Do you give back to your community?

Michael Buble was on Oprah yesterday and I loved hearing his story of faith. As early as three years old, he used to sleep with his mom's bible and would always ask his higher power to make him famous and he promises that he'll give back. Well, you know the rest of the story already and yes, he's giving back in many ways.

As gift basket professionals, we often find ourselves donating gifts for auctions. I've done one too many "galas" where they collect donations from their broader community and we attempted to make gift baskets from all of it. One year, my son's school asked us to do it and I literally ended up filling our Suburban 8 times. It was ridiculous. I mean I'm all about giving back but that was just plainly too much too ask. But, there is a heart surgeon in the organization who ended up falling in love with one of our basket designs and order 200 of them. They were $200 each. I'll let you do the math. I guess my point is that while I've never done the donations for visibility, sometimes, just doing the right thing pays decent dividends.

As the holidays are approaching, we see a 38% increase in our donation requests. Right now, I have 17 gift baskets, over 2,000 brochures, 1200 goody bag items and 1,000 extra business cards in the workshop waiting for one of my sales reps to pick up. It's almost annoying. But once again, I look at the organizations they are going to and consider the potential visibility for my gift basket companies and realize that its just simply the right thing to do. And yes, I'm crossing my fingers there will be a heart surgeon in the crowd.

As an organization, if you added up the amount of financial, product and time donations that we give on an annual basis, I bet the number would be impressive. And I'm so interested in knowing that I'm asking you to please visit our community website on GBA and log your information. We are going to report out to the media how much the members of GBA are doing to help our respective communities. We know it will gain additional visibility for www.findyourgiftbasket.com and hopefully inspire others to give back in whatever way they can. Times are tough for many and while you can't always give back, it's good to be calibrated on what others are doing.

So, my one ask of you this week - please visit the community website and complete the online form. We will not be calling out each company by name and reporting out on what you do. We'll be adding it all up and writing a press release - it's just simply great visibility for all of us. I am asking for 100% participation so don't be surprised if you get a phone call from our office asking for your information. We feel strongly about community and know that you do, too.

Thank you in advance for everything you do to help make our communities stronger, including our GBA community.