Serving Memphis, Cordova, Germantown & Collierville TN
Okay, right off the bat let me apologize for my rather wordy and sappy title of my first blog. Read on for a few seconds and allow me to redeem myself.
A few years back, AAA was celebrating our 40th year and since we are a family business, started by my mom and dad, we wanted to do something very personal to “Thanks” but we didn’t really know what to do. So we decided to possibly try some giveaways on our Facebook page. We “thought” that by showing pictures of Memphis from the last 40 years and allowing our fans to identify those local hangouts that we would be able to reward the winners with prizes and money and get to reminisce at the same time.
WE WERE WRONG! Don’t get me wrong. We had some participation on trying to ID local landmarks like the “Frosty Mug” but overall the response was pretty lackluster. We truly wanted to give back but people just weren’t reading our posts, OR SO WE THOUGHT. What we learned was that they were reading them; they just weren’t interested in what we had to say 🙂
On a whim, we decided a cool way to giveback would be to sponsor a couple of local teachers. My sister decided that she would rather be a teacher and forgo the glamour of crawling under houses or chasing rats out of attics, go figure, and I knew that teachers have to pay for a lot of stuff out of their own pockets. So we put out a Facebook posts and asked people to help me track down 2 teachers that we could sponsor. Almost instantly we got a couple of names and we contacted them and gave them both 100.00 to help offset their expenses. Within the next few weeks we noticed that every time we talked about the teachers we got more comments from our readers. On October 11th, 2011 we decided to just see how many people were really looking at what we wrote. So we decided to throw out a simple contest. For every like we would give 1.00 back to our teachers, the only catch – you had to respond within 24 hours. Up to this time the most “liked” post had topped out at 10 and I am pretty sure that my wife and family made up most of those. Almost instantly the “likes” started coming. Within 24 hours we had 188 like, a post that had been shared by over 40 people and 11 comments. We were blown away and suddenly it all made sense. People would rather help others rather than help themselves (remember I had trouble getting any responses when I was giving money or gift cards away).
From that year when we sponsored just 2 teachers we went on to make this an annual event. Each year our number of teachers would expand. This year we had another surprise, a copycat. Josh Roman with Allstate insurance found out what we did after we sponsored his sister, who was a teacher, and he decided to get involved. This year together Josh & AAA Termite sponsored over 30 local teachers. In the future I hope to attract more businesses and help lighten the burden on more area teachers as budget cuts force more and more teachers to break into their own piggy banks for simple things like extra pencils, paper, tissues and other day to day items that you got used to seeing when you would walk into your teachers room every morning when you were in school.
Hopefully I redeemed myself from my wordy title and you’ll mention this idea to someone you know that might help us sponsor a few more teachers next year.