Overview
Partnering with local schools is a great way to integrate your business into your local community and be part of what’s important to your customers.
Details
During your Community Assessment in the Step by Step Guide, you identified schools that are within your trade area. Now’s a great time to pick one of those schools to approach.
To increase connection with your local community (and, for the greatest local impact), we recommend selecting ONE school or program to “adopt” as your own, and partner solely with them. While it is tempting to want to help multiple schools, you’ll have the greatest impact if you concentrate on helping one school or program.
Another option is to talk to your customers to see which school most of their children go to in order to pick the school most relevant for your location.
Ways to Support Your Local School:
Example
A very successful store manager at Starbucks doubled his store sales in just one year by connecting with the local schools. His store was located in a strip mall in a very suburban area and knew most of his customers were parents. He got to know them and know the schools. He donated coffee and products to PTA meetings, he would drop off coffee for Teacher Appreciation Days, he would drop of ground bags of coffee for the Teachers Lounge whenever a new whole bean coffee was introduced, he got the schools involved with the Starbucks Book Drives and Toy Drives. He gave back to the schools and got involved. The schools and parents loved it, word spread and his Starbucks sales grew!
