WZZM MOBILIZES KIDS FOR TOYS FOR TOTS

With rising oil prices and an uncertain auto industry, Michigan residents know all about a tough economy. But that’s not going to get in the way of their holiday generosity. Not if Gannett’s WZZM has anything to say about it. And it does.

For more than 15 years, WZZM’s Toys for Tots campaign has continually broken its previous record for the number of gifts it provides to local needy families. Already it’s clear that this year will be no exception.

“When the economy worsens, we have to work harder,” says WZZM General Manager Janet Mason. “We just have to get more creative and passionate about the plea in order to get people to give.” 

Mason’s casual confidence in her staff and her viewers is well-founded. She’s been improving the Toys for Tots campaign since Gannett bought the station 10 years ago.

“When I got here in ’97, it was a very small campaign,” recalls Mason. “It raised about 9,000 toys. We immediately raised the goal to 20,000, then collected 23,000.”

And to make sure viewers could see the results of their growing generosity, the station assembled two Toy Mountains—first in the newsroom, then in an adjacent studio to handle the overflow.

Community Relations Director Catherine Behrendt, a 20-year WZZM veteran, has witnessed the growth first-hand. “People got excited by the Toy Mountains because they could see the toys grow. But by the second year, toys were filling the hallways and people’s offices. In fact, the Toys for Tots people became concerned that viewers would think there were too many toys.”

And Toys for Tots is one national charity you don’t want to upset. “Almost everyone conducting a Toys for Tots program has a relationship to the U.S. Marine Corps,” says William Grein, VP of marketing and development of the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation. “They’re Marines on active duty, Marine reservists or a retired or former Marine.” 

Toys for Tots has 603 local coordinators who generate all kinds of community support, none more important than the media partnerships, says Grein.

“TV stations have really been the backbone of our program,” he says. “We don’t spend dollars buying space or airtime. We feel that the dollars we raise should go directly towards purchasing gifts for needy children. So we rely on stations to build awareness.”

At WZZM, they’ve raised “building awareness” to an art form. After the Toy Mountains outgrew the facilities, they expanded both the campaign and the storage space to embrace local schools. And so was born the School Spirit Challenge.

Says Behrendt: “We got schools to … compete with other schools to see who could collect the most toys. We’ve had preschools all the way through universities hold campaigns on campus and that effort alone has collected upwards of 25,000-26,000 toys each year.”

It soon became a GrandRapids holiday tradition for families to catch WZZM’s Morning News to see how their school is performing on the Spirit Meter.

“It’s not a true competition because obviously a university has way more people than an elementary school,” says Mason. “But schools don’t seem to care. They just want to grow their numbers from last year. Finally, we did come up with a little trophy because schools kept saying, ‘Well, we won, what do we get?’” 

The real honor is bestowed on the last day of the campaign when every participating school sends representative kids to present their totals on the air. “On that day our parking lot is loaded with school busses and school kids and mounds and mounds of toys,” says Behrendt.

Mason thinks it’s smart to make students the driving force behind the region’s toy collection. “The kids learn a valuable lesson about what it means to be generous and be part of a larger community. They understand that thanks to their efforts, other kids are getting the holiday toys they need and deserve.”

Behrendt traces the success of the School Spirit Challenge to Mason’s early decision to expand the campaign geographically.

“There are a lot of other Toys for Tots projects in each county,” Behrendt says. “We invited them to join forces and coordinate so that our on-air campaign could benefit all of the counties.”

Today, what was formerly a Grand Rapids campaign encompasses six West Michigan counties. The WZZM Web site displays the dozens of donation locations for each county. This neat bit of organizational inspiration earned the Grand Rapids Toys for Tots special honors from the national organization.

Not surprisingly, WZZM’s advertisers are more than happy to bask in the glow of this winning effort. And WZZM and the Marines welcome their participation, says Mason.

“We naturally donate a lot of free airtime to promote the campaign, but paid sponsors allow us to run messages in places where there’s never airtime just sitting around. It puts the campaign in front of primetime viewers, in our newscast and really gets the message out there.”

“There are different levels of sponsorship. Fifth Third Bank is the title sponsor,” adds Behrendt. Indeed, there are dozens of Fifth Third Bank branches listed as donation points in the county-by-county Web pages.

But all of the advertisers encourage people to bring their donated toys right to their locations,” says Behrendt.

The Michigan Toys For Tots campaign is especially grateful for all the volunteer help at a time when entire Marine Reserve units have been deployed to Iraq and elsewhere.

This year there’s also the added distraction of parental worries about unsafe toys—concerns well-addressed by special training classes conducted by national Toys for Tots officials (and well-covered by WZZM news).

The School Spirit Challenge is scheduled to wrap up on the WZZM Morning News on Friday, Dec 7. Why so early? Because the Toys for Tots people need time to assemble, sort and categorize the toys by age and gender.

“One of the great things about growing the campaign is that toys are no longer just pre-selected and handed to the parents,” says Mason. “The parents are now given choices of toys. Now Toys for Tots has enough toys to set up the distribution sites more like store aisles.”

In other words, thanks to WZZM viewers, parents who may not be able to buy gifts this Christmas, can take pleasure in actively selecting their children’s toys.

Even if you already have a different holiday promotion, Toys for Tots makes it easy for stations to help with a mini-campaign. And they’ll welcome your help. If not this year, then next. For more information, just visit the www.toysfortots.org Web site and look up your local community coordinator.

Every Monday Market Share by Arthur Greenwald showcases another winning station sales and marketing promotion. So what’s going on at your station promotion-wise, sales-wise and marketing-wise? There’s a three wise men joke in there somewhere. While we search for it, let us know what you’re up to. Write to Arthur at greenwald@tvnewsday.com.