Trends and Best Practices in Volunteerism

Approximately 30 CVC members participated in roundtable discussions on civic engagement, United Way campaign best practices, volunteerism during mergers, acquisitions, and corporate volunteerism and natural disasters at its June 2004 program meeting.

United Way Campaign Best Practices

Greater Twin Cities United Way saw donors leaving them and realized they needed to strengthen the relationship by better engaging donors before, during and after the campaigns. Their intended goal is to increase donor campaign giving.

Six strategies for Increasing Donor Giving

1. Corporate Gift Match –a company that matches its employee's contribution has a positive effect on increasing employee giving. It builds credibility and makes the statement to the employees that the corporation understands the importance of United Way .
2. Number of United Way Spokespeople Talking to Employees –the more touchpoints United Way speakers and/or company employees have to talk to employees increases their participation.
3. Segmentation of Donors –realizing different audiences within the company want different messages delivered differently will improve understanding of UW. The retiree group's message and delivery will be vastly different from the message delivered to employees in retail stores.
4. Expand the length of time of building the campaign –Start talking about and introducing United Way long before the ask in August/September. One company started in January by introducing and publicizing United Way funded agencies to its employees through brown bags, food drives, etc…
5. Stocks/Securities Offerings –allow employees to give stocks or securities
6. Events— United Way has developed “Events in a Box” which is an event turnkey package.

Recruiting During Mergers, Downsizing and Restructuring

David Jones , Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, spoke about Thrivent's merger several years ago. Jones discovered employees' feelings towards the merger negatively impacted volunteerism. Present were feelings of anger, resentment and uncertainty. Maintaining a healthy volunteer base was compounded when certain operations were transferred to Wisconsin . Remaining in the Twin Cities was a workforce that had not been highly engaged in the past. Jones addressed each of these dilemmas, and over time, has seen employee volunteerism grow.

Kristi Gray Shepared, Volunteer Resource Center , gave four tips when dealing with volunteerism in times of downsizing, mergers, and restructuring.

1. Acknowledge the problem
2. Communicate about it –allow for back and forth communication
3. Focus –do not spread your volunteer efforts too thin or get involved in too many activities. This is particularly important when downsizing.
4. View it as an opportunity to see things in a new light – are there new opportunities available during the challenging time? This may be a good time to review all resources, to step outside the old box and see if there are new opportunities lurking.

Developing a Corporate Volunteer Disaster Response Plan

Recent local and national events, including September 11, floods, and the Dru Sjodin search parties, has businesses thinking how their company and employees can play a role in disasters or emergencies or how to respond to employee involvement requests.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) states the private sector and voluntary organizations play a major role in assisting public sector emergency managers, before, during and after an emergency.

Private industries can contribute by:

• Developing and exercising emergency plans before an emergency occurs
• Working with emergency management personnel before an emergency occurs to ascertain what assistance may be necessary and how they can help
• Providing assistance (including volunteers) to support emergency management during an emergency and throughout the recovery process.

Rick Johnson, senior analyst, services at Best Buy and active emergency response volunteer, provided valuable handouts to help volunteer managers develop a plan of action. The handouts outline the steps for a corporate volunteer response to a local or regional disaster or emergency with suggestions on specific policies and procedures including leave and liability examples, how to identify a pool of volunteers, and how to identify a partner(s) to name a few. View Johnson's handouts here: Disaster Response Background Information [32k Word document] | Corporate Volunteer Disaster Response Plan [61k Word document]

Civic Participation

MAP's Amy Wagner did a recap of a presentation done by Jim Scheibel, executive director of Ramsey Action Programs and long-time activist and volunteerism leader, at the State Conference titled “ America 's True Community Builders.”

Main points included:

The work of volunteer administrators is really helping people answer the call to service in their communities.

• Help people prepare and begin their service
• Sustain them through the duration of service, and
• Provide a sense of success to volunteer

Service brings more than individual success, it also helps entire neighborhoods and communities to succeed and advance to greater purposes

• In other words, as a volunteer administrator, not only am I meeting the short term need of getting a particular volunteer job done, I'm creating the opportunity for that volunteer to be more in touch and engaged with his/her community.

Given that, Scheibel talked about the importance of engaging volunteers in identifying problems as well as actions and solutions. It is also important to provide volunteers with opportunities to see the bigger picture of what their work means and its impact on the community.

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