Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest again is Kym King, Vice President of Public Relations at Goodwill Houston. So Kym, I’m so glad that you’re back on Brandonomics.

Kym: Thank you for having me.

Robin: Well Kym, the fact that you work at a nonprofit organization obviously has a lot of marketing challenges behind it and one of which is the fact that you have a very lean team and I’m curious just with the fact that Goodwill Houston has this relationship with this international association called Goodwill Industries, does that help your team get their job done?

Kym: It really does and in fact we’re so fortunate that we have Goodwill Industries International. So let me give you a couple of examples about how GII as we call them helps us. So they have a social media team for example, and when there is a national tie-in opportunity – so say it’s National Clean Out Your Closet Day or National Back to School Day and those are opportunities for us to talk about how Goodwill – how people can donate to Goodwill and support Goodwill, the national team at GII will often create a series of Tweets or a series of Facebook posts or a series of graphics that you could add to your, you know, mask head on your website. And they make that available to all the 165 Goodwills across the country. So if you didn’t, for example, have your own graphic design person on staff or you didn’t have your own social media or digital person on staff, these are the kinds of things that you could take advantage of as a result of being a part of a national organization like GII.

Robin: Well it does sound like a win/win because you can leverage that – that national presence – and the skills and work that they bring to the table. Then from your perspective how do you take some of that and localize it a little bit so that it’s relevant here to our local community.

Kym: Well it’s a great question. So the other thing that happens as a result of us being a part of Goodwill Industries International is we have these great opportunities for partnerships that we may not be able to have on our own; one example is Walmart. So the Walmart Foundation has a partnership with Goodwill Industries International. We started a new program called Careers in Retail and that is to help anyone who is in an entry level position in retail; we’ll provide free training, free mentoring for people to move up. The idea is to give people an opportunity to grow their careers in retail and who better to do that than an organization like Goodwill that’s been in the retail business for hundreds of years, right? But we then get an opportunity to connect with our local Walmart partners here in town and that gives us opportunities to do different things locally that we would never have been able to have a connection possibly with Walmart without having GII connect us in this way.

Robin: Okay. So that’s great, so obviously the international association opens the door that you can localize it.

Kym: Absolutely. That’s exactly right, they open the doors.

Robin: So that’s a great, effective marketing approach; I appreciate you sharing that. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.