Working with Goodwill of Greater Washington on their social media effort has been very enjoyable. Serving as a social media coach, I’ve watched Brendan Hurley and his team make great progress since initiating their social media strategy just a few months ago.

Goodwill of Greater Washington is successfully using social media to intelligently raise its brand, educate new communities on its mission, and create sources of income. This case study has two important aspects: 1) That it is a metro region based effort, and 2) it features a charitable organization. We asked Brendan to write up a case study, and explain his strategy and efforts to create a diverse social media strategy that includes blogging and a special online fashion show event, The Fashion of Goodwill.

The DC Goodwill Fashionista Approach

by Brendan Hurley, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Communications, Goodwill of Greater Washington

Like many marketers, I kept hearing about how social media was the wave of the future!! Throughout my recent graduate studies and professional networking, it was often the topic of discussion. “Social networking” had become the hip new marketing catch phrase.

I kept thinking to myself, “I better get on this social networking train soon or it’s going to leave the station without me!” I started going to seminars and workshops on social networking. I met with experts on social media hoping that some of their knowledge would rub off on me resulting in an amazing epiphany! I created a personal page on MySpace, Linked In and Doostang, and then spoke with even more people who seemed to “get it”. And guess what happened? Nothing!

It wasn’t until I started developing our 2007 strategic marketing plan that I finally figured out my problem: I was trying too hard to develop a social networking strategy instead of incorporating social networking into my marketing strategy.

At Goodwill of Greater Washington, we’ve been trying to find a way to make our retail stores more appealing to a secondary market segment: young professional women who love vintage and inexpensive fashion. We had already decided to launch a new online store through eBay and also needed to build awareness and drive traffic to the site as well as our brick & mortar stores.

The Social Media Solution

Suddenly, the marketing solution became clear: Use a common interest to prospect and cultivate fashion conscious shoppers. That common interest: fashion! How could we reach them on a limited budget? Social networking and the internet! Many of the items being sold on the auction site (and in our stores) are vintage and inexpensive contemporary fashions that would appeal to the young professional woman.

Therefore we decided to convert our annual live fashion show to a virtual online fashion show build a blog site focused on vintage and contemporary fashion (hosted by the DC Goodwill Fashonista); create pages on social networking sites; drive interest and push traffic through our existing email database (focusing on fashion and our blog) and then coordinate and integrate all of these efforts in support of one another.

I invite all of you to check out The Fashion of Goodwill Virtual Runway Show & Online Auction starting September 12^th at www.dcgoodwill.org. I guarantee your opinion of the merchandise for sale at Goodwill Stores will be forever changed.

All of these social networking options allow us to cultivate and communicate with prospects on the quality of merchandise in our retail stores as well as educate them on Goodwill’s mission of job training for the disadvantaged and disabled. We incorporated our more traditional marketing efforts into this strategy as well.

We didn’t know what to expect other than that it would take time to build as it was a long term strategy. To our pleasant surprise, the fashion show has been getting an incredible amount of interest and the blog took off faster than we ever expected!

After only six weeks the blog is averaging over 600 readers a week!! We?re retaining more than 25% of our readers and converting better than 3% into online shoppers. Considering that readers are still sampling the blog site, we don?t aggressively promote the online store (yet) and that the blog has only been up for about 90 days, we’re obviously very pleased so far with the results. Our other social networking sites are a bit more aggressive in pushing online retail sales, but they are also effectively driving online traffic.

Sales on our eBay site have begun moving north and we have found a way to communicate our mission to markets that had previously been untapped. Young, professional women love the blog, love the store and we hope and believe will also become much more passionate about our mission.

One reason we believe our social networking strategies have been successful so far is because we’re not using them as a blatant advertisement for our retail stores. The fashion show provides entertainment! The blog “product” sells our retail product without a sales pitch. The blog provides value to the readers, which leads to trust and a desire to shop where the readers can find great fashions. Those fashions happen to be available at Goodwill Retail Stores!

Blog readers believe the blogger (The DC Goodwill Fashionista) because she’s being honest. She’s selling vintage and contemporary fashion tips, not Goodwill overtly. But we are very transparent that the blog site and Fashion Show are Goodwill’s. After all, it’s in the name. Transparency is important because it helps build credibility and trust. Credibility and trust help build loyal customers. Loyal customers help build larger bottom lines.