Marketers work with data every day, but it can be easy to forget that there are real people behind every number—we set out to find one of those people and help them out this holiday season. Check out how we did it .

Marketers crave data. It informs our decisions, helps us solve problems, and runs the world around us. But marketing data is more than numbers in a spreadsheet, an analytics report, or a list in your CRM—behind every number is a person.

For our 2022 holiday campaign, we challenged ourselves to find the real people behind the data we analyze every day, see what we could learn from them, and find a way to lift them up. Our friends and clients at ProAthlete (a hugely successful sports equipment company that owns JustBats, JustBallGloves, JustPaddles and Routine) eagerly partnered with us to make this possible.

For weeks and with the help of the ProAthlete marketing team, we crawled through ProAthlete’s data, layering it with other data sources to find a real customer we could help. In our search we combed through:

  • Thousands of orders
  • Customer service tickets
  • Customer chat logs
  • Abandoned carts (people who added to carts but didn't complete purchases)
  • Average household income by zip code
  • ProAthlete company reviews (comments on Google, Yelp, and other review sites)

Finally we discovered the perfect candidate for this year's campaign—Chris Evans and his non-profit, named the I AM KING Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri.

We invited Chris and a few of his players to tour ProAthlete’s facility telling them we would be donating $1000 dollars to the foundation, but we had something much bigger planned—a $30,000 donation to the foundation to cover the costs of new equipment and to help contribute to the I AM KING scholarship funds.

What is the I AM KING Foundation?

Chris Evans founded the I Am King Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, “to educate, inspire and empower young men to become community leaders.”

“When my son was in kindergarten, I literally had to beg parents to bring their kids out to play baseball because everyone wanted to do football and basketball. I brought them out there and they loved it. We had a great time and decided to see how far we could take it” - Chris Evans

Each baseball season Chris invests 20-30 hours of his time weekly coaching little league teams, planning educational field trips, and developing the young men he works with into leaders. The I Am King Foundation accepts donations in an effort to “level the playing field in little league baseball.”

What is Pledge 1%?

Pledge 1% is a movement founded by leaders of Salesforce and Atlassian that encourages and empowers companies to donate 1% of their revenue to charitable and community-based causes. For years, as part of 97th Floor’s Pledge 1% commitment, we have been fortunate enough to elevate brands and people just like Chris Evans that we believe in.

Want to learn more about how 97th Floor elevates people?

Check out last year's project CharityLabs—an engine to help you find charities that match your values and interests.