With the holiday season right around the corner,local business owners throughout the region are coming together for the sixth annual Cincinnati Unchained event.

Cincinnati Unchained is an annual event hosted by BuyCincy.com the Saturday before Thanksgiving (November 17th). The purpose of this event is to encourage Cincinnatians to spend a portion of their holiday dollars at locally owned businesses.

Each participating business offers a promotion, special, or deal to encourage shoppers to visit. Deals can range from early bird specials on selected items, discounts on merchandise, food or beverages, or some donation of sales to local charities.

Shopowner participation for the event is free, we do ask, however, that each business donate a gift certificate valued between $10-25 for gift baskets to be given away to Unchained shoppers.

Cincinnati Unchained has grown each year, with last year seeing over 100 businesses in Greater Cincinnati participate, and we hope for even more this year. With the growing number of businesses and neighborhoods participating, we are looking for “neighborhood captains” to help organize businesses and assist in the gift basket giveaway.

The neighborhood captain will:

• Recruit neighborhood businesses to participate in the event
• Distribute Unchained flyers to participating businesses
• Distribute and collect “passports” – forms that customers get stamped at participating businesses for entry into the gift basket giveaway
• Collect “gift basket” items
• Select the winning gift basket entry at random from completed passports
• Contact the gift basket winner from your neighborhood and have the gift basket available for pick up at any neighborhood participating business

BuyCincy will provide neighborhood captians with all of the materials and will coordinate the promotion and communication of the event. If your business community is small, you can team up with neighboring communities to create a more regional effort. We have learned from past events that the more businesses that participate in a community, and the more that community aids in the promotion, the better the result.

With your help we can once again have a blockbuster event and help show Cincinnatians the business that truly make our city unique.

If you are interested in participating, being a neighborhood captain, or if you have general questions please contact sean@buycincy.com or kurt@buycincy.com.

Hope to have you all on board!

Previous media coverage:

• Cincinnati.com
• Urban Cincy
• CityBeat
• WCPO
• 5chw4rt7

Flickr image: ifmuth