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“While the world is getting better, the
disparity between the top and the bottom is getting greater,” according
to Talisman CEO John Manzoni. “Those of us at the top who have
benefitted from an astounding couple of decades of prosperity often forget
that the things that have contributed to that prosperity have actually made
things worse for some people.”
“Calgary itself plays a role in that,”
he continues. “It’s an oil town, a hydrocarbon city. As the price
of oil goes up so do costs…the cost of food, the cost of accommodation,
the cost of fuel. As a result, people get left behind. All that’s
happening in the financial sector is just exacerbating the situation. I am
increasingly of the view that business has a moral obligation and
responsibility to help to bridge those gaps.”
Those comments represent the windup to
Manzoni’s reply to my question, “Why did you agree to co-chair
this year’s United Way campaign?” Now comes
the pitch. “If you can do something locally, that’s all the
better. Based on that perspective, (the United Way) is a great opportunity to
do something that helps.”
A relative newcomer to Calgary – he assumed
Talisman’s top job from Britain four years ago – Manzoni also
acknowledges business reasons to become involved. “From a selfish
perspective, I’m new to the city and it’s a great way to get to
know more people. There are many advantages to doing this in addition to the
fact that you can do some good.”
Manzoni’s co-chair this year is Sue Riddell
Rose – the CEO of Perpetual Energy, which has about 180 employees
locally. A native of the city, Rose says she’s “involved in the
program because it aligns perfectly with my goals and my husband’s
goals and my family’s goals, and our vision of what we want the city of
Calgary to be.”
She adds that “The United Way has been a
presence in the community for quite a long time. It’s often been said
that every dollar given to the United Way contributes six dollars of benefit
to the community. That’s because the United Way helps fund high-impact
programs that help the city avoid certain kinds of outcomes down the road. If
you do that, you can save the system quite a bit of money.”
Campaign co-chairs “come from every part of
the spectrum of the Calgary community – sports figures, small business,
technology. It just happened that this year they’re both executives
from the energy industry,” according to Ruth Ramsden-Wood,
who has been the CEO of the Calgary and Area United Way organization for the
last 14 years. On average each co-chair dedicates 46 hours to the annual
campaign. “They lead a cabinet of 50 people who represent every
segment of our society, from major energy companies to universities to unions,”
she says. They “work with those people and they meet with people
throughout the community for the whole year leading up to the campaign.
It’s a pretty hefty role. They become very visible in the
community.”
“We put a lot of time into developing our
cabinet and they develop additional cabinets in their own sectors,”
adds Susan Rose. “That enables our efforts to trickle down and into the
community.”
Fun
Manzoni, Ramsden-Wood and
Rose give the big-picture look at the United Way. If you narrow your focus to
the workplace campaign, matters get much more interesting.
“Every company has its own fun events”
says Susan Rose. “It’s part of the intrigue that you can use
these events to express your own creativity. Something like 1,200 United Way
campaigns will take place this year, and they will all be different. Lots of
creativity comes into play, and that can be defining for companies’
cultures.”
What kind of fun? Ask Melanie Swanson, an integrity
analyst at Nexen and chair of that company’s
2011 United Way campaign. Nexen’s theme is
“Be a superhero,” and that theme led to a public relations home
run for the company.
As the United Way season kicked off, hordes of
company employees donned superhero costumes to test the previous world record
for “most superheroes in a single place.” According to Swanson,
“It was a lot of fun to organize the event, but the purpose was to
breathe life into the campaign. There was an adjudicator from the Guinness
Book of World Records present, and we had to meet particular criteria.”
When the adjudicator announced that Nexen’s
437 superheroes had blown away the previous world record, a jubilant crowd
went wild. The event got wide-eyed publicity across the full spectrum of
media – from TV to Twitter.
The superhero stunt reflects a corporate culture
that strongly supports the charity. A year ago Nexen
and its 1900 Calgary-area employees contributed a jaw-dropping $1.4 million
to the United Way. Half the total was a corporate contribution.
Nexen’s media success was the
envy of other companies. According to Peter Ingle, Imperial’s surplus
property manager and co-chair of the company’s campaign, “We have
fun events, but I have to admit I’m a bit jealous of what Nexen did. I’d like to do something like that. Our
events have tended to be more internal. For example, we have large-scale Wii
competitions among our employees.”
Ruth Ramsden-Wood never
tires of telling stories about corporate fun. For example, “a few years
ago a law firm auctioned a goat for its chairman, and I can’t tell you
how many e-mails came in from around the country making pledges.” She
adds that many companies find imaginative ways to raise money. For example,
for three months each year Esso markets $25 United Way gift cards at its
service stations – while supplies last, of course. From each sale, two
dollars go to the charity.
When it comes to individual campaigns, companies can
do anything. According to Manzoni, “to kick off our campaign we had a
breakfast for our employees, and about 300 or 400 came. We need events like
that to tell people the stories out there – for example, to tell them
about the children who go to school without breakfast. The number in Calgary
is stunning – I think it’s 20,000. People need to know that, and
we need to find ways to fix it.”
Corporate Support
The high level of corporate support within Calgary
has helped make the city a champion within Canada’s United Way network.
Last year’s campaign raised about $52 million. In terms of total funds
raised, that amount put the city in Canada’s number three spot.
However, at $39.20 the city was fifth in terms of per capita giving. Fort
McMurray was tops, with contributions of $64.78 per head.
Corporate support involves much more than cash, of
course. First and foremost, it involves the work and commitment of individual
volunteers. “If employees want to take time to work on the campaign, we
let them have it,” says Manzoni, “and we find ways to make them
feel special.”
Some companies lend people from their staff to the
United Way. “We usually get them involved at the beginning of fall, and
they work throughout the campaign,” according to Ramsden-Wood.
“They become our arms and legs. I believe we have 35 this year, but in
previous years we’ve sometimes had more. Companies do this to some
extent because they see it as a leadership development opportunity for their
employees.”
Nexen’s Melanie Swanson worked
as a loaned rep with the United Way last year, and says she got a great deal
out of the experience. “It gave me a sense of how much the United Way actually
does. So this year I wanted to contribute again by chairing our corporate
campaign.” Swanson and Peter Ingles are two good examples of how the
system works, and how much effort is involved.
“I’m a big believer in the United Way
and I have been ever since I joined the company 27 years ago,”
according to Peter Ingle. “I think it’s a good way to be
involved. The United Way targets funds in a very
focused way.”
“At Esso we have two campaign chairs, and
there is an overlap,” he says. “The lead co-chair is putting in
maybe 20% of her time during the peak period of our campaign; I’m
putting in about 10%. Next year I will do the bulk of the work while we train
somebody else for the year after that. We have a really active cabinet, and
we have floor leaders” whose job is to see whether their colleagues
will open their hearts and wallets to the charity.
While Esso has a notional target of $1.2 million in
contributions from Calgary-area employees, Ingle stresses that this is
strictly an internal number. “Philanthropy is a very personal
thing,” he says, “and we don’t do anything to influence
where people direct their gifts. We designed the campaign to help people
learn more about United Way and how it can help in our community, but we also
send out a really clear message that (giving) is up to the individual.”
Nexen’s Swanson says that during
this year’s peak campaign period she invested half of her time in the
company’s campaign. A lot of that time went into the superhero event,
which she says was designed to “increase participation in and awareness
of the event.” Like Ingle, she was assisted by people on each floor who
went from office to office talking up United Way giving.
In her case, they were called “Floor
Superheroes,” and most of them trotted around with brochures in their
Guinness-adjudicated superhero outfits. Asked how much time she and the other
volunteers in her company have given to the cause this year, all she could
say was “hundreds of hours.” She estimates that the cash cost of
the campaign represented 1-2% of the total money raised.
Virtually all the larger companies in the energy
industry make direct contributions to the United Way, but they follow quite
different models. According to Ramsden-Wood,
gift-matching is “really driven by the philosophy within the
company.” The most common approach is gift-matching, by which companies
match employees’ and often annuitants’ contributions.
Gift-matching is usually dollar for dollar, but some companies match at even
higher levels – in at least one case, three dollars for every dollar
given by the employee.
Gift-matching can be a powerful motivator –
especially since there is often no limit to the size of your gift, and you
can actually direct your gift to a specific charity along those the United
Way serves. Thus, whether you donate $10 or $10,000, matching funds will double the amount the charity receives. As Susan Rose
explains it, gift-matching is a way “to show that the corporation is
passionate about what our employees are passionate about. The United Way is
not the only area where we match employee giving.”
Gift-matching can also cost a company dear.
According to Ramsden-Wood, “Some years ago a
retiree from Shell was giving huge amounts to the community (through the
United Way), and the company matched him for every dollar he gave.”
Last year, Shell and its people contributed five percent of the total raised
in Calgary. Between 2000 and 2010, their contributions exceeded $32 million
– a vivid illustration of the energy industry’s impact on the
city’s not-for-profit agencies.
Unlike most other companies, Imperial doesn’t
use the gift-matching model. Its Esso Foundation treats corporate United Way
funding as part of its nation-wide community investment program. According to
the company’s Jon Harding, “the total budget is based on
community need in the regions where we live and operate. Over 17 communities
across Canada receive funding as part of our annual United Way grants.”
People Power
While workplace campaigns are an extremely important
part of the United Way calendar, the organization’s volunteers are
active throughout the year.
In United Way parlance, leaders are those who give
from $1000-$10,000 in a year and major donors are those who give more.
According to Susan Rose, “We have a Leaders initiative, but we also
have a Major Donors initiative and I’m very involved in those
relationships.” As John Manzoni elaborates, “The vast amount of
money comes from Leader level giving, so we want to increase leadership
giving.” That is one area of the organization’s focus.
The other is to bring new people into the United Way
– “to engage the younger generation.” Organization insiders
describe this effort as their BeCause initiative.
According to Rose, it “originated 10 years ago to try to get the aged
23 to 35 demographic – people who often don’t have the means to
actually give – to become ambassadors spreading the good word about
what the United Way is doing in our community. Our company actually has two BeCause ambassadors – young, high-potential
employees. They are leading our United Way campaign. Ambassadors focus on the
idea that if we work as a village we can make the city a better place.”
It’s all about people power.
According to Peter Ingle, Esso also focuses
“on getting newer employees engaged in the United Way. We encourage
them to just give their time through our Days of Caring, for example.”
This is a program in which a team from the company will go out and work in
the community – helping repair and repaint a shelter for street kids,
for example. At Talisman, Manzoni says, “we dedicate a week to the idea
of having (our working groups share) ‘A Day That Makes a
Difference.’ Members of our executive team get involved in volunteering
somewhere, and people get involved with them.”
“I am inspired by the amount of work the many
people involved in the United Way campaign actually do,” says Ruth Ramsden-Wood, who will retire this winter. “We are
a chronically understaffed not-for-profit organization, and it is these
people who make possible what we do each year.”
Peter McKenzie-Brown
Language Instinct
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