• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, May 23, 2011

Gap Inc. is the latest partner in Goodwill Industries' Donate Movement, a drive aimed at creating jobs and environmental awareness.  

People who bring clothing donations into their local Gap store through May 29 earn a 30% discount on purchases that day, including both regularly priced and sale merchandise. Gap is also supplying volunteers for Goodwill's volunteer initiatives in communities nationwide, Lauren Lawson-Zilai, a spokesperson for Goodwill, tells Marketing Daily.

To market the program, Gap is running radio ads in select markets, she says, as well as using grassroots efforts and social media.

The donated clothing is sold in Goodwill's more than 2,500 stores, and 84% of the revenues generated are used to fund job training programs in the U.S. and Canada. (The organization is divided into 165 headquarter agencies, which determine that region's job-training needs.) But what makes this project -- which kicked off in June 2010 -- distinctive is its connection to environmental awareness, she says. "Overall, people are becoming more conscious about what is happening to their clothing at the end of its life cycle," she adds.

People can log into donate.goodwill.org or link to it through Facebook to calculate the impact of their donation on both people (one pair of jeans buys about 10 minutes of resume-preparation services, for example) as well as the environmental impact. (In 2010, donors helped Goodwill divert more than two billion pounds of usable items from landfills.)

Goodwill suffered through the recession, she says. "We saw a decrease in the number of folks bringing in bags of donations due to the downturn in the economy," she says. But business is picking up. In March, the last month for which data is available, the number of people making donations was up 6.6% from the prior year.

Other corporate sponsors include Family Circle, Hanes, Levi's, and Planet Green.