Holiday Bus Drive
A year ago, when we started working on General Mill’s Box Tops for Education, we started our research by going out and talking to some of the coordinators who run the Box Tops program for schools in this area.
One of the people we met during those initial interviews was Jerri Henderson, a special ed teacher at Richard Green Central Park School in Minneapolis. Jerri is also the Box Tops coordinator for the K-8 school, at which 97% of the students live in poverty. She told us how participation in Box Tops had allowed some classes to take field trips that they could otherwise not afford. Our conversation with Jerri really helped bring into focus the strong cause component to Box Tops, and inspired much of our work throughout the year.
Flash-forward to October, we started discussing what we should do for our Holiday project this year. Last year’s Gift Guide was a hit, and we considered doing an updated version for 2009. But then the subject of helping Green Central came up. We decided we should put our design and cause-marketing experience to work for the school.
The last few years, the school has made enough money from Box Tops to send one class on a field trip, but most of the Box Tops collected actually came from sources outside the school. So we did some math and figured out that if we could raise about $7000 dollars it would cover bus and admission fees for a field trip for every student. We figured we could get people to help in 3 ways:
1. Donate money directly, and provide matching funds for some portion of the total. We figured this would be the fastest and most direct way to get money to the school immediately.
2. Sign up for the Box Tops Marketplace, an online affiliate program that generates money for schools on online purchases. We worked on massive re-design of the Marketplace this year, and we’re proud of how it turned out. The new version allows even easier access to the 100+ retailers who participate in the program. If we could get people to sign up and select Green Central as their school, it could generate ongoing donations.
3. Clip Box Tops. Anyone who has young children is probably already familiar with the tiny pink designs worth 10 cents each. But our goal was to also motivate people who don’t participate already to go check their cupboards for them.
We then approached our friends at PUNY about helping us create a brief video to explain the situation and help us make a plea for help. We wrote a short script and had Zeus Jones employees do voice-overs. Then we handed it to PUNY along with some basic design elements and they did amazing work bringing it all to life. The resulting piece is, I think, blowaway cool.
Zeus Jones / Puny :: Holiday Bus Drive from Zeus Jones on Vimeo.
That’s how we arrived at the Holiday Bus Drive.
As I write this post, many generous contributions have put us very close to our goal, but we want to aim higher. Every dollar counts for this school, so please consider contributing in one of the ways listed on the site. We have a few “incentive gifts” for donations, but consider doing some Holiday shopping online through Marketplace too. It costs the user nothing other than one extra click, but could have a huge impact for the school.
We would love it if you would go to the site, watch the video and help us out if you can.