The Giving Loop: What Actually Happened When We Ran It with Kisses for Kyle
I own a chimney and fireplace company in Bucks County. We're good at flue liners and gas inserts. We were not good at marketing. For years my plan was the same as every other shop's: run some ads, ask for reviews, hope the phone rings. It worked well enough, and I hated it. Every ad looked like every other ad. Nothing about it said who we were.
Meanwhile, we had things most local charities would love and can't afford: box trucks, dollies, strong backs, and a crew that's on the road all day anyway. At some point it clicked: the most useful thing my company could give away wasn't a check. It was logistics. So we built a simple system around that idea and gave it a name: the Giving Loop. Once a quarter, our community nominates a local charity, we build a real relationship with them, our customers trigger donations by tagging us in their own posts, we volunteer together, and we close the loop with a public donation. Then we start again.
This is the write-up of the first time we ran it.
The nomination post
The first step still feels strange to people, so I'll be honest about it: I didn't pick the charity. I posted from my personal profile (not the business page) in a couple of local community groups online. Something like: "Hey everyone, we want to partner with a local charity this season. We've got trucks, tools, and a team ready to help. Any suggestions or connections?" Then I put the phone in my pocket and went back to work.
When I checked that night, the thread had taken off. Neighbors were tagging charities, tagging directors, telling stories about organizations that had helped their families. One name kept coming up: Kisses for Kyle, a local charity that supports families with children battling cancer. I went back into the thread, thanked every single person by name, and announced the pick. That one thread did more for how people saw my company than anything I had ever paid for.
Coffee first, campaign second
Before anything went public, I had coffee with their director. Thirty minutes, no agenda except one question: "How can we help?" I walked in expecting to talk about a donation amount. What they actually needed was help moving things. Donated gifts come in from all over. Collecting them, sorting them, storing them, and getting them to families is a real operations problem, and nonprofits don't have fleets.
We do. So our trucks and our crew managed and delivered donated gifts across the area. Delivery days were the best days of the whole campaign. We loaded the box truck the way we load for a big install (checklist, route order, straps), except the manifest was gifts for kids. The guys wore their company shirts, I posted photos in real time, and nobody had to fake anything. It was our actual crew doing actual work, pointed at something other than revenue for a day.
The $3 tag
The engine of the campaign was one sentence, said at every job: "If you tag us and mention Kisses for Kyle, we'll donate $3 in your honor at the end of the campaign." We printed cards with the same line and left one at every service call.
Here's why it works. Nobody shares a chimney company for fun. But give a customer a reason that helps a kid, and they will, happily. Every tag put our name in front of that customer's friends and neighbors, attached to something that mattered, in their words, not mine.
At the end of the campaign we counted the tags, announced the total, and made the donation publicly: photo of the check, a final update in the original nomination thread, every tagger thanked. Then we asked the community to pick the next partner. That's the loop.
The month the numbers moved
Here's the part everyone asks about. The month the campaign ran, our revenue was up 15%.
I want to be straight about what that number is and isn't. It's one campaign, one company, and the company was mine. One data point. I can't hand you a clean study separating the campaign from seasonality or plain luck, and I won't pretend otherwise. Your results will vary. What I can tell you is what I saw up close: more calls that started with "I saw your post," customers who already trusted us before we rang the doorbell, and a crew that was proud of where they worked. I'll take that trade every quarter.
What I'd do differently
- Print the cards in week one. We were mid-campaign before every truck had them, and the tags picked up noticeably once they did.
- Practice the script with the techs. The first week, most of my guys forgot to say it. One five-minute run-through at the morning meeting fixed that.
- Keep the tally somewhere real. I was counting tags in my phone notes. Use a spreadsheet from day one, because people will ask for the number.
- Write the charity's co-post for them. Nonprofits are stretched thin. When I finally sent a ready-to-paste post with photos, it went up the same day.
- Take more photos on delivery day. The candid shots of the crew were the most shared thing we posted all quarter. I wish we had twice as many.
Run it yourself
The whole system is written up as the Giving Loop Playbook: all 17 steps, every script word for word, the card wording, and the compliance guardrails for running a charity promotion the right way, spelled out step by step. It comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee, and pricing is straightforward: I'll give it to you on the call, no games. If you want the story and the shape of it first, the free primer covers exactly that. And if you'd rather have the system installed in your business than build it yourself, that's a thing I do. But start with the primer. It'll tell you whether this fits.