Agency Web Assistant - Idea

Community Auction for Charity

An excellent idea to promote your agency in a medium sized community is to create a community holiday auction for charity using your web site.

This promotion is best done in the fall before the holidays.

The Idea:

Allow members of the community to bid on items on your website donated by community businesses and the money generated from the highest bids is donated to a local community charity.

How It Works:

As an insurance agency you have access to many businesses in your community. Those you insure and some you don't. Approach businesses with the idea of donating an item that can be bid on to raise money for charity.

Let the business know that they will be credited on your web site for donating the item. The benefit for the business is of course free advertising exposure in the community.

Once you have received enough donations post the items on your web site. Include a picture if necessary but also include the business that donated the item along with a link to their web site if they have one.

With each item give an e-mail address where bids can be sent. You may also want to consider giving anonymity to bidders. Keep the bids updated every few days by posting the highest bid next to the item on your site.

Creating Exposure

Before you spend a lot of time creating the program make sure that your local media will support the effort by donating public service type advertising space.

The advertisements should indicate that the prospective visitors log on to www.youragency.com and click on the "Holiday Auction" link.

Benefits

The benefits of this type of promotion;

• Increased traffic to your web site
• Increased exposure of your agency in the community
• A chance to visit with existing business clients.
• The opportunity to approach business prospects without the usual sales pressures.