For example.
You own a flower shop. You find out through one of your customers that the retirement home in your neighborhood is a having a gardening day.
You know that having representation at that event will go towards good will, but you do not have the time nor employee to spare. You ask the customer if they would go down to lend a hand. That customer says, "sure."
A week later, the customer comes back and says, "hey, that was a lot of fun."
This is an example of but one engagement that is easy to track.
Imagine you sponsor a garden club. The deal with the club is that club members are afforded a 20% discount off retail purchases. Only a handful of members actually do any community work. Leadership and those members really passionate are the only ones that show up consistently, but everyone regardless of contribution gets the same discount.
We say: "stop doing that!"
Afford a basic club member a modest 5% discount. Use our software to manage and reward the activity of active and engaged club member by rewarding them with purchasing incentives for their volunteer work.
We understand that you've worked hard to build your own niche in your market. You have a competitive advantage of one sort or another. You may be the only flower shop in town or not.
In either situation, what is not happening is a quantification and measurement of your efforts in your community. Broadly, a portion of your efforts are part of marketing - plainly - really hard to quantify let alone affirm of any conversion or ROI.
With luck, you build good will in your community. Smarter, you can communicate what's going on in your community to your vendors That would likely support your outreach with incentives of their own if they only knew.
If industry - your vendors - know of what you are doing - where you are investing in your community in order to grow your community, it makes sense for your vendors to assist you.
If vendors can discern that volunteering on gardening day at the retirement home increase sales in your community by .01%, when national markets are considered by the vendors, that .01% could mean an in crease in millions of dollars for the industry at large.
But to realize those increase, those vendors need to invest in you. Not necessarily in direct dollars - but in purchasing incentives and discounts for your inventory purchases.s
Velogo Software Company has come to be in order to leverage the good will and loyalty of retail customers.
The original concepts and principles originated nearly twenty-five years ago.
Our founder began an odyssey of volunteering within a community that served a personal passion.
While organizing a small local organization, promoting events, engaging in community advocacy, and recruiting members (more accurately consumers that buy goods and services), our founder realized that the members had an under appreciate characteristic: they volunteered in the communities where they are are passionate.
They also had the unfortunate characteristic of finding new passions after a few years. This departure would lead to a loss of knowledge and experience to pass along to the next volunteer. And so on and so on. Nothing would really change. And further, as society became more complex, our demands for leisure time and disposable income further constrained growth.
The question became: how can awareness lead to growth for our community?
Not too long there after, it became apparent, that without quantifiable data, it was going to be very hard to shift societal perceptions about community activism unless the catalyst was economic the benefit for the various stakeholders within a market vertical – from OEM manufacturers to end retailers.
And further, it became apparent that while managed activities would benefit communities, retailers and vendors, someone had to manage those activities consistently in order to make a difference.
Retailers largely do not have the resources to do the heavy lifting without help (volunteerism and/or donations and /or support from industry) as allocating resources: time, capital, and focus, on engaging with community have nebulous returns at best.
The question retailers and industry becomes: Where is my return on investment?
And so the idea of rewarding volunteerism, managed by retailers, paid for by vendors was born, emerged from the idea of connecting and engaging with community in a sustainable way that rewards business activity and grows the community.
But that's not the end of the story. With today's advances with technology, conceptually, it's relatively easy to capture and then quantify the data necessary to make informed decisions, and thus encourage behavior that supports community and profit.
This is a big shift in thinking about how business relates to community. Where previously, the business community might look as community engagement as a necessary evil – a loss leader – now, with performance and consumption data, that loss leader strategy has the potential to be measured, strategically evaluated, based on relevant data, for it's investment potential.
Subsequently, distributed investment capital could return profit.
And so, the idea of developing a software that integrates seamlessly into retailers Point of Sale t has emerged to make the most sense.
Some of the best retailers have a very personal relationship with their customers. These retailers communicate well to their customers about promotions via email, sms, and other promotional methods.
Many Point of Sale systems already integrate a variety of modules to better serve their customer. What these integrations are lacking is a method to solicit volunteerism among their customers, measure the performance of a broadcasted engagement. Still, it's very hard to quantify outcomes in a measurable way.
The founder's secret sauce is to aggregate that data among a number of retailers in many communities, and then make available that data to OEM for anonymous analysis.
This data can them be objectively assessed to justify investment back to community through those retailers in terms of purchasing points off regular and/or season inventory purchases.
So in short: volunteers do the work in the area of their passion, rewarded for their volunteerism by their local business, who are subsequently rewarded by industry.
The outcome is a win-win-win.: the community benefits, the local business has more revenue, and OEM potentially has growth that can be scaled intelligently.
We would love to hear from you.
Feel free to reach out using the below details.
Address: Virtual Office, United States
hours: Virtual Office Hours
phone: (307) 264-0150
Email: velogosoftware@gmail.com
We want you to know right up front that the Velogo Software Project has many hurdles to over-come, not withstanding, a new way to think about retail commerce, community engagement, and industry investment.
We want to incentivize customers, end-retail, and OEM to invest in community.