How Goodwill Industries transformed their marketing to generate 1000's of five star reviews and increase donation volume by 45%

The foundation of all of Goodwill Industries’ charity work is donations. These donations are the life’s blood of Goodwill and the donations are then provided to the needing in communities across North America. Many of the donations that Goodwill receives are delivered to their local community Goodwill Stores. For the more than 40 Goodwill thrift stores/donation centers set up in Southern Arizona, Goodwill wanted to ensure that if they were the preferred charity and donors could find them easily and effectively. With many of their donors relying primarily on websites such as Google, Bing, and Yellow Pages to find stores near them, Goodwill needed to make sure that consumers who wanted to donate/shop could easily find them through all of their internet search options.

Goodwill became aware that their donor customers were having a hard time finding their Goodwill stores online. Goodwill’s primary objective was to improve this online presence and increase in-store for donation delivery and customer sales. Goodwill also wanted to ensure the accuracy of their listing information across the various search engines.

Within 72 hours of getting onboard Synup, all of Goodwill’s 40 locations in Southern Arizona were updated accurately, listed and/or claimed on over 48 websites. Goodwill was able to quickly and easily manage all of their locations through Synup. Synup’s dashboard provided Goodwill the ability to both ensure the accuracy of the marketing data and expand the presence of this data to all of the sites that their potential donors/customers were using. Additionally, Goodwill was able to edit their location details such as opening/closing hours, address, special offers, etc. at any point in time. The Synup dashboard also provides detailed analytics about the engagement that these stores locations are getting online, and aggregates all reviews that these stores receive on any other website as well. Goodwill can track the increase in customers finding them online and by proactively managing their reviews, they have been able to attract even more new donors/customers.

The change showed up first in donations. Volume across the Southern Arizona stores climbed 45%. Donors who'd struggled to find a store were now landing on accurate listings, so more of them showed up to give.

Search did much of the heavy lifting. Google traffic grew 36%, and people looking to drop off donations were finding claimed, current profiles instead of stale or missing ones.

Reviews climbed even faster, up 223% once Goodwill started managing and responding to feedback in the dashboard. New donors could see a location was active before driving over. Fresh reviews pushed those stores higher in local search too, and the extra visibility kept pulling in more donors.

For an organization where donations fund everything else, getting found online wasn't a vanity metric. It was the difference between a donor choosing Goodwill and choosing somewhere else.

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