Quartet Community Foundation introduce a new toolkit designed to guide businesses in taking a more strategic and meaningful approach to supporting charities. By focusing on a cause of the year, instead of a charity of the year, and involving staff in the decision-making process, a business can significantly increase employee engagement - and ultimately employee retention.
Leaving Brexit to one side, Business West knows that finding and keeping talented people is probably the single biggest battleground facing local business today.
How a business is seen to interact with its local community is one of the differentiating factors in this increasingly competitive talent marketplace.
Engaging staff in charitable giving and fundraising is a key way for a company to “give back”. Thankfully there's some new help at hand for those tasked with setting up a charitable giving initiative which aism to simplify the process of engaging your workforce in choosing the right charities to support.
Lots of companies already offer employees the chance to vote for a charity of the year. If you do, your employee engagement potentially has a gaping hole in it.
Many of your employees may be disillusioned from the moment your charity is chosen, either because the charity they individually voted for isn’t chosen or because they don’t empathise with the winning charity. Add to this the tendency for the chosen charity to be a large national brand name and your staff are unlikely to see the money raised having a profound effect in their neighbourhood.
What seemed like a great idea at the beginning of the year turned out more difficult to organise than you thought and was far less impactful than you hoped, both in terms of the charitable giving and the degree of employee engagement engendered!
Taking on a cause of the year, rather than a single charity of the year, removes many of these barriers. Staying local means significantly more to your employees and choosing a cause which can embrace several charities increases the number of people identifying with the issues.
Asking your employees to vote for a headline cause that covers a broad array of topics means that they can all be engaged in the process – all year long.
The aim is the same – to raise money and support people in need – but choosing a cause rather than a charity will ensure increased employee engagement.
It’s a different approach that works – try it and see the impact yourself.
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