Whatever field your business, fundraising can be seen as a useful tool. Fundraising can fulfil multiple objectives, including providing employee engagement and team building whilst also enhancing corporate responsibility and creating awareness. It is a way to promote the good work of your company and your staff with the benefit of helping good causes. With various fundraising techniques and avenues to explore in this article Charlotte Baldwin, Operations Manager at IQ Cards, shares her tips to start your own fundraising initiatives within your company.
Allocate a team
One of the first steps to successfully build on your capacity to fundraise would be to set up a committee. Assigning dedicated roles, the committee will take on board researching potential events through to execution. This will be an ongoing team who will also liaise with potential charities and events as well as gain interest and involvement from other staff members.
Set fundraising objectives
Once your committee is in place they can begin to work together to source charities and fundraising events. They might focus their efforts on causes that have a link to your line of work, or you might even put forward a local cause within the community or even look towards your staff, if fundraising efforts could personally help a cause close to their heart. Over the course of the year there will also be various charities and events happening on a national scale which provide support for organisations to get on board.
Encourage volunteering
Volunteering is a great approach to encourage your employees to get ‘hands on’ within their community. Time will need to be spent researching potential placements, accepting volunteering efforts and provision will need to be in place to enable staff to be out of the office to take part. This could even turn into an annual initiative within your firm. Maintenance to or upgrading community facilities or gardens as well as establishments such as community centres or hospitals could be good areas to centre fundraising objectives.
Promote internal activities
This is an area that can provide lots of scope from setting up larger scale activities to supporting individual initiatives, all of which will keep fundraising at the forefront of your employee engagement programme. Opportunities can range from bake sales through to sponsoring sporting conquests, but supporting your employees through raising awareness through your company can be the key to making these fundraising opportunities a success.
Charity affiliations
If you are struggling to with fundraising opportunities or lack of partakers why not look at bigger national campaigns taking place over the course of the year to create awareness and raise your fundraising profile? Initiatives such as Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day are well known and highly publicised so might be easier to gain employee engagement. With larger scale events, employees will most likely have family, friends and other external parties that will be involved which will make participation levels higher. Larger events can also open up avenues for publicity through broadcasted events or reporting on totals raised. Also look into fundraising tools such as sites like Go Fund Me.
In the workplace fundraising can be a great way of boosting your corporate responsibility activities by supporting worthy causes as well as providing a great avenue for increasing employee engagement, and promoting a positive approach to company culture. Employees will also be thankful for the opportunity and will gain great satisfaction from working for a company that truly strives to make a difference.
About the Author
Charlotte Baldwin is Operations Manager at IQ Cards, a fundraising company that provide schools and establishments with the necessary tools to fundraise via selling high-quality and unique gifts designed by pupils. For more information visit: www.iqcards.co.uk
