Grant for Good: A Year’s Worth of Services

Big Brands and large Trusts aren’t the only ones funding cause-driven projects these days.

Pepsi’s Refresh Everything and Chase Community Giving are getting all the press, but small businesses can make big differences as well, which is truly admirable in such a challenging economy. Fellow Chicagoans Firebelly Design have been offering their annual Grant for Good, donating a year’s worth of strategy, branding and design services to a lucky non-profit, for years now.

In 2011, they are enlisting help from trusted friends to bring a broader range of services to the lucky recipient.

According to their site, services range “from organizational development and strategy to branding, design, web development, marketing, photography, video, event production, social media planning, copywriting and even printing.” Their partners in bringing this great idea to life include:

• Firebelly Design will donate brand strategy, design and website development.
• IshootRockstars will offer photography services.
• Morten Group will donate organizational and resource development.
• One Tree Forest Films will provide filming, editing and post-production services.
• Pivotal Production will offer marketing and social media strategy, event planning and production.
• P.K. Wheeler Communications will give messaging and content development services.
• Salsedo Press will provide labor costs to produce all print materials designed and produced during the grant’s lifespan.

Each of these firms will offer a year’s worth of services free-of-charge. Impressive.

The Grant Application can be downloaded at www.GrantForGood.com. The deadline is December 3, 2010.

How did all these fantastic providers come together with such a splendid solution?
We asked that very question to Shannon Downey of Pivotal Production. She has a great candid piece on the Pivotal blog about exploring the most efficient way to offer help to nonprofits, in an empowering long-term way for the most impact, but still running a business profitably. Solution? Shannon was inspired by a talk with Dawn Hancock of Firebelly. “Dawn basically said, Hey why don’t we write your services into our grant…that sparked a larger idea and evolved into the Grant for Good.”

Their plan of action was to bring together a group of companies that they:

• enjoy working with
• gave of their time/talents regularly to support good causes
• respected their work
• felt had similar values
• believed offered services that would create a robust marketing grant.

From there, with lots of creative marketing talent on board, the Grant for Good team readies for the 2011 opportunity to make a wildly successful impact for one brilliant non-profit.

Also, if you want to keep up-to-date on Grant for Good’s progress, check out their Facebook page.

For more detailed info, Edward Domain and the crew at Flyover Geeks gave them a great write-up.

Want to know more? Be sure to peruse our other articles this month in our blog series about innovative fundraising and social media charitable marketing:

• Barrel of Monkeys: Chase Community Giving Winner
• Five Ways to Use Social Media for Fundraising
• Lessons from the Climate Ride: Driving Social Donations
• and even our 10 Tips for maximizing your Twitter account.