Welcome back to our Workplace Giving 101 blog series on charitable giving in the workplace. In the first blog, we reviewed all the reasons why having an employee giving campaign can positively impact your workplace. In our second installment, we discussed how to activate leadership and build a team to help you achieve your campaign goals.

Now that you have gathered and motivated your team, it is time to roll up your sleeves and get started with planning how you will promote your campaign with excitement, or as we like to call it, “pizzazz”!
Research has shown that it takes four to six touchpoints before a person donates. Implementing a variety of ways for your co-workers to interact with the campaign will yield the best results. Well-rounded promotional efforts include emails (from leadership and keyworkers), in-person or virtual presentations or events (featuring leadership, charities, or charity beneficiaries), signage, digital engagement (social media and intranet sites) and more.

  • As you prepare to market your campaign, plan for the following actions:
  • Organize your resources.
  • Plan your campaign approach.
  • Promote, promote, promote.

Organize your resources
One way to organize all your thoughts and strategies is to assess resources that you will use during campaign season. The good news for you is that Global Impact has taken the guesswork out of it and made it easy to plan. Following this guide, you can easily put all the pieces together.

  • Create an outline of all the ways that you will spread your message and get people interested in the cause. The easiest way to is by taking some time to organize your thoughts and complete the outline. This will save a lot of time later.
  • Draft a few pieces of correspondence that you will use by pre-writing your emails and messages and scheduling them in your employee email calendar. If you are technologically savvy, you can create these with a targeted send date. If you are unsure how to do this, simply copy and paste your completed email into a calendar appointment to remind you of the day that you will send it out.
  • This is the perfect opportunity for leadership or a charity spokesperson to speak directly to your target audience of coworkers and increase interest in the campaign. Make sure to ask these groups early to solidify your strategies and plan accordingly.

At the end of this blog, you will have the chance to download templates that will help you draft your correspondence to your colleagues. We have pre-drafted these for you to use to make the promotion and communication process easier for you!

Plan your campaign approach
As you begin to strategize your approach, think about the tone and feeling that you would like to convey when you present the causes. You need to show enthusiasm and “pizzazz” when you speak about the impact of the campaign. When planning a presentation, video call or signage, pepper in some eye-catching charity photos to show the donations in action, share your personal experiences and what causes you care about. Finally, plan a strong call-to-action appeal. All of these elements create a sense of something extraordinary or special for the campaign, which will make people excited to participate!

Here’s how to plan a compelling presentation or call to encourage employee participation:

  • Be sure to explain the campaign, introduce the charity, recap any rewards or benefits offered.
  • Provide instructions on how to access the campaign giving links.
  • Utilize social employee communication channels such as Microsoft Teams or Slack to post messages to employees.
  • Always include your links to your giving platform or internal company giving site.
  • Map out the beginning and end dates of the campaign to show a sense of urgency – encourage coworkers to give soon before the campaign is finished so they do not miss their chance.

Become a go-to resource for your coworkers when it comes to all things campaign. Keep them engaged and stay positive, and they will return the energy!

Promote, promote, promote
This process is super easy – it’s time to delegate tasks to your team. While your role as campaign keyworker is to set the stage for the strategy, the team that you assemble to help you is going to be doing a lot of the promotion: they are being advocates for the campaign and why people should donate. The great thing about this is that the message will be coming from various sources and not just the campaign leader.

During the promotional phase of your campaign, you will want a variety of touchpoints to garner and retain your coworkers’ interest. Here are some ways to keep the whole team involved in your promotion:

  • Inspiring emails from leadership and campaign advocates
  • In-person and virtual presentations and/or events
  • Physical and digital signage
  • Digital engagement (social media and intranet contact points)

Plan to be in touch with your coworkers frequently but remember to keep it fresh by alternating the ways that you communicate. An email once a week, along with an intranet message, a video call or leadership message are all ways that you can communicate without being bothersome to your coworkers. Keeping this at the forefront of their mind without being nagging is the key to success.

When you communicate, utilize the following key points to remind your colleagues of the urgency of the campaign, along with the details of the causes and incentives that your employer may be offering:

  • Explore which charities are involved in the company campaign.
  • Consider making your pledge today.
  • Your dollars can be doubled with our employer matching option! (if your employer offers this)
  • Here is some information on how charities will use our collective gifts.

Make sure to update your email signature to include the giving links for the campaign, along with a note such as, “I’m giving to the 2022 Workplace Giving Campaign to provide hunger relief for communities worldwide. Have you made your donation yet?” along with the giving link.

Throughout the process, stay in touch with your leadership team to track the progress of the campaign. Track your monetary goal and participation rates, and make sure to incorporate these into your email and presentation correspondence to keep people interested and intrigued by your campaign.

Download the templates
We hope that this guide has been a valuable resource for you as you plan and prepare your 2022 Employee Giving Campaign. Below, you will find downloadable templates that you can utilize to create your emails and platform messages for your coworkers, as well as a communication plan to visualize your end goal.

SIGN UP TO DOWNLOAD THESE TEMPLATES! {FREE ACCESS}

This process is rewarding and fun, and you will learn a lot about yourself, your abilities and your impact on others throughout the campaign. You never know what others will say until you ask- so get out there, be bold, be vibrant and achieve all your goals this giving season! Don’t forget to add that special little “pizzazz” to everything you do-train yourself and your team to add in all the bells and whistles. It will make all the difference in your participation rate!

We have one final bonus post in this series: an in-depth, tactical guide for campaign volunteers on how to effectively “make the ask” of employees. We will discuss practical, seamless ways to make requests and increase giving within your workplace by overcoming objections, demonstrating the ease of giving and showing the impact of collective generosity.