#HANGRY and Hitting the Road: Arby's, Habit Burger & Share Our Strength
Arby’s and The Habit Burger Grill are both committed partners of No Kid Hungry, and together have raised over $21 million for kids struggling with hunger. Both brands are focused on three main business objectives: sales, traffic and employee engagement/retention. No Kid Hungry helped both Arby’s and The Habit Burger Grill reach these objectives during last year’s Dine Out for No Kid Hungry campaign, while raising funds and awareness for hungry children across the country.
In 2017, No Kid Hungry went bigger and bolder than ever before with their annual Dine Out effort, designing and executing an experiential marketing campaign with a call to action on social media, helping restaurant partners reach their business objectives while also increasing awareness of No Kid Hungry’s larger mission of ending childhood hunger.
Millennials are a key target audience for No Kid Hungry, because they eat out more often than any other generation and spend a significant portion of their income on food. Taking a word already in the lexicon of this target audience – “hangry”, the campaign inserted No Kid Hungry into the existing conversation. Instead of the traditional definition of “hangry” – being grumpy or irritable because you are hungry – No Kid Hungry flipped the definition to mean anger that kids in America are going hungry.
The 2017 #HANGRY school bus tour featured an RV wrapped to look like a school bus on a national tour from New York City to Los Angeles, stopping in cities along the way to raise awareness for childhood hunger. With 15 restaurant partners, including Arby’s and The Habit Burger Grill, No Kid Hungry co-created customized events for each partner. Three things remained the same at each “bus stop”: the bus, foot traffic from the local community and a self/service video kiosk to capture people’s testimonials of what made them “hangry”.
Once people created their hangry video – either on the road or online – the audience was told that they could end #hangry by dining out at a participating restaurant and donating to No Kid Hungry. Tying in the word hangry to dining out created a fun double entendre – the audience was literally ending their own hunger by dining out at their favorite restaurant, while also helping end hunger for children across the country.
The Habit Burger kicked things off in Times Square in New York City on the first day of the tour, where the team rang the Nasdaq closing bell and recruited passersby to share what made them hangry about childhood hunger. On the back end of the tour, Habit helped end on a high note in LA.,leveraging their partnership with ALT 98.7’s The Woody Show to create a fun/filled event complete with burgers served out of their food truck, stuffed animals and photo props.
Arby’s invited all of their staff to check out the bus and record hangry videos, incentivizing employees to record a video by offering free, custom #hangry shirts.
Arby’s raised nearly $4 million for No Kid Hungry in 2017, an increase of almost $500,000 from the previous year. In addition to this impressive fundraising, the brand continues to outperform the restaurant industry in terms of sales.
The Habit Burger Grill raised $585,000 for No Kid Hungry in 2017, an increase of 40% from the previous year. Over 283,000 people donated in 2017, an increase from 200,000 in 2016, and average donation per person also increased year over year. Habit saw increased coupon redemption rates in all stores during their promotion in 2017. The brand also experienced an increase to comp sales in 2017.