Businesses are changing the way they interact with nonprofits that support their communities and the causes important to them. Gone are the days of simply writing checks. Now more than ever, individuals want to know where their money is going, and they want to have a hands-on approach to the causes near and dear to their hearts. This, perhaps, applies even more so to attorneys. By nature, lawyers want to know the facts. They want the numbers and to know exactly where their money went and what it did.
Nonprofits need funding. This we know – but there are so many other opportunities to support local charities beyond the annual giving campaign or event sponsorship. The low-hanging fruit: volunteerism.
Nonprofits want us to engage; they want to know what’s important to us as companies and as individuals. Christy Neill, Director of Major Gifts for United Way of Central Maryland (UWCM) says, “Yes, we need you to give, but we need you to give for a reason – and everyone has a reason.”
So what might this look like?
One of the world’s largest accounting firms, RSM US LLP (“RSM”), has turned this concept into reality. Like many of our local law firms and other businesses, RSM’s Baltimore office holds an annual giving campaign for UWCM. However, unlike most others, RSM doesn’t limit their campaign to the holiday season. Instead, they run a year-round partnership with UWCM and other nonprofit organizations, providing their Baltimore-based employees with a variety of volunteer opportunities – ways for employees to get hands-on in a meaningful way and to see for themselves where their money is going.
This approach is not limited to the Baltimore office. Across all RSM offices and for all employees, RSM’s “Volunteer Day” encourages employees take a paid work day to volunteer at an organization of their choice. Neill adds that many companies now offer paid time for volunteering as part of their employee benefits package.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In a brief conversation with Jamie Lee Fontaine, office manager and former head of RSM’s Baltimore-based Community Outreach Committee, I learned about a host of other charitable programs RSM offers, such as Birdies for Love and Dollars for Doers, a program through the RSM US Foundation. Jamie Lee also touched upon the evolution of RSM’s community initiatives in Baltimore, which now includes 11 Employee Network Groups (ENGs), including Asian, African American, Pride and Women, and others, each responsible for identifying and taking ownership of opportunities important to them.
Woven throughout each exciting new initiative Jamie Lee described was the theme of empowering employees to connect with nonprofits, the local community and each other in a way that is meaningful to them personally.
Law firms and other professional services firms like RSM who are adopting this new strategy realize that the time they invest is not a loss of billable hours. Rather, it’s an opportunity to build morale and comradery, to help reduce turnover, and to provide their employees with some much-needed and too-often-lacking human interaction. It’s an opportunity to solidify the firm as part of the community in which it operates, the ways Johns Hopkins and Under Armour have done here in Baltimore.
It’s also a PR opportunity. Think about how much more impactful a photo of you and your colleagues rebuilding a home for a family in need or sorting through food and supplies to be distributed to local resource centers is on your firm’s, and that nonprofit’s, social media pages over a boring sponsorship ad buried within the pages of an event brochure, which is more than likely sitting at the bottom of a trash can. In fact, a DC-based agency that specializes in social media advertising recently compared user engagement with ads that feature “real” people versus generic stock-type photography. Can you guess which one won?
As legal marketers, we are constantly juggling multiple projects, sorting through the latest trends and technologies to gain that competitive edge, and striving to make our sometimes old school processes more efficient, all while seizing every opportunity to showcase our value and keep our internal clients happy. Imagine refocusing some of the time and money we spend on sponsorship budgets, advertisements and the like into something with more purpose and more impact. The strategy behind corporate responsibility is evolving – and I’d personally like to see more firms embrace it. Because in the end, everyone benefits – the community, the business and the individual.
By Ashley Rosenblatt, Marketing Coordinator, Gordon Feinblatt for the September/October 2017 LMA Mid-Atlantic Region Newsletter