Do Good, Look Good
5 Steps to Enhance Your Brand Identity Through Donate-at-Checkout
Making the world a better place is essential to your brand’s ethos. Your leaders embody it, your employees embrace it, and your initiatives reaffirm it—but do your customers know it?
Intro to Donate-at-Checkout
While your company’s charitable efforts might feel invisible—and marketing them, inauthentic—a donate-at-checkout option on your website tactfully places your commitment to good citizenship front and center at every sale.
Better yet, it reinforces shared values with your most loyal customers, creating a halo effect of positive perception toward your brand and products.
We’re ChangeUp, helping brands integrate corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the customer experience with easy, impactful donations at checkout. Use this quick guide to launch a donate-at-checkout feature so that your brand—and customers—can do good for the world in a visible and scalable way.
Know Your North Star
84%
65%
of consumers say it is a company’s responsibility to give back*
As these expectations continue to rise with younger generations placing greater emphasis on social good, every brand can benefit from a clear social mission.
Bring your key leaders and stakeholders into a collaborative discussion about your brand’s purpose beyond the products.
- What does our brand stand for?
- How do customers perceive our brand?
- How can we make our CSR program more meaningful and impactful?
- Which charitable causes align best with our brand identity?
- What measurable goals can we set for our corporate giving?
- CEO
- CMO
- CFO
- COO
- Board of Directors
Leave with a “North Star,” or guiding principle, to begin identifying potential charity partners.
Choose Your Charity Partners
Consumers don’t just want brands to give back; they want brands to give back to a cause that strikes a chord. In the previously cited study, 50% of Americans said they would switch to a company that supports a cause they believe in.
Just like your brand speaks to a certain lifestyle and set of values, so should your charitable donations. For example, an outdoor brand might donate to charities focused on conservation or wilderness preservation. Meanwhile, a pet care brand might support animal rights and welfare.
Which charity partners are right for your brand?
Make a list of 3-5 potential charity partners and contact each of them directly. Introduce your company and present the idea of partnering to drive donations. A 30-minute conversation with each organization should be enough to gauge initial interest and begin solidifying your charity partnership(s).
Make It Official!
Customers want to know how your brand is making the world a better place and how their hard-earned dollars are, in turn, supporting positive change. In fact, 73% of customers say they consider a brand’s charitable work when making a purchase. So, don’t be shy about sharing the good you are doing.
Develop a marketing and communications strategy introducing your charity partner(s). It doesn’t need to be tedious, but it does need to cover the following:
- Press release and PR outreach
- Website homepage call-out
- New web page or blog post
- Email blast announcement
- Social media announcement
- Ongoing charity partnership updates
Invite Your Customers
Donation announcements only go so far, especially in the fast-paced age of content consumption, when consumers are quickly scrolling through their news and social feeds. Rather than simply shouting your social good initiative from the rooftops, you can turn it into a unique and actionable opportunity for your customers to become more connected to your brand.
A donation at checkout is direct, unobtrusive, and, as statistics show, effective. In one report, point-of-sale donation campaigns proved to be the most common donation type, with half of respondents donating through this channel.
In a separate survey, 81% of shoppers said they didn’t mind donating at checkout.*
*Source: Catalist: The POS Giving: Progressing and Prospering study 2018
The Power of the Match
Corporate donation matching programs drive a combined $2 billion to $3 billion in donations each year.*
1 in 3 donors say they would make a larger donation if it is matched.**
84% of donors say they are more likely to donate for a match.**
Find a Reliable Technology Partner
Implementing a donate-at-checkout feature is more challenging than it sounds. User experience, onboarding new 501c3’s, donation distribution, compliance and tax receipts are just a few of the many moving parts that can make the process onerous to manage in house.
And remember, the tools also have to look good and function properly for your customers! The project could easily envelop your IT, legal, finance, administrative, and marketing teams all at once.
Position your company, campaign, and customers for success with simplified donation-at-checkout software backed by a team of specialists to assist with the logistics. ChangeUp works with your existing e-commerce platform as an easy-to-deploy solution with:
Implementation in 3-5 business days
User-friendly dashboard to manage campaign settings
Database of every charity in America plus select international ones
Donation distribution handled by ChangeUp
Real-time reporting
Your brand can have the same powerful point-of-sale donation technology trusted by ApplePay, Salesforce, Mastercard, and many others up and running by this time next week.
Download this report as a PDF to share with your team.
