Part 1: Hatching an Idea for the First Cell Phone Recycling Pick-Up Campaign

For the next few weeks, I will be blogging about a new Cellular Recycler campaign with Papa John's Pizza. Here is my first post about the idea behind the campaign.



Shortly after the 2007 NFL football season, I was listening to Sports Radio 950 the fan (now FM 104.3). Now, I have never done radio advertising and we definitely haven’t done it for Cellular Recycler. But, as I was listening, I thought it might be a good venue for letting soccer moms and football dads out there know that there was a new fundraising option instead of the every day popcorn and Christmas wreath sales that both kids and parents (and their parents' officemates)have to endure. The station was nice enough to invite us down to talk about a possible partnership. Admittedly, I didn’t know exactly what we were after, except that I felt it was time to take cell phone recycling to the people through a more widespread public campaign.

Although it was fun to see Scott Hastings and Alfred Williams doing their radio show, it wasn’t a great fit initially. We found out pretty quickly that 90% of their listeners were male. (You might say ‘duh’, but remember that at the time we were new to the whole radio advertising thing.) From our experience of building ground floor collection campaigns with companies like the American Cancer Society, we knew that we really needed to communicate with women in order to have a successful campaign. (Why? Honestly, I don’t know, but I plan to explore this in a future post.) Bottom line – sports radio was definitely not the right medium to test this “widespread public campaign” concept. Nonetheless, we left the meeting with confidence because at least we tried, failed, and learned from the experience.

It turned out that all wasn’t lost because Lincoln Financial Media, owner of 950 The Fan, also owns the country pop station KYGO, and it has a very solid and faithful base of female listeners. Our account rep had taken the cell phone recycling and fundraising concept to one of the station’s clients, Papa John’s Pizza. All of a sudden, we had a huge company like Papa John’s Pizza that was looking for an environmental edge and loved being the first with a message like this to its customers.

In the past, our team has fought and fought to get out cell phone recycling kits to business and non-profits, place recycling bins in retail stores, and train employees at wireless carriers about recycling. But this idea was truly different. This would be an opportunity for us to partner with a great company, promote the program to the general public, offer people a way to recycle their electronics, and raise money for a great cause. Papa Johns Pizza was even willing to offer its customers free breadsticks for their donation and use the program to fundraise for one of Papa John’s charitable partners, the USO.



Given what’s going on with the economy and how likely charitable organizations are to suffer, everything just seemed to click. Within three hours, our teams had hashed out a plan and set the wheels in motion for the first pick-up campaign for cell phone recycling. And at Cellular Recycler, we finally had a chance to take a campaign directly to the people.



Stay tuned – next I’ll talk about how we designed the collection program.