The Echo

Published Online: November 3, 2010
Kohl's Contest Raises Questions

By Doris Hajewski, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT)
A Kohl's Corp. contest that gave a total of $10 million to 20 schools nationwide inspired intense campaigning and wound up being dominated by small religious schools, leading to questions about whether the well-intentioned competition was fair.

Featuring online voting on the company's Facebook page, the contest succeeded in mobilizing hundreds of thousands of parents across the country to talk about Kohl's during the back-to-school shopping season. But there also has been criticism of methods used by some of the top finishers to lure votes, such as raffling off iPads or reaching out to overseas voters.

Each school in the top 20 received $500,000. Jewish schools won 12 of the 20 spots, and six other winners were Christian or Catholic schools. Two were public schools.

"It wasn't fair," said William Henk, dean of Marquette University's College of Education, said of the raffles and international voting. "It was probably creative. But it doesn't seem like it was a fair thing to do."

Henk followed the controversy surrounding the contest on his blog, Marquette Educator.

Kohl's said the raffles and the votes from outside the U.S. were in compliance with contest rules.

"We saw several communities show ingenuity and creativity in raising support for their schools," said Vicki Shamion, senior vice president of public relations.

Kohl's held the giveaway to mark the 10th anniversary of its Kohl's Cares charity effort, coinciding with the department store chain's back-to-school marketing campaign. Each person could vote a total of 20 times, casting up to five votes per school, using a Facebook account.

Voters automatically became "fans" of Kohl's on Facebook, the social networking website, boosting the company's fan total to 2.7 million, from 1 million.

"They get more connections for future marketing campaigns," said Jan Owens, associate professor of marketing for Carthage College in Kenosha.

At the same time, Owens said, the gifts to schools resonate with parents and teachers.

"We were inspired by the amount of school spirit and community support we saw from students, teachers, parents and school supporters across the country during this contest," Shamion said.

Drumming Up Support

More than 11 million votes were cast, as parents and school administrators drummed up support for their schools. Parents set up laptops in shopping malls, at nearby colleges, at Starbucks, at entertainment events%mdash;anywhere they could log on. The volunteers would solicit people to vote for their schools, helping them to set up Facebook accounts if they didn't have one.

Lucas Christian Academy in Texas, the second-place finisher, found lots of votes at the FortyFest Christian rock concert at the Texas Motor Speedway.

Our Lady of the Presentation, a Catholic elementary school in Lee's Summit, Mo., that ranked third in the contest, had help from a nearby elderly living complex, John Knox Village, where some residents belong to the parish.

"We had little old ladies helping people at John Knox set up Facebook accounts," said Jodie Briggs, principal at Presentation.

Kohl's kept a running tally of the vote on its Facebook page throughout the contest, but after it ended last month, it did not post a list of the winners. Visitors to Kohl's Facebook page can search only for top vote-getters by state.

The company provided the list to the Journal Sentinel at the newspaper's request. No schools in Wisconsin were among the winners.

"We wanted it to be very local," said Julie Gardner, chief marketing officer for Kohl's, of the decision not to post the full winners list. "We felt like the localization piece was more important."

The top vote-getter was Lake High School, a public school in Millbury, Ohio, which was listed with 163,395 votes at the end of the contest. The school was destroyed in June by a tornado that killed the father of its valedictorian. The $500,000 prize from Kohl's will go toward a $24 million rebuilding project, said Principal Lee Herman.

Lake High was a sympathetic favorite among other front-running schools, who directed their extra votes to the school, Herman said.

"It was more the effort on the local media's part," Herman said. "As a school, we did nothing to promote this."

Lake High was the exception in that regard.

Some schools, including Pius XI High School, St. Marcus Lutheran and Racine Mitchell Middle School in Wisconsin, had administrators sitting on the roof to garner attention.

Some others did more. Mount Ellis Academy, a high school in Bozeman, Mont., that is affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist church, used contests offering an iPad and a 30-minute helicopter ride as part of its successful effort to make the Kohl's top 20 list.

"We think of it as a miracle," said Darren Wilkins, principal of the 70-student high school.

The school, which is more than 100 years old, had been struggling to find ways to raise money to repair its failing sewer system. The big turning point for Mount Ellis was near the end of the contest, when the school was close enough to winning to draw support from the worldwide Seventh Day Adventist organization, Wilkins said.

"It really did end up going around the world," Wilkins said. Votes came in from Nepal, Malaysia and Japan, he said. In addition, a former exchange student from Pakistan drummed up support in his country, just as the floods there started.

After winning $500,000 from Kohl's, students at Mount Ellis ran a fundraiser for Pakistan.

Schools Form Partnerships

Motti Seligson, media relations spokesman for Chabad.org, a website that serves Jews worldwide, said the base of support for the 12 winning schools, most of them affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch organization, was local.

"It was really between the schools themselves," Seligson said.

Many of the winning schools formed partnerships at some point in the competition, asking their supporters to use extra votes for one or two other schools.

Charlotte Jewish Day School in Charlotte, N.C., for example, worked with Spartanburg Charter School, a public school in Spartanburg, S.C., marketing themselves as the only Southern schools with a chance to win, said Gale Osborne, development director for Charlotte Jewish. On the last day of the contest, the local Fox TV affiliate did live broadcasts from the school, urging viewers to vote. Both schools were among the 20 winners.

"The positive effect of the campaign is so much greater than the money," Osborne said. "The Jewish population in Charlotte is small. What happened is that it galvanized our community. By the end of the campaign, people were saying, 'How are we doing?' "

For parents at Darby Elementary in Northridge, Calif., however, the Kohl's contest brought frustration. Darby, which is part of the Los Angeles school district, was in 12th place at the end of the competition, but was eliminated after 35,000 votes for the school were disqualified. Kohl's has not explained the problem to the school, despite requests from parents posted on Kohl's Facebook page.

Sharon Docter, a Darby parent who worked on the campaign, said parents decided to try to win the money because of the school budget crunch.

"It feels like we were duped into providing free marketing for Kohl's and in the end they disqualified a significant number of our votes with no explanation," Docter said.

Two other schools, Yeshiva Achei Tmimim Academy in Worcester, Mass., and United Lubavitcher Yeshiva in Brooklyn, N.Y., also were in the top 20 at the contest's end, but were not certified as winners.

"Kohl's engaged a third-party organization to verify adherence to contest rules and regulations including voting accuracy," Shamion said. "The organization used the same contest criteria and verified votes for all schools. Any votes determined invalid per rules and regulations were not counted, per contest rules, therefore changing the final vote count. While many schools that exhibited a strong sense of spirit did not win, Kohl's congratulates all of the participants that displayed an inspiring sense of community throughout the contest."

"What we were hoping to do was to get a lot of engagement with our customers," Gardner said. "At the end of the day, we accomplished what we hoped."

THE WINNERS ARE ...

Kohl's Cares $500,000 winners:
• Lake High School, Millbury, Ohio
• Lucas Christian Academy, Lucas, Texas
• Our Lady of the Presentation, Lee's Summit, Mo.
• Pius X High School, Lincoln, Neb.
• Hebrew Academy, Huntington Beach, Calif.
• Good Shepherd Christian Academy, Fairfax, Va.
• Cheder Menachem, Los Angeles, Calif.
• Bais Chaya Mushka School, Los Angeles, Calif.
• Mount Ellis Academy, Bozeman, Mont.
• St. Clement Coptic Orthodox Christian Academy, Nashville, Texas
• Charlotte Jewish Day School, Charlotte, N.C.
• JETS-Jewish Educational Trading School, Granada Hills, Calif.
• Chabad Hebrew Academy, San Diego, Calif.
• Hebrew Academy Community School, Margate, Fla.
• Rohr Bais Chaya Academy, Tamarac, Fla.
• Silverstein Hebrew Academy, Great Neck, N.Y.
• Netan Eli Hebrew Academy, Reseda, Calif.
• Jewish School of the Arts, North Palm Beach, Calif.
• Spartanburg Charter School, Spartanburg, S.C.
• Sha'arei Zion Ohel Bracha, Forest Hills, N.Y.