Path to Peace Ambassadors

Our first project for Macy’s was the Rwanda Path to Peace. We initiated a social media marketing campaign to build awareness of this program, which offers trade in lieu of aid. Women in Rwanda make baskets for sale at Macy’s. It’s an economic empowerment initiative that has changed the lives of untold women and their families in this country, which faced the worst genocide in my lifetime. When Everywhere took on this project, we knew that we had to do more than engage audiences, we had to approach this as a cause.

Enter Christie Crowder and Lorraine Robertson, better known as The BlogRollers. Lorraine and Christie are a dynamic duo of marketing energy who partner with us at Everywhere on special projects. Christie and Lorraine joined us in our outreach efforts to create awareness among women and mom bloggers about this opportunity to purchase baskets at Macy’s and feed a family or help educate a child in this African country. Lorraine and Christie felt very strongly that this project was more than building buzz, we had to approach this project as a cause and thus the Rwanda Path to Peace Ambassador program was born. We reached out to women and mom bloggers around the country and didn’t just ask them to blog about the sale of baskets, we asked them to take this on as if they were ambassadors to Rwanda Path to Peace. With Lorraine and Christie’s help, we secured nearly a dozen bloggers who wrote passionately about how they felt when they first held a basket. They placed baskets on their holiday tables and blogged about it and they shared with their entire communities how meaningful it could be to purchase a basket and make a difference. The Rwanda Path to Peace Ambassador program was wildly successful, spawning blog posts around the country among dozens of influential bloggers. We had something like over 10 million impressions as a result of all the coverage.

It’s rare to have a project where bloggers want to take the project on as a true cause, but we’ve been favored with a new opportunity called Heart of Haiti. Macy’s is the first major retailer to go to Haiti and actually come up with a plan to carry products made by artists in that country in an effort to provide life saving income to shattered communities. We’ll again be joining forces with Lorraine and Christie to launch an Ambassador program where we’ll engage bloggers and they’ll engage their readers in a way that only someone can do when they take on a cause as their own.