Welcome to another Monday Morning Coffee. If you joined us last week for our foray into local business success, you had the privilege of exploring the social media success of Collision Repair Specialists. We are having a great time contacting the businesses we want to cover and then highlighting something they are doing right.

One local organization, the United Way of Greater St. Joseph, does a lot of things right. They work tirelessly to improve our local community, focusing on health, education and financial stability, supporting such agencies as Family Guidance Center, Boy Scouts of America, the YWCA and many others.
While the local efforts of this non-profit organization are worth mentioning on their own, it is the organization’s recently-launched Facebook campaign that caught our attention. The United Way wanted to start driving more traffic – and subsequently more Likes – to its Facebook page.

The organization’s Marketing Director, Tammy Bergland, knew that free give-aways were always a successful perk, but the United Way doesn’t have a large budget for freebies. Fortunately, Tammy and her Marketing Committee came up with a better idea – promote traffic to the United Way Facebook page and support literacy at the same time.

The United Way will explore a number of different opportunities as a means for distributing books to children that can benefit from book ownership. Dubbed the “Likes for Books Campaign”, this latest initiative is just one example of how the organization gets involved, both socially and with the community, to make a measureable difference.

United Way President Kylee Strough said it perfectly, “This promotion just made sense to us because helping our community and involving our community are always linked.”

The United Way has come up with the perfect mix of combining social media initiatives with its own mission to improve the lives of children in this community. And, it’s working. The organization’s Facebook page likes continue to grow and books continue to be donated.

If you’re ready to get involved and make a difference for your community, visit the United Way’s Facebook page and click the “Like” button. It’s that easy to ensure a great book gets into the hands of a child who will benefit from owning his or her own book.

Time is limited – this promotion ends June 24^th. To get involved, visit http://www.facebook.com/UnitedWayofGreaterStJoseph