As a small business, you have a responsibility to support the community you rely on to thrive. There are a number of ways your agency can form strong relationships with non-profit organizations to help them grow, and also brand your agency in the community. A healthy brand will result in more referrals, quote requests, and new business. Here are three ways your agency can get involved this spring and suggestions on how you can utilize your social media channels in the process:

1- Clean up a local riverbed, park, or playground!
With the snow officially behind us and beautiful weather here to stay, communities are celebrating spring and getting out of the house to enjoy the weather. Harness your employees enthusiasm and get them out of the office for a few hours to host a cleanup day. Find a local park, playground, or riverbed that has collected trash over the past few months (or years). Often your community has a non-profit organization that works to clean up the town/city. If you know of one, make a call to partner on a project; they will appreciate your outreach. All your team needs are trash bags and gloves to get to work. Within minutes, you’ll be filling up bags of trash, and in just an hour you’ll have made a significant impact.

This community outreach is great for creating visuals to use on social media outlets. Think about you can utilize your agency’s Facebook page to post photos of your findings. Before and after photos are a great way to showcase the impact you’ve had, and photos of all of the bags of items you’ve collected will show the work you put in. Your followers will appreciate the work your agency is doing in the local area.

2- Plant a garden at a school!
Elementary schools take advantage of the life that spring has to offer by incorporating nature into the classroom curriculum. Give them more to work with by assisting in planting a school garden! Whether you take the traditional route and create a space within a lawn, use pots or planters, or get really creative and build a garden out or recycled containers such as pallets or wheelbarrows, it’ll be a fun project for all. The investment is small, requiring just some bags of soil, some seeds, and a few starter plants. Your team can assist with the labor of digging up grass, filling planters with soil, etc. The kids will love planting and watching their progress over the coming weeks. Be sure to select items that mature quickly before the school year ends.

Consider ways to stretch out the promotion of projects like this on social media. Create a hashtag that explains the project, maybe using the name of the school, and use it in all of the tweets your agency puts out. Continue to post updates about the plants and the student’s reactions to what they are seeing. Followers will love reading the posts, and the parents of the students (potential customers) will begin searching the hashtag for updates regularly.

3-Hold a quote drive for charity
Launch a campaign to drive quote requests to your agency by offering a small donation for every quote request you receive. Choose a non-profit that your agency is comfortable aligning with that has some ties to spring. Is there a local garden organization for seniors, does the local animal shelter need a new fence, or can a playground use a new coat of paint? Consider how much you are willing to donate and how many quotes you’d want to receive. The non-profit that you choose should take on most of the promotional work of driving quotes to your website. You’ll have a new list of prospects that you can continue to market to forever.

Create a landing page on your website that outlines the partnership and use that when posting on social media. LinkedIn is a great place to promote a campaign of this caliber. The social network if full of professional who have connections to businesses or own them themselves. Gaining just one or two business policies would far outweigh the “cost” of this campaign.

What has your agency done recently to support your community? Share with us in the comments below.