to these farmers and gardeners in their monthly newsletters. With this public thank you CEFS can provide benefit to these farms or gardeners by providing a profile write up about the farm and what they have to offer to the public. This in turn gives the farm or gardener free marketing.
Place: Donate a Plate: The initial goal is to reach the Farmhouse restaurant chain to help with this sponsorship. This includes The Farmhouse, Pascolo and El Cortijo. However, any restaurant located in downtown Burlington would be eligible for this sponsorship and the goal is to have this be an annual event where the amount of restaurants will accumulate over the first few years. The plan is they will provide a note or flyer with the menu that states the portion of the profits from a specific item will be donated to the Chittenden County Emergency Food Shelf. The Farmhouse restaurants are of high quality and their customers are a great target for donations because they can most likely afford to donate. This provides benefit for the restaurants because they receive recognition for donating and also we hope to provide a prize in the form of an official plaque that looks like a plate stating a thank you and recognizing the immense benefit they provided to CEFS. Grow A Row: To implement this first objective we want to reach different farmers of the Chittenden county area by distributing informational flyers to the vendors at the winter and spring farmer s market in Burlington, which also includes the Intervale Co-op. Another target would be directly informing prominent gardeners around Burlington about the Grow a Row campaign and how to partnership works in donating a small portion of their crops to the food shelf without the risk of commitment. A big part of this campaign will be reaching out to the schools in Chittenden County as well. Many schools already have a community garden, and connecting with young children to help donate, will create lasting relationships. CEFS would provide personal thank yous to whoever donated a row as well as possible public recognition in their newsletters for the farmers. Monitoring and Evaluation: Donate a Plate There are a few pieces of this event to benchmark before we start. We know that we will be starting from the beginning at zero for donations as well as restaurants that are participating. This program will only run for a week, monitoring this will be a fast and fix on the fly program. Throughout the week we will need to make sure that restaurants have been keeping up with their parts of the partnership as well as keeping track of monetary donations at mid-week. To evaluate the program after it has finished we will tally up donations as well as tally up how many restaurants that have teamed up with us. This will allow us to benchmark for the next time we do it and allow us to tweak bits and pieces that can be made for the better. Grow a row: Monitoring this program will work much like monitoring donate a plate. Given that these are both new events and promotions, we will get to start from zero and build upward from there. In this case we start with local gardeners and families and the amount of produce that they bring in at the end of the season. Evaluating the program will start with benchmarking the amount of growers we have as well as how much produce we gain from the promotion. This will allow us to benchmark for the next time we do it and allow us to tweak bits and pieces that can be made for the better.
Clientele Marketing Mix Report Promotion: Our promotional idea for the clientele report reaches the senior citizens in a way we know they will hear the message, and have the means to respond. We have chosen to promote enrollment in the Homebound Delivery program through paper postcard mailers, and printed informational flyers. The postcard mailers are designed to increase awareness about Homebound Delivery, and increase enrollment in the program itself. It is important to reach our clients in a way that they will understand, and have the means to respond. The postal service is a good media channel for the distribution of our promotional message for the intended audience. We will design our postcard mailers to look authentic and hand written to help connect with the senior citizens, and make our promotional strategy creative and unique. To help reinforce the message we will distribute printed informational flyers to pharmacies, doctor s offices, and churches in Chittenden County. It will be most effective to utilize the locations that senior citizens already periodically visit. Doctor s offices at locations such as Fletcher Allen Medical Center, and the Burlington Community Health Center will be where the flyers will be present. Additionally, flyers will be distributed at pharmacies and churches in Chittenden County. Seniors or their caregivers are visiting these locations on a regular basis. Targeting these areas will reach the clients and result in an increase in awareness and enrollment of the program. The general message of our promotional campaign is to help the senior citizens and their caregivers realize that the Homebound Delivery program is a free, reliable and convenient way to get nutritional food. Product: The product we are promoting to our clients is a grocery delivery program that provides seven days worth of nutritious food once a month to the clients home. One area that CEFS stated they wanted to strengthen is the Homebound delivery program to senior citizens in Burlington. To do this we created mockups to send to the target audience to inform them of their eligibility for the program and how the program works. These specific mock ups also give the client the opportunity to fill out their information to send back to CEFS so the service can then be implemented. While we are directly targeting the senior citizens we also take into consideration the benefit their possible caregivers (family members, neighbors, ect.) might have in terms of relaying the information and actively having their dependents sign up. Alternative informational flyers were created to target other specific places the clients might frequent besides their home. Examples of these places include; their doctor s office, pharmacies, community centers and churches. This is all necessary for the campaign because CEFS needs to extend their reach to these specific clients and once the reach is extended provide follow up informational flyers and promotional materials to sustain the programs success.
Price: The beauty of the Homebound Delivery program is that the senior citizens don t have to pay anything to be apart of this opportunity. There is no monetary price in signing up for this program. By signing up for Homebound, the clients will potentially SAVE money, by not having to pay for 7 days worth of nourishment per month. Seniors save money, time, and effort by being a Homebound Delivery client. Even though this is a free program, there are still non-monetary barriers that may affect seniors in enrolling in Homebound. Some clients may not be ready to commit to being dependent on an outside organization to bring them food on a monthly basis. Many of these clients have caregivers that help support them in their everyday lives. Convincing the caregivers as well as the seniors of the reliability, and convenience of the program is a noteworthy barrier in considering the price to adopting the behavior. Place: Our audience is a specific niche of senior citizens that require some assistance when it comes to taking care of their health. These clients are elderly and most likely not leaving their homes too often besides to get daily necessities like food and prescriptions. The places we will reach them is their home through mailers, and flyers provided to their physicians office, pharmacies and other places they might frequent like churches and community centers. We will distribute these materials through USPS and directly giving the flyers to local institutions and pharmacies. Monitoring and Evaluation: Making sure that we benchmark the amount of people that are in the program before we start distributing our advertisements around the Burlington area will be a massive piece of our ability to monitor. Throughout the three month period of running the advertisements, checking in once each month with give us the insight to see whether or not they are working, watching the numbers in the program fluctuate will be normal, we are going to be looking for growth throughout the period as opposed to a spike and plateau.
Strategic Partners Local Schools/ and Community Gardeners: These individuals are our strategic partners for the Grow A Row campaign. Local citizens who actively participate in community gardens or gardens of their own can donate a row and time to help the Food Shelf with the amount of fresh produce it is able to provide to clients. Schools like Edmonds Middle School, Orchard School could be really amazing partnerships for this program. Vantage Press: The promotional materials for the clientele and sponsor plans can be provided by this potential strategic partnership that is located in downtown Burlington. A benefit of creating a partnership with this business is that it is a local small business that could benefit from partnering with CEFS. UPS Downtown: Our promotional objectives for the clientele and sponsor plans both require printed flyers, postcards, or informational sheets to be handed out among the appropriate audiences. We hope to create a strategic partnership with the UPS downtown to help with these materials. Printed materials can add, up, especially when we will need them throughout the semester. We hope to create a partnership with UPS for either printing certain materials for free, or providing us with a special discount printing. We will be able to achieve greater reach, and awareness at a much lower monetary cost with this strategic partnership. In return for printing materials, UPS has the opportunity to become an official sponsor of one of our promotional objectives. Dependent upon the meeting with UPS, they could decide to become an official sponsor of either the Donate a Plate event, or the Grow A Row event. By being an official sponsor UPS logo can be on ALL materials printed that go out to the audiences. For example, sponsoring the Donate a Plate event, the UPS logo would potentially be seen by all local restaurant owners in Chittenden County. Additionally, by sponsoring CEFS, UPS has the opportunity to help develop and increase their social responsibility in the area. Danforth Pewters/Bennington Potters: By establishing a competitive framework for our Donate A Plate campaign we also wanted to create gifts or prizes to the restaurants that brought in the most donations to the Food Shelf after one week. Danforth Pewters and Bennington Potters can be potential strategic partners for this in that they can provide an engraved plate for the winning restaurant. It will be beneficial for them to be partners because we can promote these awards to the participating restaurants as incentive to try to increase donations. Intervale: The Intervale can be a strategic channel in terms of reaching different farmers in the area as well as passionate gardeners. They could provide us information and contacts to reach these sponsors. The target sponsors are likely to be apart of the Intervale or are well acquainted with their services.