Holiday shopping campaigns besides “Shop Small”

Small Business Saturday and its Shop Small slogan get a lot of attention, but they aren’t the only holiday shopping project small town businesses can join for more buzz this season.

Shift Your Shopping

Shift Your Shopping is a theme you can adopt for any local shopping campaign. The emphasis is on shifting more of your shopping dollars to local stores. You can download graphics and logos to use in your local campaign. You aren’t restricted to any specific days or weeks, so you can use the theme all season.

Shift Your Shopping is a cooperative effort spearheaded by our friends at the AMIBA – American Independent Business Alliance. The website has been only partially updated for 2014, but don’t let that stop you. You can still use the graphics, logos and ideas you’ll find at the site.

Print the downloadable poster for your store.
Use the Shift Your Shopping Logo in your ads and online.
Put the audio PSAs on your local radio station. (You can pay the station and make them ads.)
Get your chamber or other local organization to add the logo to their campaign.
Chamber not gonna happen? Grab one other local business owner, and make a mini-campaign together.

Shop For Good

An offshoot from the Shift Your Shopping project is called Shop For Good. Participating merchants agree to donate a portion of sales on days they choose, but instead of it all going to one cause, each customer can designate a local cause to benefit. Actor Kevin Bacon is a big supporter and created fun media you can customize for your business, like campy videos. Bacon’s participation is drawing other celebrities to participate also.

It’s a fun way to add a cause component to shopping and to keep more of that benefit local.

UPDATE 11-18: Simplify the Holidays

Simplify the Holidays is not a shopping campaign. It’s more of an anti-shopping campaign, but I think it is a natural fit for small towns. Get the emphasis off of buying more stuff at major national retailers, and put more emphasis on family and community. That benefits locally-owned stores that are more likely to supply the things you need as a family. And we all benefit when our small towns build a stronger sense of community.

UPDATE 11-19: Shop the Neighbourhood

Thanks to my friend Glenda Watson-Hyatt for pointing out this one. Shop the Neighbourhood is a Canada-based event that seems to coincide with Small Business Saturday in the US, so it’s November 29 this year. The main sponsor seems to be Yellow Pages, and it seems to be drawing wide support.
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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.