Charity & business partnerships are essential for ensuring organisations can continue their great work. In our last post, ‘5 Reasons to Support a Charity’ we highlighted all the benefits of doing so. In this post, we will look at how to support a charity through your business. Along with the most obvious ways such as monetary donations, there are other more creative ways. Carry on reading to find out more!
-
Charity Donation Match
A popular way to encourage customers to contribute to your cause is to match their donations. On the other hand, you could invite them to match yours. If you donate £1 of every order to charity, provide customers the option to match that.
If you are a business that doesn’t receive a large amount of individual orders, this isn’t ideal for you. Another way to donation match is to apply the same rule to employee donations. Whether it be through fundraising or salary donations, this may encourage personal donations.
-
Auto sponsor
This idea solely relates to those inside the business. Many companies make it policy to automatically sponsor employees who are taking part in charity events. For example, Kingspan Insulation will sponsor any employee £100 fundraising for a local charity and £50 for a national charity. Providing these incentives is not only good for brand image, but also requires minimal effort on the company’s behalf. -
Donate Time
Time is a priceless commodity that a lot of charities need. It could be anything from a bag pack at the local supermarket or being a marshal at an event. Many of us always think of ourselves as too busy outside of work. It can be hard to find time to volunteer and easier to donate money. Depending on the time you have available, there are a few options:
Days:
This is where businesses and employers can help. By offering employees time out of the working day to volunteer, it’s easier than ever. In the UK there are many organisations that can help facilitate these days such as Employee Volunteering. E. V are a non-profit community interest company who organise volunteering to ensure the time is well spent. Employee can use their time helping at care centres, schools and much more.
A great example of this is British Gas whose employee volunteering hours went from 28,852 in 2013 to 37,720 hours in 2013. If this rate of growth continues there will be 1 in 3 employees volunteering by 2018. In 2014 more than 4,000 British Gas employees teamed up with Shelter to trek across Britain raising money for the homeless.
Minutes/ Hours:
If the prospect of a whole day out of office is too much, there are other options. Age UK have a programme named “Call in Time”. This programme aims to match employees with an older person for weekly phone-call catch ups.
-
£1 per Order
We support our partner charity Promise Dreams by donating £1 per order on our Lockers and Wheelie bin websites. £1 is a small gesture that can add up to a big sum with busy websites like ours. Our total donation from this is at over £11800 and counting since April 2015.
1p:
If you have a high volume of orders then £1 may be an unreasonable amount. Marks and Spencer donate just 1p for every transaction on their loyalty cards. When a customer registers their Sparks Card they are asked to choose a charity they would like to benefit. These charities include Macmillan Cancer Support, WWF, Unicef and more. 1 pence might sound very little but when there are thousands of transactions a day, it soon adds up. Since 2015, Sparks members have raised more than £790,000 for Macmillan Cancer Support. That doesn’t sound like very little now, does it?
50p:
Similarly, Pets at Home ask their VIP Club members to choose an animal charity to support. Thanks to this, the loyalty scheme has raised more than £1 million for charities such as Dogs Trust, RSPCA and Blue Cross. If your business can’t commit to a full-time charity donation scheme, a seasonal one may be the solution. Pets at Home do this by taking part in the Santa Paws appeal. The 50p customers can donate feeds animals in shelters a Christmas dinner. The 2016 Santa Paws appeal reached a total of 2,128,128 meals.
-
Alternative Services
If donating cash isn’t a viable option for your business, then there are other ways to help. If you’re a service orientated business, you could offer pro-bono services. For example, if you’re a PR and marketing firm, offer to do a campaign for a charity. Excel Rain Main donates Excel Video Tutorials to non-profit organisations. These tutorials usually cost $100 and are designed to help sharped spreadsheet skills and data analysis.Here at Direct2U we invited the new marketing staff of our chosen charity in for a crash course on the subject. Lasting only a few hours, the session allows us to help on a deeper level. Advice, experience and support is an invaluable concept that is essential to charities.
Direct2U also donates products, including a large quantity of high visibility jackets for a sponsored walk. Another alternative would be to offer your office space. Smaller non-profit organisations often struggle for office or meeting room space. Alternatively, when throwing out old furniture or equipment, offer it to charities before throwing it in the skip.
Thanks for reading. Of course there are many, many other ways to get your business involved with charity. We hope you find some inspiration to try something new from this post. Let us know how you support charity and which charity it is, we’d love to find out!
Thanks to the following links for the useful information we used to write this post: