Firsthand Tales of Creativity and Success: SAAGNY Foundation Tumbler

Rhonda Blum, former sales representative for distributor Motivators Inc. and board member at the Specialty Advertising Association of Greater New York (SAAGNY) and SAAGNY Foundation, shared a promo-based fundraiser.

As both a fundraiser and awareness piece for the SAAGNY Foundation, Blum created and sold custom-decorated tumblers from Gordon Sinclair for $10 apiece. The mugs carried 12 co-sponsor decorations on them, each sold for between $75 and $100, and were sold at various SAAGNY and SAAGNY Foundation events.

Below, she details what made the promotion so successful.

NonProfit PRO: Could you briefly describe how this promotion worked?

Rhonda Blum: It was for the SAAGNY Foundation, which is SAAGNY's nonprofit arm. We use this mug as a fundraiser. I got the idea from Ray Rodriguez [former vice president of sales and marketing] from Gordon Sinclair when we were having lunch. He was talking to me about a client, and I said, "Let's see if we can do this to raise some money for the SAAGNY Foundation."

The mug is a beautiful piece, and what we did was we sold each of the little circles to 12 vendors in the promotional products industry, including [ASI] and [Promotional Products Association International]. … It's a great product and it's been working really well.

NPPRO: How did you promote this piece?

RB: I'm the social media person for SAAGNY, so I made sure the mug was as many places as I could send it. I posted it everywhere. I posted pictures on SAAGNY's website, on the foundation's website, on Gordon Sinclair's Facebook page, on my Facebook page, so there was a lot of publicity for this for a while. It was also promoted at all of our events.

NPPRO: What do you think is the best decision you made with this promotion?

RB: It's a great product. Even people who see it in the industry are like, "Wow, this is a really nice mug." So I think that the best part of the promotion was actually the product that we picked. Gordon Sinclair also has an amazing art department. I sent them 12 very disparate logos, and they came back to me with the way the background looks, with the SAAGNY Foundation logo done tone-on-tone, so that the supplier logos really stood out. So I think that they created a product that was much easier to sell. A great product and great graphics were the best things I think.

NPPRO: Any advice you could give to others attempting similar fundraisers?

RB: I've found it's easier to get the sponsor money than it is to actually sell the $10 mug, which is really odd. I was at a table-top show, and I sold three of the sponsorships, which aren't a lot, like $75 or $100, but I sold three of those quicker than I sold 10 mugs at $10.

Michael Cornnell is executive editor of NonProfit PRO sister publication Promo Marketing. Reach him at mcornnell@napco.com