May 12, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Each week Target Corporation distributes 5 percent of the company’s income – or about $3 million – to charity. This month the retailer is giving the public a say in how it allocates its next $3-million through an online campaign that lets Facebook users vote for one of 10 national nonprofit groups they would like the company to support.
Visitors to Target’s Facebook page can vote once a day during the two-week campaign, which ends on May 25. The percentage of votes each nonprofit group receives determines what percentage of the $3-million it receives.
Facebook voters are also encouraged to volunteer through a link to VolunteerMatch, an organization that pairs volunteers with local nonprofit groups.
The competition was designed to help the charities Target supports get comfortable using online social networking tools, says Laysha Ward, Target’s president of community relations.
“This is an area they all have to figure out,” she says. “It’s a chance for the nonprofit sector to experiment and test this new social media in a way that many of them have said they had not had an opportunity to do.”
The “Bullseye Gives” campaign kicked off on May 10 with a Mothers’ Day ad in major newspapers promoting the competition and the 10 participants, which include The Salvation Army, Kids in Need Foundation, Operation Gratitude, and the Parent Teacher Association. Within the first 36 hours, more than 13,000 Facebook users had voted in the campaign.
“There’s an incentive for us to be as creative as possible in a short period of time,” says Michelle Nunn, chief executive of Points of Light Institute/ HandsOn Network which has been using its Web site, Facebook, and other social networking sites to ask supporters to vote in the campaign.
The contest, says Ms. Nunn, is a “crash course” in mobilizing the group’s network of volunteers at its 250 affiliates around a single goal: “It’s a way for us to flex our muscles around this work, learn from it, and then apply it in other ways.”
