Seasonality Countdown: Are You Involved In Your Community?

Wealth isn’t always measured in dollar signs. We each have time, talent, and creativity,
all of which can be powerful forces for positive change.
Share your blessings in whatever form they come and to whatever level you have been blessed.
Jon M. Huntsman

​by Skip Cohen

Labor Day is just a week away, and with it, the soft side of seasonality starts to ramp up. Opportunities abound for additional business as homecoming and holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Chanukah come up on the calendar. It's also a time to crank up the volume if you're marketing targets are seniors and family portraiture.

But there's one more aspect of seasonality that's important for your involvement: now is the time to get your name out there by being involved in your community. To start, with kids back in school, Mom's got more time online, and she's starting to think about holiday gifts and events. The timing is perfect for you to be more active in supporting nonprofits in your area, and using social media to help spread the word.

Here are a few ideas, just in case you're wrestling with how to get more involved:

• Get involved with a local fund-raiser. Whether it involves your camera or not doesn't matter. You need to be involved, and your community needs to know you're not just another retailer or service provider, but an active supporter.
• Look for local events: For example, what's coming up in your community that's a fund-raising event?  
• Get to know the president of the PTA for any of the schools. How about portraits instead of a bake sale to raise money this year? What events are they sponsoring that might need to be documented?
• Every high school sports team, band, yearbook, and chorus are looking for new ways to raise money, and you've got the gear and the know-how.  How about working with them to create a new idea for fund-raising beyond hot dog sales at the games?
• Not every show of support needs to involve photography. Even if you're just helping the Boosters Club at a refreshment stand selling hotdogs, the key is to be out there in the community.
• Visit your local Chamber of Commerce and find out what's going on in the community. There's always a United Way Campaign in the fall, but what other events occur as we head into the winter months?
• Sometimes, helping to raise money directly is about using your skill set as a photojournalist to boost awareness. Document various events in the community, and then provide the management of those events, the local paper and websites with your images. Remember, nobody can do it better than you!
• Use your social media role to help raise awareness for various nonprofit events. As I've written in the past, share images you capture at the events. It's great content and helps to demonstrate your commitment. Whether you blog or, for example, post on a Facebook page, by sharing information about various nonprofits, you're becoming an ambassador for that organization.
• Publish an event calendar. Here's an opportunity for you to become a community clearing house for nonprofits in the area, and it's so easy to do. Plus, again it shows your commitment.
  

None of this is a new topic for me to share here on the SCU blog. You're looking for the community to be good to you, so you've got to be good to your community! Best of all, no act of support is too small—the key is being involved and giving back.

 At the end it’s not about what you have or even what you’ve accomplished.
It’s about who you’ve lifted up, who you’ve made better.
It’s about what you’ve given back.
Denzel Washington