DENVER “Going viral” may be a scary proposition for hospital patients and elementary schoolchildren, but a focus on promoting a charitable message outside a restaurant’s four walls has strengthened community outreach for chains like Qdoba and CiCi’s Pizza.
As Denver-based Qdoba announced the winner of its first Qmmunity initiative on Wednesday and Coppell, Texas-based CiCi’s continues its Pizza Party Pay Day efforts, both chains report that the fundraising programs have helped not only draw in guests but also recruit potential franchisees.
Qdoba’s manager of nontraditional marketing and public relations, Doug Thielen, said the Qmmunity program succeeded in building awareness and raising money for its main charity partner, the Starlight Children’s Foundation, while being promoted only online and with no in-store materials.
The campaign asked guests to go online and vote for people nominated as community heroes. The top vote-getter won $5,000 for her particular cause, and Qdoba donated $1 to Starlight for every action visitors took on the Qmmunity website, such as nominating or voting for a local hero, making a public pledge, or posting about the contest on Facebook or Twitter.
“We tried to socialize the website and make it easy for people who had nominated someone to campaign for them or for themselves,” Thielen said. “While we didn’t do anything in the restaurants to promote Qmmunity, we gave our franchisees a suite of materials to promote it themselves. We try to enable franchisees to use social media.”
Qdoba, the fast-casual chain of nearly 500 units, said Wednesday that 20-year-old Emily DuBois won the $5,000 grand prize for the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America, or CCAF. DuBois, who has battled the digestive disorder colitis for the past two years, used the contest to raise money and awareness for the foundation. In addition to the $5,000 donation to CCAF in DuBois’ name, Qdoba also donated a Starlight Children’s Foundation Fun Center mobile-entertainment unit to a hospital near DuBois’ native St. Louis.
In all, the campaign yielded a total donation of $25,000 to Starlight, a charity that helps seriously ill children and their families deal with the pain and fear of their conditions by providing entertainment. The inaugural Qmmunity program lasted from Oct. 14 to Nov. 1 and garnered 250 nominees and 57,000 votes, Qdoba said.
The promotion for charity may not have appealed as widely as food-focused campaigns have in the past, Thielen said, but those guests who did participate in Qmmunity were extremely engaged.
“We wanted to find a way to talk about our partnership with Starlight but also to honor those doing things for other organizations that are important to them,” Thielen said. “In doing so, we had a smaller audience to talk to. While that overall number was smaller, the engagement levels were through the roof, and the time spent on the site was very high.”
In typical promotions distributed though e-mail blasts or called out online, Thielen said, the open rates and engagement levels spike at the beginning and wane for the rest of the campaign. For the Qmmunity initiative, however, participation didn’t dip as low as it normally does in other campaigns, and the last three days of the promotion were the busiest in terms of voting and social-media posting.
“The last three days, we got 21,000 unique visitors to the site,” Thielen said, “Our Twitter follower total increased 33 percent [during the campaign], and our Facebook fans grew by 20 percent.”
CiCi’s, the mostly franchised chain of nearly 650 units, has made community outreach to local schools a major component of its business model, said Donnie Robertson, director of local-store marketing. It’s Pizza Party Pay Day contest, which offers a $5,000 grand prize to a local school drawn at random, not only has attracted families — the chain’s core demographic — but also has been a selling point for several potential franchisees.
“When our guys execute this, they get as excited about it as the schools do,” Robertson said. “We move the brand forward and make a lasting impression. The fact that this has been around for so long, it is a real strength for potential franchisees to know that we’ve got this core program that makes a connection to our core demographic.”
To enter into the contest, schools need to host a fundraising night at a local CiCi’s, which gives 10 percent of the evening’s proceeds to the school for supplies like books, instruments or sports equipment.
Having franchise operators visit nearby schools is a major part of promoting the program, Robertson said, but if time doesn’t allow door-to-door marketing, operators can call principals and direct them to CiCi’s new website, www.cicisvip.com. The site details all the rules and rewards of the program and allows administrators to set up fundraisers for their schools easily.
“Every single one of our locations is connected to a school and takes advantage of this opportunity,” Robertson said. “If we can partner with them as our primary beneficiary, it gives us the best opportunity to make the largest impact in the communities around our locations. If you help the child, you’ve helped the family, and there’s going to be loyalty from that.”
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
