Stop & Shop New England Chooses Rescue Buddies for 25-Year Giving Program

For a quarter of a century, Stop & Shop New England Division has focused much of its charitable giving on supporting the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

This year they chose Magnovo to help them kickstart their annual fundraising campaign with a Rescue Buddies Charity Team Building Workshop. It made us proud to think our little stuffed Buddies were spearheading a campaign that’s raised over $50 million!

A Charity Workshop that Comes With a Humongous Perk

Stop-And-Shop-LogoIt’s not every day that you hire a team building company and get a keynote speaker with the deal. But for Stop & Shop, that’s exactly what they got.

As you know, we customize each workshop according to specific needs of our client. With Stop & Shop participants, they were about to start a fundraising campaign in all their supermarkets, where they’d be straight-out asking customers to donate money.

Rescue-Buddies-Stuffed-Animal-Team-Building-Workshop-LogoWhat they needed was a pep talk on how to sell…so we had our facilitator deliver an illuminating keynote speech on how to engage the customer and close the deal.

Sales Training They’ll Take with Them Back to Work

So in addition to building important team skills, these Stop & Shop managers and higher ups also learned the following points, which they’ll in turn pass on to their employees back in the stores:

  • how to connect with customers in a way that puts a face with the name of the kids benefiting from the donation
  • understanding customers’ concerns about giving to a cause they might not know about
  • acknowledging the importance of believing in what they are doing and sharing their knowledge with their customers
  • closing with confidence…believing & sharing with the customer everything necessary to get the customer to buy the $1 ticket donation

The keynote address proved to be eye-opening for these managers, and they predicted it (and the workshop itself) would have a lasting impact on the success of the annual fundraiser.

As Always, Customized Team Building

We also customized the workshop in another way. Usually Rescue Buddies are put together by workshop attendees and given to local first responders like fire fighters and police officers who use them to calm children involved in a crisis.

Dana-Farber-Cancer-InstituteSince Stop & Shop New England already had a “preferred charitable organization”, we arranged for the stuffed animals to go to kids that are part of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute…all 500 of them. Well done, Stop & Shop New England!