How VaynerX activated a World Kindness Day campaign with gifts
About VaynerX
VaynerX is a contemporary global creative and media agency building brands with a heart-centered, human-centric, wildly creative approach. To celebrate and activate their values, each year on November 13th the team finds new ways to acknowledge and promote World Kindness Day.
Last year, the VaynerX team partnered with Loop & Tie to spread Random Acts of Kindness around the world—from New York City and Los Angeles to London and Singapore.
“Real kindness is giving without expectation.” -Gary V
The VaynerMedia team knows one thing to be fundamentally true: if you navigate life giving just to get something in return, you’ll be gravely disappointed.
As their founder and CEO, Gary Vaynerchuck puts it, “When you do something with no expectation in return, with no obvious short term ROI, there’s always far greater return.”
As a way to amplify kindness as a continued practice, each year the team at VaynerX finds a creative way to celebrate World Kindness Day - which also happens to be Gary’s birthday.
Delivering Random Acts of Kindness
On November 13th, 2023, the VaynerX team sat down with Team Loop & Tie to figure out a way to make this year’s campaign ignite passion and inspiration. The campaign needed activate each of the VaynerX offices around the world and turn talk about kindness into action.
Their CMO, Andrea Sullivan shared, “Our goals for World Kindness Day was to make our community feel special around the world. Previously, our gifting strategies were much more U.S.-centric and we wanted to appeal to the different needs around the world. What we loved about Loop & Tie was that they celebrated our values system. We could support either philanthropic organizations or send physical gifts from small businesses.
Knowing that they wanted to use gifts as part of the activation, the Loop & Tie and VaynorX Teams considered ways to spread kindness through giving. From our idation, came a campaign where unsuspecting people on the streets of New York, Tokyo, and Mexico City would be given a gift for absolutely no reason other than it was a kind thing to do. Thus, the Random Acts of Kindness campaign was born.
“It’s so Vayner. Leave it to Loop & Tie to do something different. I feel like you’re the best kept secret in many ways,” says Andrea.
Taking Kindness to the Streets
As November 13th came, members of the VaynerX team took their values of kindness to the masses - quite literally. Using small cards with a QR code, the team found folks in their community and gave them each a free gift. The impact was immediate. Folks loved the experience.
One of the unsuspecting recipients of a Random Act of Kindness shared, “The way I see it, if you’re kind to someone if makes them feel better and it passes on.”
Here are some of the Random Acts of Kindness each team was able to share:
“We’d never seen any kind of gifting program like this before. It answered all of our needs,” says Andrea. “Previously, we’d done a lot of physical gifts and we felt there wasn’t flexibility in what people could choose. Additionally, it was incredibly difficult to activate our gifting programs because of the time and resources it required to bring it all to life. All of that energy only to not have the impact we wanted.”
“Loop & Tie has allowed us to improve not only our gifting, but our approach to giving. It’s taught our organization to think about a new approach and not just fall into the industry trap of gifting just to give. We now focus on making people feel special all year long.”
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