I spent a few days last week driving around to various fire and police departments to offer our first responders holiday gift cards and informing them that they will forever receive 20% off all of our services. The responses intrigued me and resulted in this post.
Table of Contents
Holiday Gift Cards Cannot be Accepted
One message I heard upon offering the holiday gift cards was that the city has policies against accepting gifts. I struggle with this for a handful of reasons. Firstly, within the same cities I heard this argument, other locations accepted. Secondly, I assume the policy was formulated to prevent conflicts of interest. I don’t believe that would be common and would be exceedingly rare for our fire fighters. Third, while at a location who gave this response, donations from the salvation army were accepted. There seems to a gap between my understanding, the real purpose of the policy, and the actions I observed.
THANK YOU!
This is what I was shooting for. Some of the locations I approached were over the moon when offered the gift cards. I received hand shakes, hugs, thank you emails, and other forms of appreciation. Even the folks that weren’t particularly interested in the gift cards made a point of thanking me and appreciating the sentiment. These groups are the ones that made the entire initiative worth while.
Holiday Gift Cards? Stop, that is gross…
Unfortunately, a few organizations interpreted the giveaway as inappropriate solicitation. They felt that I was intruding and trying to sell in their space when they had important things to do. For these groups, I apologized, restated my intent, and left promptly. While disappointing and embarrassing, I didn’t let these groups discourage me and ended up having other appreciative locations afterwards.
How to make sense of the responses
This experience shone light on two keep concepts for me.
Perseverance
As I mentioned, there were some negative reactions. In the past, I may have taken that experience and halted my efforts all together. Knowing that what I was doing was coming from a good place and had positive intent allowed me to continue trying. After visiting all the locations on my list, a majority of them were grateful and had at least one member who benefited from my effort. Even if I had only one first responder that I impacted each day, I believe it would have been a success, and luckily, I exceeded that.
Perception and Interpretation
With a variety of responses to the giveaway, I realized that the changing variable was not me. My pitch and approach were the same for all locations, yet met different reactions. This was a very clear example of “It’s not you it’s me” in that, you may be doing the right thing despite negative reactions. Give it another attempt or two or some extra time. Do not draw conclusions from a single interaction even if it is negative. That does not mean you should be ignorant, however. Repeated negative receptions is an indicator that the pitch/offer should change. People will take you messaging different ways. As long as you can appeal to the majority of your target audience, don’t worry about the few misses!