Engaging your company in an employee giving campaign will benefit your business in many ways, and is well worth the effort involved.

Study after study has shown that partnering with a charity is good for business. It increases customer trust, boosts employee morale, and the numbers don’t lie: giving back can improve your sales and retention.

Involving your employees in a collective goal with a positive mission can be fun and drive increased teamwork and collaboration.

In recent years, 50% of employers have increased the number of employee activities related to charitable giving. If your company has not yet run an employee giving campaign, you’re officially missing out.
Convinced? Great! So let’s get started.

Choosing the charity

Your employees should be involved throughout the entire giving campaign, starting with selecting which charity your company will donate to. The simplest way is to have employees nominate their Nonprofit choice and have everyone vote to select a winner.

The Nonprofit you choose should be in the same realm of your company. For example, if you’re an oil and gas company, it’s probably not the best idea to donate to an environmental charity. But it makes sense for a pet store to choose a humane society as their partner. Alternatively, if your employees have a cause that’s near and dear to them, that everyone can agree on – go for it!

The fun part – planning the campaign!

There are many ways to execute an employee giving campaign. End of year is a good time to do it – the holiday season means many causes are in need, and it’s likely your workplace is stressed. Doing something fun together, that helps your community is a great way to take the edge off. Here are some ideas

• Bake sale
• Team competitions
• Pajama day
• Food Drive
• Trivia

The options really are endless. The idea is to make it enjoyable, but not too labor intensive for your staff. Remember, this is meant to create a sense of teamwork, or maybe some friendly competition, but it should not add unnecessary stress to your team.

Collect the funds!

Make sure you’ve communicated expectations and recommended donation. If you choose an activity like trivia, set a minimum donation amount to participate.

Set a goal for your team but make sure it’s ambitious, yet achievable. Multiply the suggested donation amount by the number of employees. You may not have 100% participation, but this encourages your team to donate above the suggested amount.

Consider creating a visual ‘thermometer’ to track your teams progress and place it somewhere people will see. If your team is working from home, create a landing page with a trackable goal.

It’s almost campaign day!

Keep your team accountable with a sign-up sheet for participation but allow day-of participation as well. This will help your team stay committed to the employee giving campaign, but not pressured.