Episode note:

• Learn more about Panorama Strategy

• Check out the Silicon Valley Community Foundation

• Dig into Apple’s employee giving program

• Explore Microsoft’s employee giving program

• Read ACCP’s 5th Annual Insights Report

• Follow Melanie on LinkedIn

Full transcript:

This transcript was automatically generated.

People who work in CSR tend to be big thinkers. They approach their work as a chance to make transformative changes in their organizations and out in the world. And they often measure success against those big picture goals. The trouble is, you rarely get the resources you need right out of the gate.

Anyone who works in CSR has probably had that moment of asking for what you need to execute a big picture vision, and then being given a fraction of what you asked for. It's not something we talk about enough. The ability to scale down when that happens. What it looks like to redefine success in a narrower scope.

Melanie LeGrand has faced that exact moment.

When she pitched her vision for an employee giving campaign for a company she worked with, she didn't get everything she asked for, but she got something.

And she made it her goal to create a lasting, impactful program with the resources she was given.

Today, she walks us through what it was like to pivot, and how she reshaped her vision, and then what it took to recalibrate her definition of success.

Welcome to Impact Audio. I'm Sam Caplan, Vice President of Social Impact at Submittable.

Joining me today is Melanie LeGrand, the Managing Director of Panorama Strategy, a social purpose consultancy. She has two decades of experience crafting and launching CSR programs for organizations of all shapes and sizes. While working with one of these organizations, she saw an opportunity.

So I worked with a company a number of years ago that did not have an employee giving, like, a match program. And so just for those who are listening, employee giving the match program is a dollar for dollar or two dollars to one or something to that effect, where the employer, the corporation that a person works for matches and employees giving to charity. And so I recognize that the company that I worked with did not have one of those programs and I know how important those programs are. And I really wanted to bring that into the company's culture.

And I worked hard to put together a pitch to our executives to say, hey, here are the options we could do, you know, an employee match up to five hundred for particular employees, etcetera, etcetera, because there's so many ways you can run these programs.

And in the end, the decision was not to move forward with an employee giving a match program, but they did move forward with what I thought was a a micro version of this, which was, we work with our platform to give what we call cause cards to our employees that were in the amount of twenty five dollars, and it was, hey, employee Joe. You know, here's twenty five dollars for you to give it to a charity of your choice. So it was starting the program in a way of, if I can't have the full fledged, let me incorporate this into the culture so that we can start to build on that and have this great culture of employee giving and company support.

Launching a giving program from scratch can take a lot of planning and management. Melanie found she had to strike a balance between being proactive and staying flexible so she could pivot and adapt when necessary.

In short, I wanted to instill a culture of employee giving. I pitched the idea to our executive leadership. Although my idea fully wasn't put into effect, I did launch a micro version of that idea. I work with our vendor, our employee involvement on vendor online to set up a system.

I drafted communications, a series of communications. So the guidelines for the program, I worked with our HR team to make sure everything was on the up and up.

Up. I drafted other communications to inspire action. Like, you can get to this charity, or what do you think about this charity? Or those types of things. I promoted it widely. Lots of emails, lots of intranet posts, things that you have available to you in the company. I use those and leverage those and was in, in the end, able to have a good launch of the program that's continued on since I left the way I reported on it all as the progress and the case studies and testimonials from employees who took part in it, shared that with the other employees, shared it with executive leadership, and then reflected on that at the end of each year to say, you know, how good do we do and how can we try to be better next year?

Employee giving provides a unique opportunity for employees to direct resources to causes they care about. Even at a small scale, that can be really powerful in building momentum for a cultural shift.

You can volunteer your time, and, you know, that is exciting, for those who are really committed to that type of work and feel that that is something that they want to do. And then sometimes others have some discretionary income or want to carve out some funding for this to to set up that legacy, to set up the the the feeling that, hey, I'm contributing not just my time, but actually from my finances.

And so I think that this is just such an important way to do that. And when an employee participates in this type of program, they feel more of a tie to the company because the company is supporting their interest. I was reflecting on this, looking at my old files, and it's always interesting to me to see, you know, the stats around what employees give to with these types of programs, and animal causes are always in the top five. And so the company I work for was not related to an animal cause, but the fact that an employee who loves dogs and wants to give to, you know, any type of rescues or shelter, even this twenty five dollars that they would give on behalf of the company, that would feel very special for them. And that's important.

One thing that's unique about the way Melanie shaped this giving program is that it didn't include a matching component.

Instead, they handed employees money to give away. That approach can actually be a really great way to kick start participation in a new initiative.

One of the things that I think about as I reflect on this program and other programs like it at the companies across the nation and beyond is sometimes there's low uptick. There's low conversion.

So let's say for example, a company has an employee giving program, employee match program, and they will give, you know, a thousand dollars. They will match an employee's gift to charity a thousand dollars, you know, a typical conversion for this, maybe, like, forty percent. So if you give that match opportunity to five employees, only two of them are going to be able to give, and then you can match it. And I think that that is so interesting to see.

And so when you think about why someone wouldn't take advantage of that, yeah, there is reasons. Like, I don't want you to know who I'm giving to or, you know, I forgot. You know, you sent me ten emails, but I I put it on my to do list, and I just didn't make the deadline. But one of the reasons that I've learned through my career that people don't participate in these programs is because they don't have the income to do it.

So even if you are at a company that doesn't have a program or a company like one of the big tech companies that gives you fifteen thousand dollars in matching, the the ability for someone to give a little bit is important. And so I I just think to your point, this cause cards program, even though it wasn't an official, we're going to match what you give, now it's just we're gonna give so that you can support an organization on your terms without your financial resources because you may not have those to give. So there's a lot of ways to support this type of programming, and this is the way that we did.

Measuring the success of a giving program is often about impact on the community and the business, but it's also worth noting that the longevity of a program in itself is a measure of success.

Yeah. I'm so pleased that even though I launched this program years ago, the company is still running it. And that is a win. That is a win, even though they have not progressed to what I think would be best case scenario is, hey.

Why don't you let the employees know they can have up to a thousand dollars in matching gifts every year? The fact that they're still continuing this this level of support of, like, hey. You know, we support you, and and this is the way we're gonna support you right now in parallel with our other ways in which we support you, whether that's employee volunteerism or, you know, whatever it is that the assets that the company has to offer the employees. So that's success.

So when you think about longevity, even though the amount and the the program was short term in terms of the the window that employees could give, that's still a success in my book. And I think the fact that they expect it, the employees expect it, they welcome it, they think about this as part of the culture, that's long term, and that helps to really support the employee satisfaction and people feeling valued and feeling like they belong in the organization.

For Melanie, handing money to employees so that they can give it to any nonprofit they choose seemed like a surefire way to get people involved in giving, but some people didn't participate. It was a good lesson in how companies need to see engagement as an ongoing holistic effort and not a onetime push.

We gave the opportunity for employees to here. Here's a card. Go, you know, go forth and and and give the money to charity, but it wasn't a hundred percent participation.

And so that always blows my mind, but you'll you'll see statistics, that tell you that there's so much matching gifts that go unclaimed every year. Billions upon billions of dollars an employee gives to charity, doesn't ask their company if there is a matching gifts program, doesn't even put in the request to get matching gifts. That money is like free money to a nonprofit, and it hurts my heart to think about individuals who have these very large matching gifts programs that don't even go to the site and fill out the paperwork for that nonprofit to get an extra thousand, two thousand and three, like that blows the mind.

But again, you know, each person decides to do that on their own. They may say, oh, I forgot. I didn't do it on the deadline. Or they may say, like I mentioned before, they don't want the company to know who they give to.

Right.

Because they think they might judge them or whatever.

Or sometimes there's some matching gifts programs that are very tight in terms of a company may say, we're only gonna match if you give to these ten organizations or if you just give to your alma mater, those kinds of things. So it's just surprising to me to see little participation numbers.

I worked with Microsoft Silicon Valley when I was at Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

And one of the things that I was so impressed with is they pride themselves on employee participation in their employee matching gifts programs.

And they would, at the time I worked at, the community foundation, Microsoft at that time would do like a three week run of bringing in nonprofits, incentivizing employees to come to the cafeteria and meet this nonprofit. Like, they they blew they blew it up. Like, we want you to use these matching gifts. And they had very, very high participation numbers. So, I think it just depart determines, you know, how much the company gives and how much they're willing to support and what they really want their employees to to do versus what they say they wanna support.

It's easy to get stuck in the binary of success or failure, but that's not a particularly useful way to approach CSR work. Because what you might label a failure on its own can be a step towards success if you look at the big picture. It's important to keep this context front and center as you iterate and evolve your strategy.

You know, this is the thing about doing this work and also being an executive in this work. That's the name of the game. Right? You try things, you fail fast, you fail forward.

That's what we always talk about, especially having worked in Silicon valley for so many years, with Silicon valley community foundation and having a portfolio of tech companies under my belt. You really want to throw things out there and then see what sticks and see what the executives are gonna support. And then you have this this benchmark. You have this foundational data that you can use and say, hey.

We started that. You gave me a budget of x and and look look at, you know, the retention numbers, look at the employee satisfaction numbers, look at the poll survey we did after that and look, you know, how many more people were happy about being at this company. Like all these things matter to the bottom line. And so then you use that data and you say next year, I'd like to increase the budget by fifteen percent.

Can can we do that? Like, look what I have, look what I started. And so I think being able to establish something is going to go a long way.

The ability to create that story for leadership is essential for launching programs and sustaining them, but you need to tell the right story to the right person.

I think that the data is always important. In any CSR role, understanding the decision makers and what motivates them is the most important thing you have to do.

You know, typically in CSR or social impact leaders and corporations, you report into maybe a marketing person or a human resources person or a communications person. And in some of the best lucky cases, you report straight to the CEO, the function reports to the CEO. But understanding who your decision makers are and what drives them so if you're reporting into a person who leads, you know, is it CHRO, right, the chief human resources officer or people and culture team that that kind of, nomenclature, maybe their motivation is that recruitment.

Right. So if you look at some of the tech companies, I think maybe Apple, their matches, maybe fifteen thousand and Microsoft, maybe ten or fifteen or twenty. I can't speak to it, but that's, that's a factor when you've got all these engineers, especially younger people who are coming in now, there's so many stats out there that tell you that individuals, employees, they care about this type of work and this and their companies caring about this work. And so if you report into HR and you understand that this is a differentiating factor and a lever that you can pull to bring in more employees, to bring in employees who care about this type of thing, then that's what you speak to when you're pitching these programs.

Now if you report into a marketing person, that person may care more about, well, if my employees are giving to a charity and I match it, what's the story that I'm going to tell to get more consumers to think highly of my brand? Because that will indirectly allow me to get more revenue. So you just have to think about the motivating factor for the decision makers in the room, and then have your different programs that you're pitching and see which one resonates, and then you pivot from there as you as you need to.

There's increasing pressure from leadership to report on the impact of giving programs. In the latest insights report from ACCP, seventy one percent of respondents said they experienced an increase in demand for impact measurement. But according to Melanie, it's less about the hard data and more about the story.

I think that the CSR practitioner needs the sophistication of the reporting in order to tell the story, But I don't think most CEOs or, you know, executive decision makers that you report into are like, I'd like to see that chart.

Right. They're more like, what's the bottom line? Oh, we had seventy four percent employee participation.

We gave three hundred thousand dollars to charities, to to a thousand charities and including our top five charities, which were, you know, sanctuary for families, feeding America, and save the children. They they want the story at the top. I don't the software and the platform is what the CSR practitioner needs to be able to tell that story and to, you know, not have to do as much minutia type work. But I don't think the executive is like, pull that report for me from that platform and give it to me every thirty days. It's not happening, in my opinion.

When you're looking to deliver reporting that really captures your program impact and satisfies leadership's need for specificity, storytelling plays a key role. All the metrics you collect have to connect to a narrative that resonates with both leadership and employees.

I tell friends and colleagues and those who reach out and they want, you know, to chat about my career, I tell them that, you know, I'm one of the rare people who uses the degrees they earned every day. My marketing degree from twenty plus years ago, I'm marketing all of the time. I'm marketing myself. I'm marketing the product, whether I work at a company or not.

I'm marketing a program. I'm always selling. You don't think about it like that, but that's the soft skill. And, you know, for some cases, it's the the hard skill.

Right? But this is the soft skill of relationships and understanding what the end user, the person who you're going to be speaking to, what do they need? What do they need to hear? What do they need to feel?

What do they need to really focus on so that they will give you a yes? And I've I've done that throughout my entire career, whether it was years ago working for an NFL team and saying, hey, player x. There's a school that would really love for you to come and speak to their fifth graders about goal setting. There's there is this push and pull of marketing.

Like, the school is amazing. The kids wanna hear from you. You have a great story to tell. That same skill set I use as a CSR practitioner at Amazon Web Services or at Major League Baseball or, you know, all of the other places that I've worked at.

Like, that that's the soft skill you need to think about is how do I position something such that I can move it forward and have progress against it so I can get to the actual outcome that I require?

For CSR professionals, part of the appeal of the job is that they can bring their values into their work. When I asked Melanie what her ideal giving program would look like, she laid out a specific vision with one really important caveat.

I think the first thing I would say is, well, number one, there's programs I wanna put into effect, but I would also understand there are guardrails for those. Like, I have lots of thoughts. Right? I'm I'm really big on scholarship programs.

I'm really big on education. I'm really big on girls' education in the middle school grades. It's such a significant time for young women and a lot of statistics tell you. Right?

When you invest in a girl, you invest in an entire community. And that middle school time is a time when they decide I'm gonna do extracurriculars, I'm gonna stay focused, or they go into a different path, which could result in things like negative behaviors. Right? And so I would want to do that if I had the most money in the world.

But if one of these companies reach out to me, I'm not gonna pitch something like that. That's my vision. If it doesn't align to the corporation, because I want it to be successful. And I understand that CSR really does add to the triple bottom line of people, planet and profits.

And so that's a tough question for me to answer.

My personal nature would allow me to establish programs that are investing in things that I care about that I think have long term impact in systemic change. But I'm smart enough to know that if I work for a company, I have to be thoughtful about what makes sense for the company.

I think that answer sums up the balance that social impact professionals have to strike between their personal values and the company's, and between chasing that ideal state and the resources they have to work with on the ground. So if you're trying to launch or revamp an employee giving program, based on Melanie's advice, I'd start with these steps: one. Calibrate your scope to match your resources.

Two. Redefine success to match your scope. And three. Use metrics to find the story that resonates so you can build on your success.

That's all for me today. Thanks for tuning in to Impact Audio, produced by your friends at Submittable.

Until next time.