Inside the Takeout for Good Master Promotion Plan
Over 1500 restaurants across the country came together on June 2nd to tackle one dire problem – families in need of access to food during COVID-19. Restaurants helped to combat hunger by inviting cause-minded diners to order takeout and are donating a percentage of those sales to their local food bank.
GroupRaise and participating locations worked together to reconnect restaurants with their communities and raise awareness of the initiative by taking these 10 promotion steps:
- Outreach to GroupRaise organizers and supporters
- Customized posts for your social media
- Suggested schedule for your social media
- Takeout for Good promotion video
- Social media ads
- Outreach to local & national media
- Template for you to contact local media on behalf of your brand
- Custom Meal Promotion Page (per location)
- Event promotion on city-wide event listing pages
- Empowering diners to tell their friends
1. Outreach to GroupRaise organizers and supporters
GroupRaise let its whole fundraising community know about each restaurant participating in Takeout For Good and the opportunity to help out families in need. We did this through various email campaigns to diners who have organized or attended a fundraiser in the past as well as promoted on all of our social media channels.
In total, we sent over 780,000 emails to our community about the Takeout for Good event.
The online engagement to this outreach was high! GroupRaise diners love eating for a cause and care about people in need, so Takeout For Good was a perfect opportunity for them.
2. Customized posts for your social media
Whether you needed an image, a video, or a caption to go with them, we got you covered. GroupRaise provided brand-specific marketing materials to each restaurant to help promote on Facebook & Instagram.
Here’s the breakdown of the materials we sent to participating restaurants:
- 2 branded images personalized with the logos of individual restaurants
- A restaurant-branded “Save the Date” video
- A PSA video with customized caption to copy and paste
- 3 restaurant-branded images to post day-of: 1 each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner
If your restaurant participated, we sent you emails with every promo tool mentioned above. These tools were there to help your social media shine by letting thousands of local diners know about you serving the community.
3. Suggested schedule for your social media
We know our restaurant partners don’t have all the time in the world to spend on social media and marketing logistics. This is why we put together a simple plan for promoting this event that restaurants could use to post on their social media channels to optimize their turnout on event day:
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- Wednesday, May 27th 3:00PM: 1 promo video on Instagram and/or Facebook
- Thursday, May 28th 3:00:PM: 1 promo image on Instagram and/or Facebook
- Monday, June 1st 12:00PM: Post 1 video on Instagram and/or Facebook
- Tuesday, June 2nd 11:00AM: 1 image on Instagram and/or Facebook
4. Takeout for Good promotion video
Video is king in the land of digital promotion, so we created this 30-second PSA video to let people know about the opportunity – the video has reached more than 63,000 views!
5. Social media ads
With the promotion video in our marketing toolkit, we got it in front of thousands of potential supporters by running ads on Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter.
Here’s what it looked like on Twitter:
By the end of the campaigns, the Twitter video ad got more than 93,000 views and the Facebook ads reached over 14,000 people on Facebook.
6. Outreach to local & national media
Getting the word out through both local and national newspapers is a big deal, so we deployed our PR gurus to make sure the efforts of our restaurants were heard and seen by the public. We collected contact info for TV channels and newspapers in the vicinity of our participating locations, and reached out to them directly to write about the event and the restaurants involved.
There were over 150 press articles about the event!
Here are some examples of the published articles:
NBC Bay Area – San Francisco CA
The Spokesman Review – Spokane WA
Takeout for Good was also featured in local TV news. Check out the video examples here:
CW KOIN News AM Extra Channel 6 – Portland OR
7. Template for you to contact local media on behalf of your brand
At the end of the day, local news outlets always want to hear from their community. For restaurants interested in going the extra mile to promote their participation in this event, reaching out to local TV stations on the day of was a surefire way to get the community’s attention. If you wished to reach out to your reporter friend or a local media partner, we created an easy template to use:
8. Custom Meal Promotion Page (per location)
Each participating restaurant location had a dedicated event web page on GroupRaise showing the brand’s logo and event details such as address, hours, how to order, and donation percentage. The page also allowed diners to RSVP ahead of time to let the restaurant know they were coming.
This unique Meal Promotion Page was perfect for sharing as the link could be incorporated into social media posts, emails, and more.
All of the Meal Promotion Pages were easily accessible on both GroupRaise.com and TakeoutforGood.com, where supporters could choose their state and then type in their zip code to see their closest participating restaurants.
9. Event promotion on city-wide event listing pages
Many newspapers use city-wide event listings as a reference to update their daily news and events sections. We made sure sure that Takeout For Good was listed in key city listings like Eventful and Patch to ensure this event was seen by as many community members as possible. We also recommended that for even more visibility, you could go to the ‘calendar events’ or ‘things to do’ section on your local newspaper’s website and list the event pointing viewers to your location on June 2nd.
Here are the sites where we posted one unique event per restaurant location:
10. Empower diners to tell their friends
Last but not least, we wanted not just diners, but their friends and their friends of friends to know about Takeout For Good. A large group of people who RSVPed to this event received promotional images, captions, and participating restaurant suggestions to share via email, Facebook, & Instagram. This snowball effect has proven to be the biggest success factor for large scale events. Our goal was to empower as many people to share genuine, beautiful, and inviting messages to the people they care about.
A great example of a supporter-turned-advocate was this video posted by a dog shelter that reached over 32,000 views, letting their community know how they were participating in Takeout for Good.
HGTV Star Erin Napier also retweeted GroupRaise’s Takeout for Good announcement:
Takeout For Good started with an idea to help families in need while supporting local restaurants that are doing everything they can to survive through this crisis. We remain here to serve you by doing what we do best, connecting local businesses to their community – a win-win for everyone.
