Eye on Entrepreneur   >   Leveraging Assets

One of the best ways to approach this problem is to look at what assets you may have beyond cash on hand. One of my best assets has always been my friends and the relationships that help make things happen.

A lot of people will say, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”. But I say “If you want something done well, ask your friends to help”. Now, asking a friend to help you clean out your garage may be easier than asking a friend or acquaintance to help you market your product or service, but you may be surprised. In this era of cross promotion, when businesses are battling for the same ears and eyeballs, a joint or collaborative approach is better than a solitary one and the opportunity to share and leverage resources is increasingly essential. And where you don’t have a relationship to call upon, you have to identify the people who can help you be successful and find a way to make your objectives of some value or benefit to their own.

A Case Study

In 2000, Philadelphia won the honor to host the Republican National Convention – a big coup for a city that was still suffering from the image of Eagles fans throwing snow balls at Santa Claus during home games!

Brought on board Philadelphia 2000, the city’s Host Committee for the convention, I was tasked with the challenge of recruiting, training and deploying 10,000 volunteers - and I had just six months to get it done. I knew it would be a tough sell to recruit 10,000 people from a heavily democratic town to take time away from their jobs and family to work for free at a republican convention. I also knew that the volunteers would either make or break this convention for Philadelphia - they were the front line of both the convention and the city that week when the eyes of the world would be on us.

Where to start?

Identifying a Spokesperson

First, I knew I needed a leader to head up my recruitment campaign and who better than my friend Pat Croce – Philadelphia’s most enthusiastic, effective and popular booster? Pat agreed to Chair the Philadelphia 2000 volunteer recruitment effort on three conditions:

Communicating our message – getting the word out.

Next, we had to target our audience. We had three states to cover – Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. We had a clear message to communicate; “Make the Convention Connection” - this was a program open to all but it required time and commitment. We had little to no budget and in the year 2000, less than 50% of the population had e-mail addresses. We knew we needed to reach an enormous amount of people quickly. We knew we needed volume. Again, I turned to friends.

All of the local papers pitched in by distributing our volunteer applications as inserts, we had volunteer kiosks in all the area malls and at professional and college sporting events across the region, our applications were in brochure racks at the Philadelphia Zoo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the New Jersey State Aquarium. Businesses donated billboards and local retailers and restaurants displayed “Convention Connection” window stickers and distributed our applications as well. We even had help from our friends at the post office when they allowed us to greet last minute tax filers on April 15 with volunteer applications and Tastykakes (a Philly favorite confection).

In less than three months we had over 25,000 volunteers registered in our database – more than enough to retain and train the 10,000 we needed. Our friends and partners helped us get the word out to millions of people – quickly and cost-effectively. In return, we promoted them on our convention collateral and materials – allowing them another way to communicate with their potential audiences.

Creating a fun but meaningful experience for the volunteers.

Finally, we had fun – lots of it. There were volunteer parties and volunteer gifts. There was round the clock entertainment and food – and even chair massages - at volunteer headquarters. The local Girl Scouts created a special convention badge that could be earned by completing so many volunteer hours. We recruited and signed up every mascot from the tri-state area as a volunteer and we even put Pat on top of our symbolic 10,000th volunteer – an elephant from Ringling Bros. Circus while they were passing through town.

But we had meaning too. We knew that the key to top quality, professional volunteers would be to provide them with top quality, professional training. To that end we identified and partnered with Dale Carnegie Training – the foremost training and public speaking consultancy in the world. Dale Carnegie agreed to develop and deliver our volunteer training and every volunteer who completed a training session was given a special Dale Carnegie Convention Training Certificate – they were not only professionally trained, but they had something to take away with them that would endure long after the conventioneers went home – something that could meaningfully boost their own career and educational efforts.

So why would Dale Carnegie do this all for free? We presented a value proposition that they found, well, valuable!

For their part, Dale Carnegie gained new visibility and prominence before the top corporate sponsors of the convention and gained credible access to the key influencers in those companies. Even for a globally recognized brand like Dale Carnegie, the development, deployment, scaling and quality control to train 10,000 people, in a limited period of time, was a huge undertaking. Their success in doing so and the publicity they received became an important and unique distinction for them in their field.

When the 2000 Republican National Convention was over, everyone agreed it was one of the single best political conventions that had ever been hosted. Philadelphia had surprised everyone – we were indeed a world class city, with world class residents, worthy of hosting a world class event. And when Dan Rather, in a national news interview, cited the volunteers in Philadelphia as the most memorable part of the 2000 RNC convention for him, I knew we had done our job. But I also knew that we couldn’t have done it, in the way that we did it, without the help and cooperation of countless friends and partners.

Just by identifying and leveraging the resources that already existed all around us, we were able to produce a marketing and recruitment campaign that cost little and yielded much.

-- Alison Grove owns her own PR and Marketing Consulting business in Philadelphia.