Best Practice Guide to Charity of the Year Initiatives
About Charity of the Year initiatives are popular with businesses wanting to back different causes regularly. The business typically chooses a different charity to support each year, offering staff volunteering time, sponsorship and fundraising support. But how do businesses know they are providing the help that charities really need? This guide looks at how your […]
About
Charity of the Year initiatives are popular with businesses wanting to back different causes regularly. The business typically chooses a different charity to support each year, offering staff volunteering time, sponsorship and fundraising support. But how do businesses know they are providing the help that charities really need? This guide looks at how your company can build a meaningful relationship with a charity that is also inspirational for your staff.
Benefits
For a company, a Charity of the Year programme is a manageable way to support the community, providing a clear structure and direction for your charitable activity. Engaging staff in pitching and voting for which charity should be supported is a great teambuilding exercise, and it is simple to communicate the positive work you are doing to customers. Charities benefit from the extra financial and moral support, as well as your company’s time and local connections.
Risks
If businesses choose to support a charity for just a year, there is a great danger of introducing instability to them, especially if they are small. The charity may invest a lot of time building fruitful relationships with you, which are then abandoned; extra money allows a charity to fund new projects, but these cannot continue beyond pilot stage. What is more, companies tend to offer mass volunteering such as labouring or stewarding – but is the charity missing out on the significant business expertise your company could be sharing, such as strategy, marketing or finance?
Top tips to help you realise these benefits, and avoid the pitfalls
- Nurture champions: Ask staff to make a solid case for a charity to support, then make them the sponsor
- Be democratic: Getting staff to vote for the charity makes it meaningful, keeping staff engaged
- Partner with others: Challenge other companies you work with to collaborate with you on fundraising
- Facilitate involvement: Provide free volunteering days for staff to fundraise or do pro-bono work for the charity
- Piggyback on events: It’s more time and cost-effective to enter organised events than run your own
- Consider bandwidth: Choose a charity that has the means to accommodate you – especially for volunteering
- Offer real expertise: Volunteer the services you know about – often much more useful than menial work
- Follow the energy: If someone is passionate about an idea, help them make it work, however eccentric
- Pass the baton: Help your charity find their next business partner, or consider a longer relationship
Resource provided by Reciprocate
More in NEXUS
Sobell House – May News Update
Welcome to our May update, which I hope finds you well. It’s good to see restrictions starting to ease, family and friends being able to meet outside, and the joy this brings.
The B4 NEXUS Webinar hosted by Adrian Sell
B4 NEXUS webinars give local charities, social enterprises and up and coming businesses the opportunity to tell us more about what they do and how they work. They’re also an opportunity to hear from experts with advice for third sector organisations to help them develop and flourish.
B4 Community Building Day
It’s B4 Community Building Day at B4. So we’re highlighting some recent and not so recent articles and press releases posted by B4 members over the past year or so.
From this author
Wootton Science Park unveils £35 million masterplan for new SME science...
Hartwell Plc, the automotive and property development company, has unveiled emerging designs to deliver new carbon efficient lab and workspace buildings for small and medium sized science and technology companies and amenities at Wootton Science Park to the south-west of Oxford.
B2B Networking in the UK? Welcome to B4
Connecting Multisector Business Owners, C-Suite, Decision Makers
Unveiling B4 HUB: A New Era of Benefits for B4 Members
In the dynamic landscape of business, connections are the cornerstone of growth and success. At B4, we’ve always believed in the power of collaboration and support within our community. Only last week we saw the power of four of our Platinum Members coming together as the fantastic team at Sobell House stepped up the launch of the incredible OxTrail 2024 at Oxford Brookes University with the support of Darcica Logistics and Aston & James.