Published in Modern Steel Construction.
Tips for marketing leadership to make your firm’s involvement with nonprofits and other charitable organizations easy and effective.
We often hear that ”everyone in the company is a marketer.”
For those of us who are marketing professionals, we must provide ”everyone else” with tools and guidance to best support the firm’s marketing efforts. Visibility is an essential marketing ingredient, so it’s no surprise that active exposure within nonprofit organizations—community, professional, and social—is an excellent way for an engineer to contribute to the firm’s overall marketing activity.
To make this happen, review your firm’s existing organizational involvement program, or consider spearheading a new initiative. Based upon your firm’s available resources, size, and structure, you may opt to collaborate with another department such as human resources in order to ensure the effort remains robust and permanent.
Easy and Effective
Here are some ways to make organizational involvement both easy and effective.
Emphasize the merits. Active involvement in organizations offers life balance, rewards, and satisfactions that are highly personal in nature. Less obvious, but equally valuable, are the professional benefits. Not only is organizational involvement a way for the individual—a representative of your firm’s brand—to be visible, but that person also has great opportunity to grow themselves and their careers. They become more confident, self-fulfilled, productive, and well-rounded. Interestingly, senior positions in both business and non-profit organizations involve similar tasks: setting policy, long-term strategy, networking, and organizational structure. So a junior or mid-level engineer can step into leadership roles within organizations in order to develop, practice, and sharpen their skills at rapid speed. In other words, nonprofit organizations can serve as training and proving ground for those who want to stretch explore, and experiment—often within roles beyond those available within their own firms. In addition, organizational involvement allows individuals to demonstrate their true character in a non-selling, non-business scenario. Later, this same character may be remembered, and sought out, by business prospects and colleagues.
Help with assessments. Provide a tool to promote self reflection within each individual. Facilitate a group discussion or meet with them one-on-one to discuss their answers to these questions: Motivation to get involved? Skills you offer? Skills you want to develop? Interest in community, professional, or social organizations? Hours you are available to dedicate per month (1-2; 3-7; 8-12; and so on)? Level of involvement desired: member/volunteer, committee, board? Core interests: environmental; foreign relations; animal welfare; health; elderly; children; disabled; women; underprivileged; arts and culture?
Provide ideas to get them started. Opportunities are abundant, and could become overwhelming. To help, compile a focused list of local organizations as a starting point. Make special note of places where employees are currently involved, as strength in numbers can be motivating. Coach them to conduct informal conversations with an organization to find the best fit. Make them mindful that some organizations provide certain marketing benefits (e.g., including the company names of board members on letterhead or bartering sponsorship spots in exchange for volunteering.)
Offer an alternative team approach. Some individuals may not have availability to commit to an organization. Yet they may be willing to participate in occasional one-off events. Identify an enthusiastic person in your firm to organize a finite number of firm-wide volunteer activities per year (e.g., Saturday afternoon cleaning up a community park within a low-income neighborhood).
Remember, it’s their choice. You cannot force anyone to perform really well if they are not truly open and interested. Plus, this is their personal time, beyond work. Encourage, rather than pressure.
Track it. Monitor who is involved in which organizations. If possible, encourage extending the efforts to various organizations for wider visibility. On a micro level, track each individual’s involvement during annual reviews, and discuss how the firm could further support their efforts.
Encourage active participation. Becoming a volunteer/member is good; serving on a committee or board is excellent. Like anything, the more energy one puts into it, the more personal and professional benefits one will reap in return.
Support it. Allow them schedule flexibility, as appropriate. In addition, have a modest budget to support the organizational involvement of your staff. Maybe they need a sponsor. Maybe they need to buy a table. Maybe they need T-shirts (with your firm’s logo) for a specific community event. Invite staff to come forth with their pitch on the value behind financial contributions.
Equip with communication tools. The top priority is for the individual to genuinely grow. The potential benefit is the visibility and networking for your firm. Give these individuals the tools they need (e.g., help with articulating your firm’s value proposition) to feel comfortable as an “ambassador” if and when appropriate.
Lead by example. If you expect others to be involved, then you too must be involved. Make sure that the marketing team, along with the firm’s leadership, are committed to external organizations. Otherwise, any organizational involvement initiative may be received by the staff with skepticism, even criticism.
Applaud it. Without going overboard, make others aware of accomplishments of staff within their organizations. Perhaps it’s a brief article for social media feeds, a website, or a newsletter. Show admiration and appreciation for those who have decided to offer themselves up for the win-win-win benefit.
And just what makes organizational involvement a triple-win? One, the nonprofit organization itself wins, and enthusiastic volunteers and members are heartily welcomed. Two, the individual wins, with opportunities like none other to grow personally and professionally. And three, your firm wins, boasting happier and more talented employees with an enhanced sense of purpose, along with stronger visibility.
Facilitation of Organizations
In April 2019’s Business Issues article “Forging a Framework for Facilitating” (www.modernsteel.com) we focused on the overarching techniques for facilitating meetings. If you’re looking for places to hone your facilitation abilities, joining an organization at the committee (or board) level is a perfect opportunity. (Note that the organizations below are all in Chicago, where I’m located. Similar organizations no doubt exist in your neck of the woods.)
Perhaps you want to stick with what you know: engineering. If so, you could get involved with a program like Chicago’s Project Exploration, where you can educate Chicago minority middle school students on what’s cool about our profession.
On the flip side, you may want to steer clear of the “usual,” and opt for something that aligns with your personal causes and passions. National organizations like Volunteer Match will help you identify local options in a wide range of categories, from animals to the arts to the environment (and much more.)
But maybe you just want a taste for now. Organizations like Chicago Cares have a robust website that even includes a calendar of volunteer opportunities with specific one-off projects. Did a window of time in your busy schedule suddenly open up? Jump on their site and see what’s needed!
Perhaps you’d prefer to join a social or sports related club. That’s relevant! There are abundant opportunities to casually network, and they also have committees if you opt to get more actively involved.
Maybe you’ve volunteered for a while, and you’re ready to take a higher step: becoming a board member. Chicago’s Arts and Business Council actually offers an On Board program (requires a financial investment) to train people to become board members for arts organizations.
The bottom line is this: If you’re willing to make the time to get involved, you’ll be expanding your mind, your network, and your impact. And in the process, you might just contribute to your company’s marketing efforts in a new and rewarding way!