Supermarket Perimeter - March 2020 - 13

trong communities are everyone's responsibility, including
the businesses that serve them. Each year grocery stores
across the country help hundreds of local nonproﬁt organizations that are working to make their communities better.
Cause marketing is a great way for nonproﬁts and corporations to
join together for a similar purpose, and it is becoming a key way for
businesses to show their philanthropic side. These partnerships with
nonproﬁt organizations to help them raise money and awareness
and, in return, this charitable action generates more business for the
company.
This type of corporate philanthropy is ideal for supermarkets and
grocery stores due to consistent foot traffic. And those $1 or $5 contributions at the register can add up to something signiﬁcant. American
individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations gave an estimated
$427.71 billion to U.S. charities in 2018, according to Giving USA 2019:
The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2018.
To get a piece of that charitable pie, companies use various tactics
such as asking shoppers to buy a paper cutout to hang in the store, add
a dollar or two to their total, offering special coupons to donors or asking customers to round up their purchase to the next buck. The simpler
the process, the more likely customers are to participate.

Hannaford bag program
helps environment,
local charities
Scarborough, Maine-based retailer Hannaford Bros.'s reusable bag program offers consumers a simple, practical way
to give back to their community while also supporting the
environment.
Every time a shopper buys Hannaford's $2.50 Community
Bag or Fight Hunger Bag, they can direct a $1 donation to a
local non-proﬁt of their choice within 7 days of purchase.
If the customer forgets to make their donation, not to worry:
Hannaford will donate their dollar for them, to the non-proﬁt
the individual Hannaford's store has selected for that month.
To date, sales of Community Bags have raised $657,039
and sales of Hunger Bags $464,244 for charity.
And the environmental savings have also been huge: 5.1 million fewer paper or plastic bags used due to Community Bag
sales, and 9.2 million fewer thanks to Fight Hunger bags.

Helping kids
One of the most recognizable cause marketing campaigns is the Miracle Balloons to beneﬁt the Children's Miracle Network. For six weeks of
every year, employees of Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart ask for
donations from customers at checkout as part of the Miracle Balloon
campaigns, an ongoing partnership with Walmart and Sam's Club. If donors contribute a dollar or more, they can place their names on a paper
Miracle Balloon and place it on the honor wall. Walmart has helped raise
$6.9 billion for children's hospitals since 1983.
Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based GIANT Food Stores is also one of the
top 15 corporate sponsors in the country for CMN Hospitals. Combined
with the grocer's in-store Miracle balloon campaign conducted earlier

this year, customers raised more than $2.5 million for local CMN in 2019.
That number includes a record-breaking total of $814,223 was donated
to local CMN Hospitals by its customers during the company's 2019
Candles for Kids fundraising campaign.
This type of charitable action is found at stores across the county.
It's a way for larger retailers to establish themselves as part of their
communities.
"Anytime we open a new store, we take the pulse of that community,
meet with local leaders and ﬁnd out exactly how we can be helpful,"
says Rachel Shemirani, senior vice president of San Diego-based retailer
Barons. "It's actually an essential part of creating an engaging and exciting customer experience, even when they are not in your store."
Shemirani says supporting local schools, food-insecure communities
and dog rescues are causes that are very dear to Barons and therefore take priority. Last year Barons supported 350 organizations and
donated almost $300,000 to those organizations, including an in-store
fundraiser for Rady Children's Hospital which raised over $5,000 for the
hospital, making it one of their most successful retail campaigns.
"We have great continuing relationships with the schools in our communities, Feeding San Diego and Feeding America, Riverside as well as a
variety of local animal rescues. We are also constantly ﬁelding requests
to support other smaller local organizations," she says. "It's important to
us to help organizations that are hyper-local to our stores. We ﬁnd that
we make the biggest impact that way. When a customer sees that we're
supporting a local organization, they are quick to come in the next time
they shop in our stores to thank us for supporting local organizations as
well as tell us who they'd like us to partner with in the future."

Zero Hunger initative and Barons Market's beer pairing event give
these companies a chance to be a part of the communities they serve.

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