Today’s customers increasingly want to know that the companies they do business with are a force for positive change. During both the “Power Panel” and “Connecting Powerful Diamond Stories with Customers” seminars at the Smart Show Chicago, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, co-‐founder of the Diamond Empowerment Fund (D.E.F), stressed the need to connect the positive stories behind diamonds with customers.
“Storytelling has always been the way to connect diamonds with the heart,” said Chavis. “We have the good stories customers want to hear, we just have to start telling them”. D.E.F has created materials to help retailers and their sales associates communicate these stories to consumers both in-‐store and online.
Positive stories behind diamonds are part of the Diamonds Do Good Initiative, launched in December 2014 with funding from industry leaders at the Diamonds In The Sky Las Vegas event, and also with the help of grants made by the JCK Industry Fund. The website DiamondsDoGood.com and its accompanying social media efforts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, acknowledge the aggregate ongoing good of the global diamond and diamond jewelry industry through personal stories. It is a real-‐time interactive repository of the collective good works and impacts of the industry on communities where they do business, whether these communities are in Africa, India, China, Australia, Canada, Russia, or the United States. Retailers are encouraged to share their own individual stories of giving back with the Diamond Empowerment Fund.
Just as unique and powerful as the stories behind diamonds are the stories of diamonds themselves. “Every diamond is, by definition, a wonder all the more intriguing because it has borne witness to the origins of our world a billion years ago,” says D.E.F Executive Director Nancy Orem Lyman who was also part of The Smart Show seminar. These are the stories consumers need to hear and they are featured on the website and through the Diamonds Do Good Initiative.
The materials developed for use by retailers include a core visual component – the “We Support Diamonds Do Good” seal that has been made into a window cling for display on storefront windows and for digital/website use, clickable back to diamondsdogood.com. The materials also include sales associate training materials on the Diamonds Do Good message; a digital brochure on D.E.F’s own Diamonds Do Good mission to share with consumers through each store’s social media channels; a 12-‐month digital content calendar of the stories behind -‐ and of -‐ diamonds to help a store plan their posts on a monthly and weekly basis; counter cards, and a one-‐page customer brochure.
These materials are available to retailers around the world at no cost. Contact Nancy Orem Lyman at [email protected] or 212.359.4219.
Chavis and Lyman will be giving Seminars on “Communicating the Diamonds Do Good Stories to Customers” at AGS Conclave on Saturday, April 25th from 12 noon to 1pm and at JCK on Saturday May 30 from 4 to 4:45pm at Tradewinds C/D, Pool level.
About the Diamond Empowerment Fund:
The Diamond Empowerment Fund is a global non-‐profit based in New York City and co-‐founded by Russell Simmons and leaders in the diamond industry in 2007 to empower diamond communities around the world. Its beneficiaries include: CIDA City Campus, South Africa’s first non-‐profit university to offer a four-‐year business degree. CIDA has an 80% employment rate among graduates; the African Leadership Academy, a university preparatory school in Johannesburg, South Africa, founded on the belief that ethical leadership is the key to sustainable development on the continent and drawing students from all 54 countries in Africa, Botswana Top Achievers program that provides the top high school students countrywide the opportunity to study at a university of their choice worldwide then return to Botswana to contribute to its economic, social and political development and Veerayatan, a model for encouraging the development of responsible citizens who are educated, have strong integrity, and a motivation to give back to their community. D.E.F supports students attending the Colleges of Pharmacy, Engineering and Business Administration. www.diamondempowerment.org.
