How Can I Participate In Community Outreach and Stay On Budget In Retail Sales? | Retail Today With Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor - Flash Briefing

Well, if it's January, it must be a donation season. This is the time when all the nonprofits come to you to look to be that benevolent person who will give them something for their silent auction or their raffle or something else. And those can become quite a pain unless you're a big organization because, in big organizations, they just refer them to a central office. When you only have a few stores or it's just you, I would suggest at this time of the year, create a budget of what you'll do for community outreach.

And I encourage you to also come up with one type of nonprofit you'll support. So whether that's kid's education or maybe it's going to be cancer or maybe it's going to be literacy or homelessness. There's a million things and then say, and we've chosen to donate to nonprofits that are supporting that mission. And that helps you then to whittle those donations down, but also base it on fact.

And then, when you do this, you keep track of those donation requests as if they were a line item. And you find that, oh, I have a limit, and people understand, and you don't get caught in that way that someone says, well, can't you just give us $10 for this? Or $20 like that? And by the way, when you're being solicited for donations, make sure that you've seen these people before because when you get a solicitation from one of your best customers, you should go out of your way to make them happy.

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