This interview was originally recorded on May 18, 2023, as part of Leoni Consulting Group’s All Things Marketing and Education Podcast.
Access this episode's show notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.
Elana Leoni:
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. This is a very special bonus, whatever you want to call it, episode where I have some awesome people on the call and we're going to be talking about the things that we absolutely love, teachers. So we're going to be talking about what we did for Teacher Appreciation Week, and I'm going to clarify we, because you all know me, I own an agency called Leoni Consulting Group, but we also founded a foundation called the LCG Foundation about a year and a half ago. So we're going to talk a little bit about what that foundation is, how it came to be, but how did we use this foundation to put so many smiles on educators' faces for Teacher Appreciation Week. So it's all about love, it's all about joy, this episode. I am joined with, speaking of Joy, the director of Joy, Ms. Porter Palmer. So Porter had the pleasure of being maybe my first or second guest on the podcast.
Porter Palmer:
First.
Elana Leoni:
First ever guest. So for those of you that want to hear me stumble on my words and be absolutely terrified as a podcast host, go ahead and look at our first episode. I took the advice of friends and they said, "Invite your friends first, the people that are you are most comfortable with and interview them." So Porter talked about what her role was in LCG, but she also talked about really what is community, if you're a brand and you want to start community, what does that mean/ So there's a lot of really gold nuggets in there about community and just joy. So Porter is here with me today, not in her role representing LCG as director of Joy, although she spreads joy to everyone.
she is also a founding board member on the LCG Foundation. She was a key person to help, which I call, I don't know, Operation Teacher Smile. She was one of the people on the ground. So we're going to be talking about our experience, what we learned, how we can hopefully inspire others to do the same to spread joy to educators. I also have with me today on the podcast, William Trilkle. He said, "Well, William sounds so formal, formal."
William Trinkle:
Formal.
Elana Leoni:
Formal. Formal, not familiar, that he's Bill. So we have Bill Trinkle on from the LCG Foundation. Bill was also on the ground every single day helping us look for educators, distribute gifts to educators. He has all sorts of tips, tricks and wisdom to give us as well on the podcast. So I am so excited to have you two on talking about what we were able to do. Welcome to the podcast.
Porter Palmer:
Thank you. It's so good to be here.
William Trinkle:
Thank you. It's so good to be here. Thank you.
Elana Leoni:
I will also say that one of Bill's special talents is he used to be on radio for a long time, so when he speaks, I feel intimidated because his voice sounds so good.
William Trinkle:
Thank you so much.
Elana Leoni:
Okay, so let's set the stage. We were maybe like T minus three weeks in before Teacher Appreciation Week. For those of you that are listening and going, "What's Teacher Appreciation Week?" I want you to know that every year there is a Teacher Appreciation Month that happens in May. There is a Teacher Appreciation Week that happens typically the second week of May, and then there's the Teacher Appreciation Day. The Teacher Appreciation Day caused all sorts of kerfuffles because it's typically during the week of Teacher Appreciation Week. It's typically that Tuesday of Teacher Appreciation Week. This time for 2023, it was the first Tuesday of May, and none of the brands got it right, including us because it just felt wrong. So most brands focused on Teacher Appreciation Week. With the huge disclaimer that if any of you know us in LCG, one of the things we will harp on, we will die on a hill about is we don't just appreciate teachers during the week that we are told to appreciate teachers.
Sure, it's a great excuse to go above and beyond, but educators are in a very thankless position. We want to make sure that they feel loved, special, heard, seen, whatever it is to keep them going in one of the most challenging professions in the world really. If you could tell, for me, I respect and I just get so inspired by what educators do and do on a daily basis, the mental capacity it takes to juggle all of the things they do in a day. So I'm going to get off my soapbox around that. But know we're going to be talking about Teacher Appreciation Week, but if you follow us anywhere, I want you to think about how can I appreciate educators all the time, so.
Porter Palmer:
I mean, if I can jump in and just say that we're going to talk about what we did for Teacher Appreciation Week, but please don't let Teacher Appreciation Week be the time that you feel that it's the only time that you can do something like this. Teachers deserve this year round. So Elana, tell us how did this come to be?
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. What we'll do is in the show notes, we'll put in our first episode where we announce the LCG Foundation so you can get a little bit of context of who we are and what we decided to do. But in a quick one sentence, we initially partnered with Meta and the division of Education in Meta to say, "Gosh, educators typically do not get the trickle down effect of funds that they need to feel special, to feel heard, to have that voice and choice, to have professional development that they want, to have the supplies they want, all of the things they do not get that trickle down financial effect." For those of you that are new to education go, "What do you mean? There's billions of dollars in funding for Title I schools and ESSER funds and the pandemic funding."
Yes, but that didn't trickle down into, "Hey, educator, here's $50, go buy the thing you really need. Here's 100 bucks. Here's what you really need. What do you need? Have I ever asked you?" So what we were here to set out is how can we make grants to teachers a thing and grants without making them jump through hoops, grants to just say, "Hey, we see you. We trust you. We want to make your life a little better." We are not under the assumption that 150 bucks to 500 bucks is going to change the trajectory of an educator's career or life. But what we are under the impression on and what we did experience during Future Appreciation Week is all sorts of smiles. So we're going to talk about that. But LCG Foundation exists to really support and uplift educator voices. We typically do that by providing micro grants to educators.
So we had some profits from what we were able to do with some brands. What we are able to do with brands is we help them give to teachers and we evaluate its impact in terms of what teachers they were trying to reach, what areas, and so on and so forth. So we had some profit. We have a small foundation, we've only been around for about a year and a half, and we said, "How do we want to use this profit?" So I do remember, Porter, especially on this meeting, and then Anna Fields, our project manager and has an instrumental role within the foundation as well, we're all brainstorming things that we could do with the profit for Teacher Appreciation. We said, "Well, we have about $50,000. What do we want to do with that?" Porter, why don't you jump in here because I feel like you were slightly dying on a hill for this one.
Porter Palmer:
I mean, I'll just go back to the past few years I have, and I will get to what our initial plan was, but what we wound up doing is I have just been watching the Clear the List movement for several years now and have participated in it on my very own and found it very rewarding to just spend some of my money supporting teachers and going and looking at their lists. The way that I've looked at it is that I used to spend money in my own classroom. I don't have a classroom anymore, but I can't help but remember what that felt like. So every year, either at Amazon Prime Day or Teacher Appreciation Week, I try to set aside a little bit of my money to go buy little things off of as many teachers' wishlists as I can.
Now, we as a foundation said, "Hey, we have this amount of money, $50,000," and we've set up this process for grant giving, but we learned that in this particular circumstance it might be really complicated and time consuming, and if we were going to spend the time, one of the things that we don't see a lot of times is how educators use the money. They tell us in the grant process how they might use the money, but a lot of times we don't get that gratification at the end getting to see it. I really enjoy that gratification. So we started talking about can we do this Teacher Appreciation Week instead of a grant where we're writing checks to people, or they're applying for the grant, what if we just use our money to go and help clear lists for teachers.
That doesn't mean that we were able to clear entire lists. We tried to be, I wouldn't say fully equitable, but we set aside a particular amount of money that we tried not to go over for each person so that we could support as many teachers as possible with that $50,000. So we started thinking about how we might do that.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. I think that that's where the ideas started forming in saying, "Could we do this?" Because again, we're a small foundation. Prior to this, we gave away about 25K to Marin County schools in California to special education teachers. We definitely looked at what we had to give. So we said, "Okay, yes, our board's on board, we're going to give away $50,000." Then as Porter started convincing us and it didn't take a lot of convincing because we've all experienced this Clear the List movement and the vulnerability it takes for an educator to even create a list and say, "I need help," is a lot. The feeling of no one seeing it and no one fulfilling a list breaks my heart.
That's typically what happens a lot to educators. So we said, "Yes, let's do it."So Operation Teacher Clear the List commenced. We were going to start Monday of Teacher Appreciation Week and go as long as we could, but $50,000 in looking at a spend of 100 to 150 per educator, that takes a lot of time. We got good at it, right?
Porter Palmer:
Yeah. One of our questions is what surprised you. Anna had calculated, she was like, "Porter, this is going to take a lot of time." I'm like, "Oh, it'll be fine. Because I've sat on my phone and made purchases for teachers off of lists in the evenings on my own time. It'll be fine." Anna's like, "No, but it's like six minutes per person." I'm like, "Uh-huh, no, it's fine." Oh, no. It was so time-consuming.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. One of those things that if anyone has a part of their job that you're like, "Oh, I can't wait to do this."
Porter Palmer:
Oh yeah.
Elana Leoni:
I found myself at night going and going, "Okay, I know it's 8:00 at night, but I'm going to spend two hours and clear some list and it's going to be really fun and really joyous." But a little bittersweet and we can get into that as well. But Bill, we have not heard from you and your awesome radio voice. So why don't you jump in on, you were responsible for helping clear a lot of educator lists and you came enrolled. I know you probably had some experience prior because Porter loves clearing lists. I'm sure you did that, but not to that I'm an expert in jumping in Amazon lists and fulfilling. What was your initial experience jumping in and saying, "We're going to do $50,000 of this"?
William Trinkle:
Well, when they were first talking about how long it was going to take, I kind of wondered, "Well, I wonder if that's really the case." When I first jumped in with clearing the list, what happens is there's a lot of unexpected things that come up. You've got a list and you're going to look at it, and then you're going to try to prioritize and try to figure out what items can I get off the list. Then you've got issues with Amazon and you've got issues with the banks, and there's all these hurdles that come up that you've got to try to figure out along the way. They come up and then you clear that problem and then they come up again as time goes on. So there was a lot of unexpected things, but I suppose they should be expected because you're just dealing with so many entities. You've got the teachers, you've got Amazon, you've got the bank that's involved that's paying for this, and a lot of moving parts.
Elana Leoni:
All right. Let's pause there because let's talk about some hurdles that maybe we expected, but didn't expect all like to be as hurdley, if that's a word. But I would say yes, we're going to be doing hundreds of charges to our bank and we have to make sure the bank clears it. So I was on multiple fraud calls. Anna, our project manager, was on multiple calls just to clear the purchases. So once we got that done, great. I was out Monday celebrating my birthday, and during that Monday, Twitter decided to restrict our LCG Foundation Twitter account because of... why don't you go into it, Porter, because you experienced it?
Porter Palmer:
So one of my notes here is to say that an unexpected thing for me was how hard Twitter, Amazon, and the banks would make it for us to do good. That is an a thing to, hey, just be warned. Because Bill, you had to call Amazon. So there were these barriers. So our foundation is young and doesn't have a huge following or a lot of activity on Twitter. So this one day we are on there and we put one post that says, "Hey, drop your wishlist here." Then we went to fulfilling the wishlists, taking a screen capture of what we purchased for the educator, replying to the educator with that screen grab. Twitter decided that we were bots, that this was not real. We were down, that was by noon Eastern Time, maybe on Monday, so of day one we were already unable to reply to anybody. There was a big warning on our account all day that says, "This account's been restricted." So.
William Trinkle:
It looks great when you're trying to give away money like, "Oh, this isn't a problem."
Elana Leoni:
I mean, luckily we had the LCG agency account, and then I had my personal Twitter account. I haven't looked at the analytics, but I think my tweet calling out Twitter support going, "Hey, this is Teacher Appreciation Week. All we're doing is trying to give away money to educators. Can you please unrestrict our account," that people started retweeting it, going, "Oh my God, Twitter, come on. Come on. Help this foundation get back up." So we did manage and a lot with Bill's credit and Porter's credit, jumping on, trying to figure out how... I don't even know how y'all did it, but was it like Wednesday, we got the account up and running?
Porter Palmer:
Yeah, the account.
William Trinkle:
Yeah. Ultimately I was able to email back and forth with Twitter, and they actually responded. They have a generic thing that I tried first, and then I emailed them back and they were able to get it back up and going, so.
Porter Palmer:
With apologies.
William Trinkle:
With apologies to their credit, but it still probably took longer than we would've liked.
Elana Leoni:
Okay. So we got Twitter restricting us, banks calling us frauds and holding and freezing the card. Then on the Amazon side?
Porter Palmer:
Bill, you could tell this about it being related to the bank.
William Trinkle:
Yeah. So the issue there was, again, they were thinking it's fraud because all of a sudden there's all these charges. So we had to basically re-certify the card on almost every order, verify the card. So the question was is this a bank problem or is an Amazon problem? Both said, "Yes, it is the other." So the bank said it's Amazon's problem. Amazon said it's the bank's problem. To be honest with you, it never fully got cleared. So we were still verifying cards up until the last order.
Porter Palmer:
Sure, yeah.
William Trinkle:
It's another step, right? It's another step that takes a little bit longer. It would be nice if we didn't have to do that, but I understand that there's fraud problem.
Porter Palmer:
Yeah. I mean, right. We understand that it is for our protection, all of this. But it was an unexpected barrier. We just thought it'd be smooth sailing and that the hardest thing to do would be choosing what to buy for whom.
William Trinkle:
Yeah, these are the things, things you just don't plan for that come up. They were just-
Elana Leoni:
I'll say that we are a small foundation and the people that are on this podcast probably fulfilled, what, 100% of all of these maybe.
Porter Palmer:
Yeah.
Elana Leoni:
We did a team meeting where everyone got to pick stuff and find stuff on Twitter and things like that, and we fulfilled it kind of together. But us three were the majority of the lion's share of fulfilling every single one that we saw, so.
Porter Palmer:
Ask me what we accomplished.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, in time. But I just want to say that one of the hurdles that we're like, "Oh, won't take that much time." We're going to give you some best practices if you're an educator listening too, but if you didn't have things filled out properly on your wishlist or things like that, it took us a lot more time. So the marketer and me said, "Oh, it'll take us two minute per order." I got it down to three if I was able to really breeze through it, three minutes per order and the order was proper. But in general, it probably took anywhere from five to seven minutes an order, and then we multiply that by hundreds of educators, and we are a small team. So when big companies tell me, "We don't have the resources, we don't have the funds," we now can laugh and say, "We did it, so please don't tell us this. We made it happen." I think if you are passionate about anything, you can make it happen. So now Porter, I want to transition to what we were able to accomplish together.
Porter Palmer:
All right, so here are the numbers.
Elana Leoni:
Drum roll.
Porter Palmer:
Drum roll. So here are the numbers as of this morning, and there are still a few that we're trying to resolve. We'll talk about the address issue when we talk about advice in a little bit, but teachers make sure your address is correct on your wishlist. So we have a few things that we're still trying to resolve, but we went over budget. We spent, as of this morning, $51,638, so over budget. we supported 424 educators in the United States. Our average spend-
Elana Leoni:
A couple in Canada. At the end, when you fulfill a list and you're like, "Oh, .ca, I should have known there in Canada." No offense to you Canadian teachers, we love you too. But we were focused on U.S. this time. So a couple Canadian guts snuck in.
Porter Palmer:
So 424 educators. Our average spend was $121.50 across that. When I calculate the hours committed, it was about 50 across the three of us last week, maybe a little more with meetings and phone calls, but actual fulfillment of the wishlists, we committed about 50 hours of work to it.
Elana Leoni:
Awesome. When we think about this process, I remember, Porter, you telling us about what you did. I really liked the philosophy. So sometimes when educators do a list, they do a lot of, and we'll get into best practices probably right after this, but they'll say, "Oh, I need little things that people are willing to spend $3 on some Kleenex for my classroom or $10 on hand sanitizer." People are more willing, because the fact of the matter is is a lot of people that fulfill classroom wishlists for other teachers are teachers themselves. That's also what breaks my heart. So they have limited income, but they want to make sure that that educator feels heard and that those wishlists don't get just ghosted with spiderwebs.
So they're in there fulfilling other educators lists for Teacher Appreciation, so they can only do like I want some post-its and things. So a majority of the lists were very small. So what Porter quickly said is, "Go to their dream item." Educators, this is the tip for you, never feel like you were being selfish. Put your dream item on your wishlist and call it that. Say, "This is my dream item, highest priority," and see if someone bites because you never know there'll be a foundation like us jumping in. I jumped in and looked at the most expensive thing on their list and got it. Usually that was around $100, 150 bucks. We're able to do one to two items and fulfill it.
Porter Palmer:
Yeah, when you talk about that, when you're talking about the big item things, and there is a mixture of the big item things, but I love being able to buy flexible seating for educators, robotics kits, they're big dream items because as you said, Elana, a lot of times they put their lists out there hoping that somebody will buy a $9 book for them. They also have these big item gifts on their list, but because we as a foundation had said this 100 to $150, we're like, "Let's go get the thing that costs the most money that they are less likely to get."
Elana Leoni:
They were [inaudible 00:25:12].
Porter Palmer:
It was lot of fun.
Elana Leoni:
Right. I was thinking about all the items, the big ticket items. They were like mini fridges, HEPA filters, air conditioning units, and this is where a little bit of the bittersweet comes in, right? So you're like, "Why do teachers need to make sure their quality of air is okay? Why do teachers need fans?" But there was also the high ticket items like the robotics kit, AR, VR, MR, there's all sorts of cool high ticket items, but then there was laminators, and hey, I need a printer. I need a printer that actually works. So do the printer, the toner and the paper. That was a good gift I would do in a trio sometimes. Bill, what were the items for you, the high ticket items that you're excited about fulfilling?
William Trinkle:
I got a couple that I thought were pretty interesting. There was a gumball machine that someone was using to give treats to a class. That was so cool because we weren't allowed gum when I went to school, that was forbidden, and any treat whatsoever was sort of forbidden. Lunch was in your locker. So that was really cool. The other thing that I was able to get for a teacher, well, I don't know if you've seen them, but they are these little speakers that you wear on your hip, like on your belt, and it comes up and it has a headset. You may see these in theme parks or something where people are walking around and people are directing traffic. That was pretty cool. I saw that. It's just a little amplifier for your voice, basically. That was pretty cool. That was pretty cool to see. But a lot of the stuff that for me was your typical glue, scissors, pencils.
Porter Palmer:
Since you're talking about that, since you mentioned that, there's a question that we have about how did it feel or what did you learn? Those are questions for us to talk about. For me, I feel like if you are an education brand, this is where I would say apply some money to do this project because it's very humbling to see that teachers' basic needs are not being met in their classroom. They are asking for pencils. Amazon has a pack of 150 pencils that are on many wishlists for $10.70. You don't know, Bill's laughing, how many times we have bought those pencils and they are not the good Ticonderoga ones that other people put on their list, but they are pencils and teachers would have highest priority are these $10 pencils for 150 of them, and we need three sets.
That's how desperately teachers needed pencils, glue. You see my eyes squinting, so that tells you how I feel about this, you all. Paper. Paper, so much paper was needed. Notebooks for their students, scissors, crayons, Kleenexes, hand sanitizer, tape, these sorts of essential classroom materials teachers are on the internet needing to ask help getting for their classrooms. I had people private message me about the fact that they are not allowed to have wishlists because their school districts don't want people to know that they don't have the equipment that they need. So that's even an issue of teachers desperately need these things for their classrooms.
Elana Leoni:
One other thing I'd add on the general stuff that I saw a lot were cleaning supplies.
Porter Palmer:
Yes.
Elana Leoni:
I bought mops. Again, we were trying to navigate to how can we spend the most in a quickest, most impactful way. If you had a good wishlist and we're going to sprinkle some of these tips in now, within wishlist, you're able to say what priority, highest priority, high, medium, low. You can also put a note, "Here's how I'm going to use it." So you can tell that story. So we would typically go to the highest priority items. If you didn't tell us, we went for the high ticket items that you were too scared to put on, but last minute you did. I think that fulfilling the list, the items, there were a mix of, gosh, this breaks my heart that they have to go out to the general public to get Kleenex in their classroom or whatever it may be, the basic staples, right?
But then there was also this feeling of hope and excitement because I bought a tent that turned the classroom into this castle. So there was this hope and wonder, and then tech infused awesomeness too. But I want people to know that when you fulfill Amazon wishlists like this in this mass quantity, you fundamentally start understanding the state of education in a deeper level of what is being supplied, what do teachers really need. I think as a brand, if you're looking to say, "What are the items that educators need if I want to appreciate them?" go to some wishlists. Now I can go to my Amazon and see all of the stuff I bought. What we're going to do as a company is look at our gift guide and start revamping it and saying, "Gosh, this is what teachers want now and these were the trends." So I think when we talk about it being bittersweet, it was because I'm like, "Gosh, we live in a world..." Oh Bill, here's your moment. In a world.
William Trinkle:
In a world.
Elana Leoni:
We live in a world where educators have to go out to the random public to fulfill their basic needs in one of the most challenging positions and that breaks my heart. It was amazing. It put smiles on my faces to be able to fulfill anything. These educators were so incredibly grateful. But part of me is like, "Why do they have to be grateful? Why do they have to rely on some random person who just happened to have 50K?" Our society is broken fundamentally and we all of a sudden get Title I funding and all this other funding and it doesn't trickle down to the people that need it the most. That's what bothers me and that's why we have the foundation. Everyone's like, "Okay, stop."
Porter Palmer:
We're not passionate about education at all at LCG.
Elana Leoni:
It's a job. Well, anything else? Let's jump into the actual tips and tricks to navigate an Amazon wishlist. Yes, there are DonorsChoose, there are all sorts of ways, but we're going to focus on Amazon wishlist because that's what we fulfilled. I want, first and foremost, educators to realize you are not being selfish by having one, and you should have one up all year long. So Porter and Bill, what are the tips and tricks of how to start one up? What are the types of lists we should do and what are the things you should avoid? Porter already said, make sure put your address on there.
Porter Palmer:
Yes. If you don't know how to do that, you can Google the term that says set up address on Amazon wishlist and it will take you to a link that tells you how to do that. That was for me, and the part of this that I did, I was working to fulfill wishlists for a lot of teachers who have never created a wishlist before. So I had a different circumstance than Bill did who was focused primarily on Twitter and people who have a lot of experience with Clear the List. But make sure your address is up to date if you are creating and sharing your wishlist. I honestly don't recommend your school as, that's just me, but I don't recommend using your school address.
If you put your address with your wishlist, I don't see it as the person who's giving or purchasing, but if you put your school, that makes delivery hard because Amazon likes to deliver things on Saturdays and Sundays during the evenings. So if that's the only choice that you have, use your school address obviously. But if you live in a place with a proper address that you can receive packages at, use that address.
Elana Leoni:
We will never see that address.
Porter Palmer:
We never see that address.
Elana Leoni:
It just says Mr. Thompson's class wishlist address, and the only thing we get to see is the city and state.
Porter Palmer:
That's right. So your anonymity is still protected, but boy, it sure does make it easier and more efficient. There are three different wishlist styles that we experienced. I think Bill has some thoughts on those. One is the typical wishlist. There's also a wishlist that some people gave me a link to and a wishlist that I had to join in order to do it. There's a wedding/baby registry that some people used. Bill if you want to.
William Trinkle:
Yeah. So some of the things that we have to deal with. From our end, when we start a wishlist, we see all the things and then we just start putting them to the cart, right? Then we don't know if you have an address attached to that wishlist until the end. So we go through all this process, and if you don't have it, then we got to clear everything out and start all over again. That's one thing. There's a couple. There is a regular wishlist that's out there, that joining, inviting someone to join, I don't know how I felt about that. I felt like they were going to see me and not the foundation, I suppose. So who's this random dude who's in here? Because part of this was my personal Amazon account, so-
Elana Leoni:
Get notified when other people join that list because you're a part of that list. I'm like, "No."
William Trinkle:
Yeah. So I would not recommend that. Because people are wondering exactly, "Well, what does this do for me?" So the other wishlist that I was going to mention is some people use a baby registry or a wedding registry as their wishlist, which I thought was actually fine because when you see those wishlists up in the right hand corner starts to give you a tally, and the tally tells you how much money you are spending instead of just guessing. Because the other thing that happens is we might have a full list and we get to the end, and for some reason some things just won't ship. So we've got to get those off the list.
Porter Palmer:
Oh, let me add a tip here related to that, and that is put things on your list that say Amazon Prime. That's a big tip is we would get to the finalization, and as Bill said, we would discover that, oh, that can't be shipped from a wishlist. What I found is if you're selecting something that says Amazon Prime on it, they most likely can ship it.
William Trinkle:
The other thing that I noticed that was great was there were some teachers that did a great job of saying, "This is a high priority," or they had some notes that were attached to the items and that was great. The other thing that I will say is load up your list, because there was a couple teachers that broke my heart that I have 100, 150 bucks that I can spend on them, and all I could do was spend $20 or $50. I'm like, "Oh." There's no opportunity for me to go back and add to that. I felt bad because it was a missed opportunity. So yeah, put things out there.
Elana Leoni:
So with that, so sometimes you have multiple lists, and if you are all Amazon shoppers, sometimes you have a personal list and stuff like that. So if you invited us into your wishlist as an educator, sometimes your other list showed up. So some teachers were cool. They had self-care list right next to their classroom list. Some of them only had $20 worth of stuff on their classroom list, maybe because they didn't think people were actually going to do it, maybe they just didn't put a lot of importance to it. Maybe it's banned in their district, whatever. But I went to their self-care list and it was full of chocolate. So I did lots of Reese's peanut butter cups, SkinnyPop Popcorn, cozy sweaters, face masks. So I tried to do that too. So you just never know who's going to see your list.
So make sure, to Bill's point that you have enough, but don't forget yourself. The only downside I would say, Porter, of doing this is I didn't feel like I got to really do a lot of self-care for the educator because the educators are always thinking about their classroom first and foremost. I know that that makes their heart full, but I also want to recognize them as humans that need stuff too.
Porter Palmer:
I think that's why the flexible seating made me so happy to buy because, I mean, I know that that's not care for teachers, but the dream items was a way to make me feel better about fulfilling, like these are the things that they hope for.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I did a standup desk. I did a standup garden, which was cool.
Porter Palmer:
Love it.
Elana Leoni:
So there's fun dream items that I feel like could help nourish a teacher as well. But the one thing missing was it was very rare. There were lots of chocolate, don't get me wrong. Lots of chocolate.
Porter Palmer:
Oh, teachers needed this. I'm jumping back. But teachers needed snacks for their kids. That also just ripped my heart out really. We were talking about the one advantage of using the wedding or baby registry was if you have these high dollar things, you can put them on there and people can contribute towards that rather than... so you have something that's $399 and people could contribute, anybody could contribute $10, $20 towards that item, and then once there was enough money there, it would be purchased. So we did see that option.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I was just going to say, some of the items that I felt like I had to spend more is that the educators told a story. They're like, "These snacks I'm going to use for celebration in a graduation party." I'm like, "How can I not do that if they're celebrating a party?" So don't be afraid to actually tell people what it's for and get them behind the story. Because I could imagine the kids having these gummy bears at the end and getting so excited that they're graduating to a new grade. I want to be part of that.
Porter Palmer:
So for advice for educators, we've talked about making sure that you have a list, whether you use the regular wishlist or you use the registry model, have a list with lots of items on it, and make sure that your address is up to date. Best case scenario, it is a personal address knowing that it is not viewable by the people who are fulfilling. But I also want to have us discuss advice for brands. If you're on a marketing team and you are listening to this podcast, we have advice for you as well.
Elana Leoni:
I think one of the things to kick off is couple years ago, a former colleague and good friend of ours, Lily Jones, wrote a blog post and we'll put it in the show notes, but what brands should not do for Teacher Appreciation Week. I think I want to just start there because sometimes during Teacher Appreciation Week, when you're sometimes in the myopic viewpoint of, "My product is awesome, of course more educators want to see my product, maybe I want to give a discount to my product." Or, "I want to talk about my product in a way that I think applies to Teacher Appreciation."
What you want to do during Teacher Appreciation is get as far away from your product as possible and say, "Gosh, I appreciate my users so much. I appreciate my community, I appreciate my audience of educators that support me, that use my product, and I appreciate them as human beings. I don't care about all of this other stuff. So how can I uplift their voices and show authentic appreciation?" So know that when Porter and I joined a lot of our brands, when we're doing Teacher Appreciation brainstorms, we will poo poo things. We will say, "No, do not do that."
Porter Palmer:
No teacher wants a 20% discount to your product for Teacher Appreciation Week.
Elana Leoni:
You may want to say, "Okay, we've got some free things we can get them." Sure. But I want you to brainstorm with authentic appreciation, trust, admiration in mind first and foremost. So I want to just set that foundation to start with. But when you think about making a difference in your audience of educators' lives, what could it be? What can make them smile? Maybe it's your customers, you surprise them with a pizza party or you surprise and delight little educators that come in and say, "Hey, thank you. This product really made my day." Say, "Gosh, because of that, you get this."
There are great giveaways that happen during Teacher Appreciation Week and month. I would say just with the caveat, do not make educators jump through hoops for a $5 Starbucks card, okay? So don't make them follow you, tag 10 teachers and all of the things, just give it to them. We didn't capture any emails through $50,000 effort. We're not using these names. We don't have any data. Maybe we got some followers on Twitter, but we're not doing it because of that. We just want to give out money. I understand if you are a brand, you have budgets, you have real capacity issues, but I want you to really stretch that and really challenge. If you're at a leadership table, say, "How can we appreciate educators just for the sake of appreciating them?"
Porter Palmer:
I'll make the play for, with just a few thousand dollars, you can bring such joy to classrooms. The teachers will tell me how they opened their boxes in front of their kids and how excited they were. So if you are a brand, one, you can reach out to the LCG Foundation obviously, and we would love to help you with a grant giving plan, a way to help you put your money, your profits to a really great use and to help you feel what we have been able to feel by being able to do this. But even if you don't come to the LCG Foundation to support that effort, put aside some money and empower your employees to go out and give to teachers, clear some lists, or at least buy items off of lists even if you aren't able to completely clear them and just feel the rewards of that. It's a way of listening to your audience by going and looking at their wishlists.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah, I would say one of the things you said, Porter, is very doable. What you could say is, "Hey, we're going to match our employees to go help clear some lists up to $5,000." You can help tell that story. So follow us, follow myself. We're telling the story not to say, "Wow, we did awesome things." The reason why we're doing this podcast is to inspire others to do the same. I think it is, I am going to use the word travesty, it is an injustice for brands that are making money in education to not give back. I think it does. It's not just about EdTech giving back. It's about all brands. We do want to elevate the discussion to bigger brands that have budget to do so. We are working as a foundation to make this a norm is to give back to educators, those that need it the most.
When something hits the fan, educators are always there. They were there for the pandemic, they're there for every natural disaster. They're there when shooters are on the ground. This is giving me goosebumps. But we don't protect them, we don't support them, and we should be doing it every single day of the year. So I want you to think about if you give a product to EdTech and if you made money, even if it's just 1% of your profits, or even .25%, I don't care. Like Porter said, if it's $10 you give to an educator, the educator is going to use that $10 in the most thrifty way possible.
Porter Palmer:
It's interesting. We work with Ed EdTech founders a lot, CEOs of EdTech companies. I have not met anyone, and maybe they just don't work with us, but I've not met people who say, "Oh, I want to get into educational technology because it is this huge basket of money to be made for my company." If you are an EdTech founder, I already know that you are in this because you care about kids, you care about education. You have identified some sort of problem that you are wanting to resolve to make our world better. So to get back to what Elana is saying, you are in this industry, so use some of those profits to give back.
Elana Leoni:
Yeah. So I hope that you all were able to experience our joy, our experience of kind of bittersweet, our experience of just being fired up and wanting to tell the world about this experience. So maybe next year we'll see other brands. Maybe we won't be doing this just alone, that people will want to join in and help bring so many smiles to educator voices. Who knows? Again, because we don't appreciate educators just during Teacher Appreciation Month or week, we'll be doing some of this. We'll be surprising, delighting as much as we can as a small foundation with limited budget. But I hope that you were able to say, "Wow, my perception of what educators needs is different. Maybe I'll think a little bit more critically when it comes to Teacher Appreciation Months and week and just how to appreciate them as a brand."
Then educators, I want you to step up. I want you to have a list. I want you to have a list that's functioning. I don't want you to feel bad about it. I want you to have items that are for you as well as your classroom. Put it up on your Twitter profiles. Put it up on different things. Don't be afraid because you never know, there'll be someone like us that can jump in and say, "We see you." So I want to just thank you all for listening to us. I know we kind of went on soap boxes. We love, love, love helping educators. I know that came through. I want to thank Bill for jumping on because he normally doesn't join. But these two people, Porter and Bill fulfilled probably 80% of all of the lists at least.
Porter Palmer:
It was so fun.
Elana Leoni:
That is hard work. You two are just angels and you jumped in and came on, and I guess I didn't expect the amount of work, like you said, 50 plus hours. But you guys were inspiring. So I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for jumping up and having the call of duty and say, "Yes, I'm showing up for teachers."
Porter Palmer:
It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. Thanks for helping us make it happen.
Elana Leoni, Host
Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.
Porter Palmer, Guest
Porter Palmer serves as the Director of Joy at Leoni Consulting Group and leads all community strategy and building initiatives. Prior to this role, she spent a decade developing engagement strategies and overseeing the general operations of the DEN, Discovery Communication's award-winning community of practice for technology-loving educators.
William Trinkle
For the LCG Foundation, William Trinkle plays a crucial role in grant processing. In addition to his responsibilities with the foundation, William manages social media for brands with a focus on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Prior to joining the LCG Foundation, William enjoyed a successful career in radio broadcasting. During this time, he served as an on-air talent and oversaw programming operations for multiple commercial radio stations. He is a photographer and video editor and brings a wealth of experience in both the nonprofit and media sectors.
About All Things Marketing and Education
What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.
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