Our August Donation To World Vision Australia (Donation + Giveaway Results)

We’ve been running customer-only giveaways for a little while here at Wholesale Suite. It’s a small perk for our customers to enjoy and gives us a great way to build interaction with our customer base.

I’ve really enjoyed the chats with people who’ve participated in each of the customer giveaways so far. It’s great to read all the reviews of our products, and also to give some prizes back to our community.

Another great endeavor we’ve been exploring recently is corporate giving.

This means we actively look for charities and non-profits which fit with our values and working with those organizations and people to pass on some of our good fortune.

It’s a fairly new thing for us. We’re not a huge company with large budgets. But we are able to do a small amount and after 5 years of Wholesale Suite, I’m happy that we can start exploring it.

In August we decided to try combining the two by running a competition to make donations in the name of some of our customers.

I have to say… I learned a TON from doing this.

Although this was probably our least successful giveaway in terms of entrants, I did have some really insightful takeaways and at the end of the day, we had the opportunity to donate to a worthy cause.

Here are my top 5:

1. Philanthropy is very personal and everyone approaches things differently
2. If you’re going to do a corporate donation, you need to explain yourself very clearly and leave no grey areas
3. Not everyone believes in the causes you believe in (and that is OK!)
4. Combining philanthropy and giveaways not a very clear way to do a donation
5. Not everything you think will work will work (and that is OK too!)

Our August giveaway was all about this donation effort and we decided to partner with World Vision Australia via their donate a goat program.

I particularly liked the idea of donating an animal as they can bring many benefits beyond just the monetary donation. So when I found this page to donate a goat to a family in need I thought it might be a good fit.

We had 5 winners of the giveaway and we’ll be donating 5 goats in the name of these wonderful companies:

• Excite Media – website design
• Sky Siouki –wildlife illustrated homeware
• Mediamojo – web & graphic design
• Rough Diamond World – diamonds dealers
• Paint Pixie – furniture paint brushes

I’d like to extend a massive thanks to all those who entered. It was a great experience and not one I’ll soon forget.

Josh Kohlbach
CEO/Founder of Wholesale Suite