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Social Impact

Social impact, cause marketing and CSR solutions drive our festival consulting and experiential marketing services.

Experience

Deeper Connections

If experiences help you connect, social impact closes the loop and widens your net. Gen Z and Millennials want festivals and brands to solve problems and elevate communities. Our services deliver social impact marketing, cause marketing and corporate social responsibility (CSR) solutions.
Sierra Nevada, Forecastle Foundation :::25,000 reached

Identify

We believe festivals and brands can better communities. We work to identify nonprofit partnerships that reach beyond one-dimensional, transactional relationships to impactful, long-term partnerships. There’s power in pairs and we remove the boundaries and unlock potential.

Strategize

Our strategy builds a bridge that builds a new brand. It implements learnings from decades of experience in social impact marketing, cause marketing, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). We dive deeper, reach further, and unearth a common currency that betters lives and elevates communities.

Architect

Once the nonprofit partnership is identified, we design a corporate philanthropy structural blueprint that charts the way to a blue ocean of opportunity - new customers for the business, new verticals for the nonprofit. You now have a social impact platform to reach unreachables, and engage them in a deep, meaningful way.

Implement

With the match made and plan in place, it’s time to implement our social impact blueprint. Successful nonprofit partnerships create value-generating verticals, dynamic growth opportunities, and brand superfans you will find additive to your PR, Marketing Sales and corporate social responsibility (CSR) plans.

Manage

The focus now turns to managing and optimizing, solving the problems of today and foreshadowing the ones of tomorrow. Successful nonprofit partnerships are catalytic to both parties. They provide real world utility, tackling problems our increasingly polarized planet cannot. This is what social impact is all about.

Measure

We measure your social impact in real time, providing you with the metrics that matter, so you know the nonprofit partnership is working and can promote it internally and externally through cause marketing and social impact marketing channels.

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Case Studies

Successful nonprofit partnerships are about designing an enduring relationship that delivers dynamic value to both parties and social impact to their communities. With the nonprofit partnerships below, we designed a successful cause marketing framework to help businesses reach new customers and nonprofits achieve new revenue verticals.

Four Roses and Forecastle Foundation craft a business nonprofit corporate partnership
Business NonProfit Partnership :::Four Roses, Forecastle Foundation

Bourbon Cares

Mission:

Introduce 30,000 new customers to Kentucky Bourbon Trail brands, while providing a new revenue vertical for the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust to protect critical Kentucky wildlands.

Strategy:

Design an engaging experiential marketing activation that combines bourbon brands with national touring bands inside the Forecastle Festival. Design a “turn-of-the-century rickhouse meets prohibition-era speakeasy” and invite bands to sample single-barrel selections from their favorite bourbon brands. Pair Woodford Reserve, Four Roses, Old Forester, Heaven Hill and Wild Turkey with artists like Alabama Shakes, My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Spoon, and more, with proceeds going to purchase critical watersheds and old-growth forests in Eastern Kentucky.

Results:

The participating brands received a powerful PR and social impact marketing alignment with popular national artists, new customers and retail sales (at no cost, other than allocating a single-barrel to the program, paid for by the concessionaire). Kentucky Natural Lands Trust raised thousands to protect critical watersheds and wildlands corridors. For the festival, an impactful experiential marketing activation was born, which grew from 900 to 15,000 square ft, and was hailed as “Bourbon’s Most Important Festival” by Wall Street Journal best-selling author Fred Minnick.

Experience It
Sierra Nevada’s Chantey IPA - a business nonprofit partnership and experiential marketing campaign with Forecastle Foundation
Business NonProfit Partnership :::Chantey IPA

Sierra Nevada

Mission:

Inspired by the Sierra Nevada mountain range, craft a new product line that protects the world’s most breathtaking environments.

Strategy:

Pair Sierra Nevada with The Forecastle Foundation. Under the guidance of Steve Grossman (brother of Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman) craft a limited-edition, community-centric expression with a powerful corporate philanthropy arm. Prior to product launch, design a multi-tiered, on and off-premise PR, cause marketing and retail strategy to build anticipation and maximize its social impact. Following the campaign, debut the product before 400 media outlets and 75,000 fans at Forecastle Festival - its unique, collaborative story told at each serving location.

Results:

The social Impact marketing campaign rewarded Sierra Nevada and its key accounts with exclusive product, earned media, new customers, sales and on-site engagements with an audience it may not have otherwise reached. For the Foundation, the campaign raised thousands to protect critical wildlife habitats from Argentina to Indonesia, Belize to Florida.

Experience It
Heine Brothers and Forecastle Foundation partner with Whole Foods to forge corporate partnerships with nonprofits
Business NonProfit Partnership :::Kentucky Dream

Whole Foods & Heine Brothers

Mission:

Develop a new coffee blend that attracts new customers to Whole Foods and Heine Brothers, while supporting indigenous Central American communities while protecting highly-threatened, biodiversity habitats in Kentucky.

Strategy:

Pair national retailer Whole Foods with local retailer Heine Brothers on a unique, proprietary, community giveback blend titled “Kentucky Dream.” Leverage Heine Brother’s extensive grower relationships in Central America, while partnering with cause marketing and corporate philanthropy team at Whole Foods to maximum awareness. Launch a targeted PR & cause marketing campaign across retail and non-profit channels to share the story and reach new customers in the hyper-competitive coffee and grocery segments.

Results:

Thousands of new customers patronized Whole Foods following a press conference announcing corporate partnerships with nonprofits and the products local/global focus. For independent coffee purveyor Heine Brothers Coffee, a new level of customer engagement was reached, reinforcing its commitment to the communities in which it operates, keeping its product line fresh and relevant, and loyal customers invigorated. For the Forecastle Foundation, a new revenue stream to protect Kentucky’s Green River and Pine Mountain Wildlands Corridor.

Experience It
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Why It Works

GEN Z AND MILLENNIALS

Research shows Gen Z and Millennials are strongly motivated to support brands driven by purpose and causes greater than self-interests. Successful corporate charity partnerships are less transactional and one-dimensional, and more enduring, dynamic and mutually beneficial.

BIGGER THAN BRANDING

Smile like you mean it. If you want customers to wear your brand like a badge, think past your brand. Solve a problem. Improve a life. Enhance a community. Successful corporate partnerships with nonprofits accomplish this and so much more.

EXPERIENCE MATTERS

For nearly twenty years, we designed corporate partnerships with nonprofits seeking an impactful festival integration. Strategically tied to priorities of each company, we know what it takes to artfully architect successful brand partnerships.

BUILD THE BRIDGE

We identify, design, and deploy impactful nonprofit partnerships that implement cause marketing, social impact marketing, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) solutions to reach broader networks, new customer segments, new revenue verticals, PR and MKTG value and more. Together we help bridge the business nonprofit divide.

"A gifted entrepreneur and trendsetter in our business and philanthropic community, JK has an engaging way of bringing people together to support one another in impactful and inspiring ways. His creative and collaborative approach is meaningful and methodical, unlocking intrinsic value and inventive solutions."

:: Rep. John Yarmuth | Chairman of the US House Budget Committee
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