In today’s Colorado Business section of the Denver Post, I noticed a small blurb that Colorado Bag’n Baggage stores will be collecting gently used luggage in April as part of their event, “Bags 4 Kids Trade-in Event.”  “Luggage will be donated to foster-care children living near each store.”  In return, each luggage donor will receive a $20 gift certificate to be used for a future purchase from the store.

So, as usual, I went to their website to check out more details…and found nothing after poking around in the likely places and doing a search of their site for “Bags 4 Kids.”  When I did a Google search, I found a group in California by the same name, Bags4Kids.  Then I got confused – is this promotion affiliated in some way with that nonprofit?  Or…??

Here’s a tip!  Great ideas need great implementation.  Please…make sure you have all your ducks lined up before you launch an effort like this.  The idea to collect luggage for kids makes total sense for a luggage selling company – so good job there on alignment.  However, before sending out a press release to the newspaper, make sure – at a minimum – you also work with your webmaster to post the press release on the company website..at the SAME time.  Preferable would be to have a special landing page for the promotion that gives a few more details to those that want to support the effort – perhaps information about the nonprofit or community agency being supported including how customers can support foster children in other ways, as well.  As is, it is way easy for consumers to make the leap to “this promotion is self-serving and just about getting people in the store” and overshadowing any heartfelt intent to do good that motivated the promotion in the first place.  Win-win is great but do it justice.

Maybe next time…??

NOTE:  After writing this blog post this morning, I was contacted by the company (see comment section below).  So in case you don’t click through to the comment section, I wanted to give you an update.  They have a new press release section on their site and the release on Bags 4 Kids is now up!  Very impressive that they contacted me back.  I have bought all my luggage from them for years and am now an even bigger fan!

Tags: Bags 4 Kids Trade-in Event, Colorado Bag'n Baggage, foster children

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.