Giving Back: How to Motivate your Colleagues to Support Charities?

Choose a Charity with a Local or Emotional Connection

Partner with a local hostel or charity that needs help raising funds for a particular project.  Pick a cause that your colleagues can relate to – perhaps there is a children’s charity looking to raise funds for equipment, or a homeless charity in need of accommodation services. Keep it simple and engaging, if your colleagues are not keen to part with cash – instead collect food donations for a local food-bank or ‘let them eat cake,’ ask for cake donations and hold a McMillan Coffee Morning in the lobby.

Run an Event or Set a team goal

Create an event that captivates colleagues and incorporates your wider community. Join in with a Centrepoint Sleepover near you, sign up for a personal fitness challenge to raise money for cancer research or a charity of your choice. Most importantly recruit your team mates to join you - it’s well documented that achieving goals is easier with the support of friends and colleagues. Added to which, collecting sponsorship can be far less taxing when you’re doing it as a team.

Fundraising is hugely rewarding and empowering too. Most organisations take a positive approach to pro-active Employees taking on a fundraising or volunteering challenge. These are both valuable life skills that add value and a USP for the CV skill set.

Many Employers actively encourage Employees to fundraise, offering days off or budgets for their Employees to support charities. Lloyds Banking Group has a volunteering programme, called ‘a day to make a difference.’ Employees can spend at least one day per year volunteering for a charity or community project of their choice. Part of Lloyds’ ‘Helping Britain Prosper Plan’ is to deliver 2.3 million hours by 2020. So far, they have exceeded 1 million and in 2017 Employees delivered over 258,000 volunteering hours.

In addition to this, as part of Give & Gain Day, Employees helped over 800 charities and communities with 5,000 colleagues volunteering over the space of a week.

Streamline the payment process and use you social media networks

Giving is now easier than ever, set up a fundraising page with justgiving.com or virginmoneygiving.com. Share the page on your social media networks, among colleagues, family and friends - sit back and watch your fundraising efforts flourish. Donating online is less intrusive and more cost effective as gift aid is usually added at source meaning you can reach fundraising targets faster.

Giving makes us all feel good

According to the Charities Aid Foundation (CAD,) ‘The Knowledge that you’re helping others is hugely empowering and in return can make us all feel happier and more fulfilled.

Research has identified a link between making a donation to charity and increased activity in the area of the brain that registers pleasure – proving the old adage that it really is far better to give than to receive.  When 700 CAD donors were asked what motivates them to give regularly, 42% cited the enjoyment they receive from giving as a key factor.

Go for it, get involved, fundraising can be great fun and a rewarding way to engage with colleagues and team mates to achieve an alternative goal. We have been supporting the OX5 Run for 10 years now, and we are immensely proud to do so. It creates a positive company culture, and we believe it’s something you should look for in a company you want to build a career with, too.

Over the last 20 years, we have grown as a business to become one of the leading independent Recruitment agencies in Oxfordshire, and in 2018 have opened our first London office, to service Clients in the capital.

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