Reply for All: A Simple Solution to Big Problems

The Body Shop is always looking for interesting ways to support our values and spread the message of conservation and care. That’s why we are helping to sponsor Reply For All, a service that allows you to sign up for a cause of your choice from a list provided and attach a signature to your email letting all your contacts know about the cause you are supporting. I spoke recently with Enmi Kendall, the founder of Reply For All, and she explained some of the great ways the service helps nonprofits and other charitable organizations.

• Can you tell us a little about Reply For All?

Reply For All is aiming to do a very simple thing, which is to allow users to select a cause of their choice, and showcase their support for that cause in all their outgoing email messages. And the premise is this: all of us have our favorite causes, we have interest in supporting them, both through our personal support and writing checks, donating financially, but really, we don’t have to be supporting that cause just financially.

The notion of Reply for All is “how do you leverage a user’s entire base of assets?” Meaning their enthusiasm and excitement and to support that cause with their entire network of relationships, the friends and family they reach in turn and let them translate those relationships into a way they can support a cause. It doesn’t have to be just about writing a check, it can be about leveraging relationships, too. In short, Reply for All is a way for users to support a cause of their choice, something that is important to them, something that they really believe in and that they want to help advocate for, and I believe the only real sustainable way of doing that is by embedding that into something you do everyday anyway. In our case it’s about leveraging the emails you send to your friends and family.

• What are some of the causes you’re supporting?

Right now there are eight causes for the user to choose from, and they are efforts to defend animal rights, which is a popular one amongst our existing supporters; fight global warming, end world poverty, and some other popular ones include to stop global AIDS as well as provide educational resources. In total there are eight, but those rank among the top. We have also gone through a thorough due-diligence process to explore which non-profits should be representing each cause.

The model is as follows: a brand sponsor, like The Body Shop, sponsors Reply for All, Reply for All shares that revenue with the non-profits. The allocation across the non-profits is not done or decided by Reply for All in a top-down fashion, it’s actually decided by the users themselves. So, in essence, the users are voting for where the donations should go with their actual cause selections. The more users we have on board, the more donations will go to all causes. We’ve tried to choose non-profits who have a strong direct delivery of services and goods component. Some non-profits are engaged in creating awareness, and while they play a very important role, we want non-profits who can help directly.

• What’s the impact been like so far?

We launched on August 29th, and up until now its been about getting that core group of supporters, that group who is going to help us seed it and send it out into the world, so to speak, and what that has meant for us is that we’ve done many different levels of outreach. One has been to engage with student clubs and organizations on campuses where there’s a strong values alignment, so you can imagine for example, there are campus clubs who are thinking about sustainable businesses or environmental actions on campus. There was a big push on the early part of our campaign to engage with those clubs and get those students aware of the product. The signatures can be catered and specialized to suit the needs of individual clubs, so the sender can not only press cause support, but for support of their club or organization specifically, too.

• Are there any other incentives that users can expect from Reply for All?

The number one reason users are joining Reply for All is to support the causes that they believe in, and beyond that there are other benefits that have been made possible by the generosity of our sponsors. The Body Shop, in particular has been really kind and generous in extending some great gifts that we can share with our most active supporters. So right now we have some of the bath products that we’re going to be packaging with a Reply for All organic cotton American Apparel t-shirt which is super cute and we’re going to be packing those up for those who have at least one impact unit, meaning they’ve starting using the signatures. They’ll be eligible for that package for the next six weeks, and we’re very excited about that. It’s more of a “thank you” than an incentive, per se, because the incentive is about the message itself.

You can check out more information on ReplyforAll.com, or check out their blog to get a peek behind the scenes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under The Body Shop, The Body Shop Values & Campaigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.