25 Days of Awesome

I’m pulling one out of the archives today as it contains topics people here generally respond to:  creativity, branding, community, and B Corps.

Oh, it’s holiday themed as well, so we’re hitting relevancy here, right?

And everybody loves the mystery and suspense of an advent calendar, yes?

I’ve had a long run with Oliver Russell, now in my – yikes! – 35^th year.  Over those decades, our agency created a lot of good work, but some projects still stand out.

One of those projects was “25 Days of Awesome.”

It was late September when we decided to try and pull off an ambitious project to celebrate what was then our 25^th anniversary:  Build an interactive advent calendar that would promote individual B Corps, as well as the larger B Corp movement.

That meant we had two months to get our act together, which included developing an interactive website the likes of which we had no clue how to build.

No problem, right?

After all, we had a track record over a quarter century for pitching ideas to clients and then figuring out how to actually do them.

Here’s how the promotion would work:

Each day, a visitor could go to the website and open that day’s door to reveal a prize from a participating B Corp, say a gift certificate from Patagonia or organic skincare products from Badger, for instance.  They’d then be entered into a drawing for that day’s prize.  For successive days, they’d have to come back and do the same to play again.

This introduced people to an individual B Corp, its products, and created general awareness of the B Corp tenets of business for good.

On the 25^th day, participants would be entered into a drawing for a grand prize.

We corralled the requisite number of B Corps to participate, collected prizes, and somehow built the website in time for the December 1 launch.  We were all a little surprised as it came off without a hitch.

We leveraged the social media and email networks of participating B Corps to create awareness and had thousands of participants each day.  It was a ton of fun – and I still think this idea has utility.  A reboot, perhaps?  Thinking about it, thinking about it…

One lesson learned from the project was that B Lab, the nonprofit operating the B Corp standards, wasn’t able or willing to put its promotional heft behind the project, which we’d been counting on.  So that was a bummer – and the first of many times where I observed that, while B Lab has many strengths, promoting its community isn’t one of them.

If you’d like to open a deeper door on this project, you can read more about 25 Days of Awesome here.

If you have an advent calendar at home, have fun opening it each day.

And if you don’t, I hope you are able to experience some mysterious joy this holiday season by opening another door of your choosing.

Godspeed, friends.

Russ

💬 Food for Thought

"The space between someone who is offering the best he can and someone in need is holy ground." Fred Rogers

💥 Quick Hits

• A gift guide filled with goodness – Santa Clara University's Miller Center for Global Impact came up with a "Shop with Purpose" guide.
• A gift guide for the arts – Artist, coach, and Godspeed reader Andrew Nemr took time to put together this guide for making meaningful purchases that benefit artists – including his artist friends, plus some of his own endeavors.
• A gift guide that brings the (social) goods – Multiply your impact with gifts that give back – arranged thematically around topics such as "Moms Who Get Shit Done" to "Rest is Resistance." Check it out.

🎧 A Song For You

So, what should collide and crash, but actually soars? How about a fab holiday collab between Bing Crosby and the Thin White Duke?

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