Self-Promo Holiday Card Collaboration
Giving isn’t only a corporate initiative to make end-of-year donations at our agency, rather we are critical thinkers… innovators… and passionate individuals… so we are charged to apply this energy to everything we do and then we carry this positive attitude with us all year long. The legacy of the Ink&Pixel giving platform is something we are particularly proud of, and maintain as part of our core values.
And so at the end of the year, we reflect on this and contribute in a deliberate and meaningful way: proceeding to research causes to support that will make a marked difference, and making donations in our clients’ names. We like to choose two causes — one local and one national — so that we can move the mark across the country where its needed most, but also right here in our own backyard.
This particular example is a gift mailing we produced under our former How 2 Design brand. The concept began, as it often does, with a discovery of a hardship or tough issue out in the world that we are compelled to fix. In this case, we read a story of kids in some lower income communities in the South who couldn’t afford or didn’t have coats, so when colder weather struck they were either faced with the decision to stay home or often school was fully closed lacking the proper resources. A great disparity of income is seen throughout the country and even here in our region. Here we see coat drives popping up all across the state during the winter, in an effort to collect gently used coats and distribute to those in need to keep them safe and warm.
So these situations were in the forefront of our minds and they became the driving force of this gift mailing’s concept, where we invited recipients to join the “Design Patrol” and make a difference. It feels all sorts of warm and fuzzy to chill for a minute and remember how good it feels to give, while bearing in mind that not everyone affords this opportunity. We paired the gift package with donations to two charities in our region: Operation Warm, and the DC-based Coats for Kids Foundation, and the Ink&Pixel staff also donated some coats personally to local drives, and a national resource was included in our message to invite recipients to do the same.
Every time we look back at the piece — and the time we spent creating it on behalf of the causes associated — we get in the spirit all over again, and so the Ink&Pixel spirit of generosity goes on and on… merry, merry!
