During a recent entertainment system delivery to a nonprofit in Michigan it seemed like the staff, families, and donors were all a bit surprised with how Cardz For Kidz was able to pull everything together by getting corporations to pay for these top of the line Xboxes and gaming systems. One father pulled me aside and told me how he knew someone who had been waiting on one of those for months.
But going above and beyond is a Cardz For Kidz motto. I can attribute a lot of that to my family – specifically, my older sister. Going from leading one section of children’s church to running a certified nonprofit partnering with major corporations. Would you say that’s like being on the yearbook staff in 8th grade at a midsize middle school to being student body president of a large high school? How did that happen? My sister.
I trust what my sister says since she’s always been looking out for me. For example, compare these two hospital articles (University of Michigan) & (Akron Children’s Hospital). My sister specializes in treating people with my condition. I took her advice when it came to choosing my neurologist, position, clothes, and much more. One day when we were connecting, I brought up the idea of Cardz For Kidz needing more funds and she mentioned the idea of doing a Kendra Scott fundraiser selling jewelry. Here’s a snapshot of myself and the VP, so I
knew we wouldn’t be purchasing too many pieces, but I still had to follow my tradition and go with her recommendation.
At first, we reached out to the Kendra Scott team and were connected to our friends at the Kendra Scott store on Michigan Avenue here in Chicago. We learned that we could run one of their standard fundraisers and if people used our code, they would donate 20% of the funds spent to our organization. We ran a couple of events, particularly ones around Valentine’s Day called ‘Share the Love.’ The turning point was when the Kendra Scott team donated jewelry to one of our social influencers, Maymay, and her teammate so they could help us promote our event.
The Kendra Scott team’s level of compassion continues to rise. We’re very excited because Kendra Scott is one of the companies who have completed Donation’s triple crown:
They donated 20% of the total sales to our organization.
They had some of their artists at their store on Michigan Ave in Chicago join in on few video conferences to make cards.
They donated an extra piece of jewelry to a patient and/or family at a partner Ronald McDonald House Charity or other nonprofit for every $100 spent on their store.
It’s clear that it’s one of Kendra Scott’s staples to give back to nonprofits in their community. What officially exceeded all of our expectations was when our original contact made supporting us a priority. As mentioned before, ever since we missed our goals in 2015, we’ve been working to get some type of online article written about us by a news channel, but that hasn’t worked out yet. We set it up where a large company was going to host a volunteer event and the following day, we were going to donate some jewelry to a shelter for abused
women and children. As promised, we reached out to news channels to see if they wanted to cover the event, but we were met with silence.
Thankfully one of the regional managers from Kendra Scott dropped by in between setting up a larger event (the actual Kendra Scott was coming to town) to meet the nonprofit where we were donating the jewelry.
With some groups we need to BEG for their time. With others when it comes to donations we need to PLEAD and respond to the standard question, “What’s in it for me?”, but with Kendra Scott, we can simply ‘SHOP FOR GOOD’ ideas on what could help our organizations and the people we serve, and they are there to support us in multiple ways!