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Episode #47 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute features Andrea Staub and Zachary Campbell of Metzger Wickersham personal injury law firm in Pennsylvania. We discuss their experience with local community involvement.
A few of the ways they participate in the community include donating to the local food bank, working with charities, providing a scholarship to local high schools, car seat checkups and speaking at colleges. The firm provides paid time off for employees to participate in community events.
Visit Metzger Wickersham online at: https://www.mwke.com/.
See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.
Lindsey:
Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield. Even though SEO and digital marketing are essential for lawyers, not all marketing can be done over the internet. Shocker. I know. Sometimes the best marketing comes when you step away from the computer, turn off the phone, and talk to people face-to-face. One of the most meaningful and genuine marketing opportunities happens when you get involved in your local community. This is especially true for personal injury lawyers. Think about your target market. They are members of your community. They are in a time of crisis. They will want to work with someone that they know and trust to have their best interests at heart. They want to work with someone who is willing to put in the time to care about them as a person. Andrea Staub and Zach Campbell of the Metzger Wickersham Personal Injury Law firm in Pennsylvania are joining us today to share their experience with local community involvement. Thank you so much for joining us.
Andrea:
Good morning.
Zachary:
Thank you, Lindsey. How are you?
Lindsey:
I am doing great. How are you doing today?
Zachary:
Good. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Lindsey:
Well, tell us a little bit about yourselves and your practice.
About Zach Campbell and Andrea Staub with Metzger Wickersham
Zachary:
Sure. I’ll start. My name is Zach Campbell. As you said, I’m a personal injury attorney in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That’s the capital of Pennsylvania. It’s in the center of the state. We practice primarily in the central part of Pennsylvania going up to the New York border and then south of Maryland, and then we did just open an office in Frederick, Maryland. So we have a pretty wide practice range in Pennsylvania. We only do personal injury. I’ve been practicing for about 18 years, and I’ll let Andrea introduce herself.
Andrea:
Yep. My name is Andrea Staub, and I’ve been practicing in personal injury for just over 13 years. Primarily do motor vehicle accidents, slip-and-falls, dog bites, things like that. Like Zach had said, we’re mainly in Central PA. We just branched out into Maryland. So I’m one of the licensed attorneys in Maryland that will be handling that, but we are a local firm and like to be recognized as such in our community.
Lindsey:
That’s great, and it’s so important to really get connected with your community and feel like a local firm. One of the ways that you do that is through community involvement. So what do you do to get involved with your community?
Benefits of Lawyers Participating in Community Involvement
Zachary:
Well, we do a number of things, and we’ve done this for a lot of years now. One of the things we’re really proud of is each year, we donate to a local food bank or a shelter in one of the counties that we have offices in. We have about eight offices now. So we pick a local shelter or a food bank that we can donate to, and we’ve also really partnered with them. So it’s not just giving them a donation. We go out, and we meet with them. We’ve met all the staff at the different charities that we’ve contributed to, and we’ve also encouraged our staff to participate in volunteering with them, and those relationships have really grown in the past few years. We also developed a program just last year where we give our staff actually paid time-off to volunteer at some of our partner organizations. So we found that to be a big benefit to our firm in getting our name out there in a community as well.
Andrea:
One of the other things that we do that we’ve done for quite a number of years is we get involved with local high schools and the seniors. Primarily, we do a scholarship-based…
Zachary:
Road to Safety.
Andrea:
Yeah, Road to Safety scholarship contest where we ask them to provide us with entries on distracted driving, whether it’s texting, eating, putting on makeup, or drunk driving, things like that. Then, we pick from the entries. We pick a couple to provide scholarships to, and we get a lot of entries from seniors. We think that it not only helps us get involved with the younger community, but it also… I mean, their schools get involved. They will help, I guess, get the…
Zachary:
Yeah. They speak to their friends.
Andrea:
Yeah.
Zachary:
We get really good submissions, surprisingly. Some of these kids are really talented, and the videos we get, they seem professional in a sense, and it’s created, and they show their friends, and they’re proud of them as well. Then, when they win, we put them on the news, we publicize everything, so it’s good for the kids as well. Along with that, Andrea and I, for years, especially pre-COVID, but probably getting it back into it a little bit more, have gone into these schools, and spoken at the classrooms, and talked about the dangers of distracted driving. We have a presentation we give. The surprising thing, to me at least, was a lot of them comment on how they know the dangers, but they have to tell their parents to get off their phone when they’re driving or something like that. So I think we actually do make an impact in the community and meeting these kids. But again, in the marketing sense, it also helps us get our names out there.
Another new thing that we’ve started is one of our staff members has gotten certified in car seat safety and the installment of car seats. So she’s going to different events, and we’re looking to host one here where people can come bring their car seats in and get them checked to make sure they’re installed properly and appropriately. You’d be surprised, in speaking to her, how many people do not install their car seats correctly. I thought I did for a long time with my younger kids, but then you learn things as you see these programs that you’re supposed to install the seat correctly. Sometimes it’s not just clicking it in. There’s different things you have to do to make sure it’s secure. So, I mean, there’s just a little bit of what we do to try to get our names out there, but we try to be in the community as much as possible just because we want to be recognized as a local firm.
How Much Time to Devote to Community Involvement
Lindsey:
Right, and I love how many actions you guys take. It’s one thing for a firm to make a scholarship and just give the money, or just make a donation to the food bank, but the fact that you guys are pairing your pocketbook with action, and getting out and meeting people, and meeting people as they’re putting in these car seats. As a recent mother myself, it is overwhelming when you’re putting in that car seat, especially for the first time, and you don’t know which clip is going in which place, and so providing a bit of peace of mind is a huge help, and giving your staff paid time-off to go out, and get to know people, and be representatives of your firm, and show that you guys are a caring firm that is willing to put in the time and energy to get to know people where they’re at before they have the need for representation. So, all of those things, the pairing of putting the time and money behind creating a local brand is absolutely essential to have a grassroots campaign, a marketing campaign to position yourselves as a local firm. So, all of these activities, they do take time. So how much time are you setting aside for local community involvement?
Andrea:
I mean, I don’t think that there’s necessarily a set time. Anytime that anybody reaches out to us or we find something new to get involved in, we check it out. If it’s something that we can do, then we can do it. We make sure that we have time within our schedule and within our employees’ schedule to be able to get involved in anything that comes our way. So it’s not that we’re setting aside a certain amount of time. If they come to us or if we find something and we think it’s a good fit, then we’ll find the time to do it.
Zachary:
We have a great marketing team, and we’re lucky that our attorneys are all willing to get involved in this. For example, one of the most recent things we did, one of our younger associates went and spoke at a local community college that we have here and was part of the panel, and he spoke to a bunch of students about careers in our field, in the personal injury field. So that was just another way to get it out there, and that was something he was more than willing to do. So we’re fortunate to have a good team that’s willing to step up and go do things like that. We usually don’t have a hard time when we have these community events with our staff stepping up and saying, “Hey, we’ll go help.” So that helps us a lot because we’re busy as the attorneys and the shareholders here, but it gives us an opportunity to get the name out there.
Lindsey:
Absolutely. They’re all extensions of the firm, and creating that mindset within everybody who is working for your law firm is huge. Any perspective client who comes into contact with you will see that this is something that starts with you as the shareholders, but extends to everybody on your team, and that’s the kind of law firm that if I were in an accident, I would want to be working with.
Zachary:
I was just going to say. Our firm has actually been around since 1888. So I think we do have some name recognition to the community, but it’s always good to put a face with that name as well and to know that we’re just not this conglomerate, this large firm, that we are a local firm, and that we live here. So we want to be out in the community and know that they’re dealing with a local person when they do come to us. So that’s important.
Can Lawyers Get Cases From Community Involvement
Lindsey:
That’s absolutely important, but of course, what our listeners are going to want to know is have you gotten any cases as a direct result from your community involvement?
Zachary:
Absolutely. Throughout the years, we’ve gotten many referrals just from people that say, “Hey, call this person. I’ve met them at this event.” I can’t even count as many times that we’ve gotten a referral just from somebody being at one of our events or an event we’re at, and they see our tent or whatever we have set up, and they just remember us, and then they contact us. I mean, that’s one of the things we’ve seen. Of course, we go to these to be in the community, but you’d also like to develop a client coming into you via referral because of that event. We track that. We do track like, “How do you see us?” One of the things when we’re completing our intakes, because that’s what we do in our field when a person calls in, is we ask how they heard about us, and it’s shocking how many times it’s either a direct referral from one of our community events or they saw us at a community event, and they recognized the name and just called us.
Andrea:
Yeah, and we used to do a Law Night where we stayed open past our regular closing hours and advertise for people to call in if they had any questions about anything legal. I mean, hopefully, they would call in regarding anything that we would be able to assist them with, but a lot of those people would call in just because they have a general question, and they would say, “We really appreciate you guys being available,” because a lot of times, they don’t think about calling an attorney. But when they see an advertisement like that, then it gets their mind going, and they appreciate just the opportunity to be able to talk to somebody to see if what they’re doing is correct or if there’s something that they can do. So I think that makes us feel good that we’re giving back to these people. Even if we can’t help them, we can at least get the opportunity to talk to them and hopefully put their mind at ease that they’re doing what they can or help them, guide them in the direction that they need to go.
Additional Benefits of Community Involvement
Lindsey:
Right, and that way, you’re not just a law firm. You’re a real asset to them regardless of whether or not you can take them on as a client. So what other benefits have you found as a result of your community involvement?
Zachary:
Not to sound cheesy, but raising awareness is always important. A lot of times, people don’t understand especially the dangers with distracted driving, how that can affect you until it actually affects them, until you have a loved one yourself that’s involved in it. So we think the more we’re out there pounding on the pavement saying, “Hey, we see this. We see this every day. Just because you don’t, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to look out for it.” So, I mean, that’s something that I think we fight ourselves on of not just helping people, but also raising awareness, especially with young people like we talked about earlier because when they hear it from an attorney and they see what we’ve seen, and we point that out, it makes it real to them. So that that’s important.
Andrea:
Another benefit. We want people to know that, and we’ve said this before, we are a small firm. We’re not across multiple states. We don’t have a ton of attorneys or anything like that. We are a local firm that live in this area, and we’re always surprised when people call in and think that we’re much bigger than what we are. So letting people know that we understand where they’re coming from and where they live is very important to us because our firm itself is family-oriented, and so we want our clients to feel that way when they contact us.
Lindsey:
Right. You want them to feel like they’re part of the family, that they already know you as people, but will be able to use that relationship to get the best possible outcome for their case.
Andrea:
Exactly.
Lindsey:
How Can Lawyers Give Back to Their Communities
So for our listeners who might want to get involved in their own communities, where should they start looking for opportunities?
Zachary:
There’s opportunities everywhere. You just have to look. I mean, you’d be surprised how many people love partnering with us. We have a great marketing team here. We typically try to reach out, again, to the areas where we practice in just to reach out, but there are so many organizations that are just shocked that we contact them and want to get involved. So that’s all it takes, and a lot of times, people reach out to us. I mean, one of the biggest things with our scholarship is it has allowed us to grow our network basically of additional contacts that we have. So it’s just reaching out.
Lindsey:
Well, thank you guys so much for giving your time this morning to talk to our listeners, maybe give them a few ideas of how they can get involved in their own communities and help make a difference.
Zachary:
Lindsey, thank you for your time.
Andrea:
Yes. Thank you.
Zachary:
Thanks for having us.
