AngelPoints Client Luncheon: World Cafe Discussion
I had a wonderful time at this year's AngelPoints Client Luncheon helping facilitate a world café discussion with everyone. I was really impressed with the sophisticated levels of discussion from all of the brilliant minds in the room.
I know we didn't have enough time to devote to the question I posed, "What is the one thing you could do to double the effectiveness of your program?" But, it touched off a lot of great discussion about what has and hasn't worked within each of your programs.
Overall, the big message was that volunteer programs should really be employee-centric and focus on providing the right kinds of recognition to help motivate people to get involved. As the conversations were rolling along, I took a few notes. Below are some of the more salient points that bubbled up.
We would love to hear your stories from that discussion and have some more dialogue on what we could do to improve all of our programs. The AngelPoints client community is large and full of bright individuals. Jump in and start talking! (Oh, and tell your colleagues about this dicussion. We hope it will bear a lot of fruit!)
Be very creative in your communications and get support from upper management.
Volunteers sharing their experiences and managers sharing their learnings will help the volunteer management programs over the long run.
Event managers should get cheat sheets on how to set up and run their events.
The employees are the un-sung heros of every volunteer program.
AngelPoints is a great resource to help and troubleshoot any issues.
Employee recognition is one of the bigget factors in a successful program.
- $5 tokens for volunteers to redeem
- Employees get a chance to work side-by-side w/ upper management
- Dollars for doers works
- Gift certificates
You have to answer the question, "What's in it for me?"
There should be a direct correlation between volunteer activities and corporate initiatives. It translates into
real change and brand leadership.
So, with that said, "What is the one thing you could do to double the effectiveness of your program?"
A number of clients are interested in the business model of Dollars for Doers, so if you are able to do so, please share your budget and guidelines for your programs below. One of the biggest concerns seems to be that once you open the flood gates, the budget could get out of control. How have you dealt with this?
Recognition is a big topic for us and one I've written about elsewhere. It's fundamental to our name "AngelPoints," which has always hinted at the idea that people should be rewarded for their service. Certainly there are karmic, spiritual and emotional rewards for getting engaged, but we are exploring ways to create additional tangible rewards to increase excitement, participation and results. Stay tuned for innovative ideas on this topic in the near future. We're exploring a best-practices webinar on this topic too, so please chime in if that's of interest to you.
In the meantime, we hope you will utilize the tools we've given you to engage employees. Now they have a real voice and can be heard by others. And sometimes just knowing that you are not alone in your efforts and that others care about causes you're invested in is reward enough.
Cindy Skinner of AAA shared an excellent suggestion for expanding the number of people engaged in EVPs - plan ahead 6 months if possible.
What are you planning? A strong internal marketing campaign that can include the creation of a corporate volunteer website and highlighting one "unsung" volunteer hero story every week on that site or in a corporate newsletter.
Thanks for the inspiring suggestions everyone...