Support Your Local Economy During a Crisis With These Tips (Part 2)
Supporting your local economy isn’t just about helping the people and businesses around you. It also means driving your business forward and changing the world of business for the better. This is the second part of the previous article. If you haven’t read it yet, click this link before reading this list.
1. Donate items instead of throwing them
As mentioned in part 1 of this article, it’s nice to redecorate your office or home and support local craftsmen and artists through buying their goods. But in that activity, you’ll need to discard some of your stuff out.
Instead of throwing them out to the dumpster, you can donate them to charity. For example, if you’re changing your office table, you can send that to startup businesses that are struggling to afford office supplies.
The same goes for your bed and other extra clothing, you can donate those to homeless shelters in need. After donating, introduce yourself and your business then open up opportunities for partnership. You can also avail of a charitable donation tax deduction.
2. Share local restaurant menus on social media
Buying takeout from struggling local restaurants to treat your team is good. But you know what’s better? Letting your friends know about delicious foods you’ve bought from those restaurants on social media. Share your reviews as well. To make your review fair, offer constructive criticism.
Fair reviews help the people who come across your shared post make a sound buying decision as well as giving the restaurant ideas for improvement. And don’t forget to use the hashtag: #supportlocal.
3. Donate to educational organizations
Every human life is essential, and it’s even more valuable for the greater good of humanity if everyone attended school. Educated and working people contribute to society by earning wages and spending those wages as living costs.
That spending in turn feeds the economy and keeps it running. As the saying goes: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” But in this case, send people to school through sponsoring scholarships.
When these people graduate, they’ll work jobs, start businesses, or become legislators and feed the entire community. Some of these graduates can even become your business partners or part of your future team!
They’ll be loyal to your business goals as a sign of gratitude for teaching them how to fish.
4. Keep on availing of maintenance services
Maintenance services such as automobile shops, house cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, and house repair have lost their business demand during the pandemic. This is because everyone is at home with more time and information available to perform maintenance themselves.
With people working in these sectors losing their jobs, there will be an increase in crime rates and everybody suffers. If you can afford to hire someone else to do maintenance work for you, by all means, do it.
5. Tip service crews
Being a restaurant or bar service crew is one of the hardest jobs in the industry. The low wages cannot compensate for the stress caused by some irate customers. And mostly they get berated for the mistakes of their coworkers.
If you have extra money, tip them 15 to 25% of your bill. If your bill isn’t that much and you don’t have a lot of extra money, a dollar is okay. If you have a lot to spare and feel generous, $5 is more than enough. Generosity is one of the best ways to build a good business PR.
This two-part article was inspired by a quote from the 2007 film Evan Almighty: “How do we change the world? One act of random kindness (A.R.K.)” - God (Morgan Freeman)
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