When Berenice’s Salon in Denver was putting together ideas for their Earth Month fundraising, they knew they wanted to do something cool and involve the neighborhood. Ice cream, anyone?

They reached out to a popular local ice cream shop, Sweet Cooie’s, and their next-door neighbor, the Under the Umbrella Coffee Shop. Sweet Cooie’s donated ice cream and helped to cross-promote. Berenice’s had a DJ playing vinyl records of music from the 1950s and 1960s, and offered complimentary mini-services and makeup touch-ups to bring added value to the event.

For raffle items, they engaged even more local businesses, with all proceeds going to the Western Resource Advocates, a non-profit dedicated to clean land, air and water initiatives, and ended up raising a thousand dollars in under three hours.

Here are their top tips for how to run a relationship-building, local event—

using your salon software as a tool to handle the numbers, while you handle the fun.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BTCIoz_hA82/?taken-by=sweetcooiesic

Five Tips to Make Your Neighborhood
Promotion a Success:

1. Partner with like businesses This doesn’t mean just the people on your block. Off the beaten path? Ask a business on a street with more foot traffic to get involved so you can drive traffic both ways. And when you reach out, don’t call or email—go in person and present a fully formed idea. Businesses get so many calls asking for things; a personal touch really counts. 
2. Make it an Event Get on Facebook and create an event that people can be “interested” in. Tag the other businesses participating, tag other key businesses in the area, invite everyone who likes your page and boost your posts to people in the neighborhoods you want to bring to your event. Make a cool visual post for Instagram and tag/hashtag away.

   

    

3. Keep close track of donations: Collecting money for a charity raffle/donation? In order to keep accurate track of the cash coming in (and avoid paying tax and commission on donations), we recommend using drawer entries in SalonBiz to record donations.

   Making a donation basket with some retail products in it? Use an inventory adjustment to remove the item from your stock and record it that way using a specific adjustment reason, so your counts will still be accurate at the end of the month.

    

4. Know your codes: Create a discount code in the salon software and prep your team ahead of time and put it on any print collateral for the event to give customers an incentive to come back and visit after the event is over. Before the event, brush up your staff on how to track the people who redeem coupons with a discount code, and program a unique referral reason into the salon software so you can track how much revenue was generated from each channel. 
5. Follow up after the event: Once the party is cleaned up and everything is back to normal, run reports on discount codes to see the immediate success of your event. Run those reports again once the discount codes have expired, and then run the referral reason report six months later to track your long-term success and see how many new customers you gained.

And above all… focus on relationships

Using simple tools to track your success is the key to holding an event that benefits everyone in the long run. The day-of will be hectic, but it’s a lot easier to relax and have fun with it when you know you’ve done all the prep work ahead of time. Above all, you should have fun with the event, and use it to build positive authentic relationships with your neighbors, with your clients and with the community. That’s it’s own kind of success.