How to Grow Employee Giving Systemwide (Part I)

Are you facing the challenges of building an employee campaign across many campuses, locations, cities or states? We feel your long-distance relationship pains!

With growing health systems, whether it’s through mergers, acquisitions or expansion efforts many of us face the challenges of building one campaign that resonates across many miles and different localized cultures. So how do you hack the system and use the distance to make the heart grow fonder? Here’s a few tricks that have found helpful as you navigate.

#1 Recruit the right leaders locally

The most critical place to start is finding the localized leader who is ready to champion the employee campaign in their neck of the woods. When you grow your campaign across many locations - your message and campaign need some serious street cred as your roll into new places… and so by recruiting a local employee rockstar to lead the charge locally you get this credibility from the start. This key volunteer becomes your point person for this location/campus and they are the bridge of the campaign messaging to their unique culture where they serve. We have found that by recruiting a leader who is the natural connector and is typically someone who has served in other service-based initiatives, they’ll have an easier time building their bench of volunteers at the department level who can really drill into the local hospital.

Want to geek out on all the roles we recommend for an employee giving campaign? Check out this article: 6 Roles to Ignite Your Employee Giving: https://www.egcmasterclass.com/news/2019/7/17/6-roles-to-ignite-employee-giving

#2 Connect the campaign beneficiary to the local level

If you’ve spent much time with us, you know our philosophy with employee giving is about building philanthropic belief within your employees. And the easiest way to do that is to simply follow through on the impact of their gift and make sure they see and feel great about their contribution to making it happen.

Our success in growing strong branches of our campaign in outlying hospitals from our main campus has always been to offer a localized project that will happen right within the walls of their own facility. Now of course, you likely can’t do this approach with every clinic and location of a major system - but you can certainly get creative and find ways to fund projects at all your main locations.

Having a great local project paired with the right leader (step #1 above) are the one-two punch that have allowed us to scale and grow our employee giving campaign beyond our main flagship campus.

#3 Build a solid campaign framework with room to make it their own

A campaign can live and die by not having the right systems in place - especially as you look to scale your growth. However, by focusing on building a solid campaign framework of the nuts and bolts of the campaign, you can allow your campaign room to breathe and be tailored to fit the context of outlying locations and hospitals.

What are some ways to customize at locations? Our favorite branding approach is to setup photo booths of real employees (no stock photos here!) to use on videos, marketing materials and web/email graphics, so it’s a no brainer to setup opportunities to take photos of employees at each hospital. Other ways to customize the plan is to allow locations the latitude to host kickoff or celebration events in a way that their location loves - or our favorite - finding special ways (especially those unique to their location!) to thank and recognize their donors. When you find the right leader in step #1 they will be key to finding ways to take the plan and make it their own.

Join the Conversation!

I hope these tips are a jumping off point for you as you scheme ways to grow your impact across a big organization. We have three more tips for organization-wide engagement coming at you next week. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you! What are ways you have grown your campaign's long distance relationships?

Jonathan McCoy, CFRE is Director of Annual Giving at INTEGRIS Foundation and Founder and Chief Visionary of We are for Good. {Read more] [Email Jon]