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Using the Sweet Tooth to your Advantage

by Matthew
(Portland, OR)

As a youth, I was involved in many fundraising activities for my little league baseball team. The purpose of the fundraising was to generate money to purchase better equipment and provide better care for the baseball fields. One of the more popular products we used to sell was dark chocolate candy bars with almonds. Initially, we used the door-to-door sales technique. We’d plot out neighborhoods and try to get to each house. Although we did have some success, we weren’t accomplishing the goals we deemed necessary and it was simply a lot of work.

My friends and I then contrived a plan to fully reach out to who we really believed our target market to be, our fellow students. We strongly felt if they knew just how great this chocolate was, they could play a major role on influencing their parents to purchase it and actually sale the candy for us. We decided to take few bars out of our stash (that our parents naturally bought), stuffed them into our backpacks, and took these samples to school. We gave out small chucks at recess based on the agreement that they would tell their parents about how terrific the candy was. This worked wonderfully! Our peers began to tell their parents about the candy and our cause, and it turned into a situation where they were doing the work for us. In the end, we were quite successful with our fundraiser and eventually got the much needed new batting helmets!