Welcome, everyone. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is pleased to present this online webinar. Employee Giving campaigns. My name is Ann Weller and it's my pleasure to introduce our speakers today. Jesse Pisors has spent 25 years in educational leadership, including senior advancement positions at both private and public universities. Currently, he serves as vice president for advancement and external relations at the University of Houston, Victoria, where he played a leadership role in the University of Houston System's successful $1 billion campaign. He has led his team at V to set multiple fundraising records since 2015. Susan Summers joined Low's Lonestar College Foundation in 2015 and serves as the director of donor relations, where she creates and implements raising and communication strategies that enhance giving and cultivate new donors to the foundation. As a 23 year veteran of the advancement profession, Susan has worked on a variety of sectors, including private K-through-12 education, higher education, health care and social services. Susan has enjoyed a hands on and in-depth experience in all areas of advancement, including annual funds, capital campaigns, major gifts, galas, golf tournaments, marketing and communications, donor relations and alumni relations. Welcome, Jesse and Susan. Thank you very much. And we appreciate that. It's great to be here and great to be here with all of you successful alumni or I'm sorry, employee giving campaigns to be executed at all sizes of institutions and all types of institutions. The University of Houston, Victoria, where I serve, is a public rural university, located about 2 hours from from Houston along the Texas Gulf Coast. We have about 5000 students and we have about 450 benefits eligible employees. We've had a great run with our employee giving campaign. Matter of fact, we reached 69% participation in 2020. And on the other end of the spectrum, there is Lonestar College in the greater Houston, Texas area, which is a multi campus community college serving over 93,000 students in their educational journeys, which includes nearly 200 programs for academic transfer, workforce development, and recently a few new bachelors degree programs. Lonestar Employees 2900 full time employees. And when you add part time employees, it's about a total of 8000. We have been doing employee giving campaigns formally for just the past five years, actually six campaigns since 2015. Although we're giving percentage average a full time employees is not as high as we would like, just 39%. We did just exceed the million dollar mark in funds raised. So we have some room to grow and we are excited to share what we as advancement. Leaders at a small world university with University of Houston, Victoria and a large urban community college with Lone Star College have learned and implemented about the keys to success for employee giving campaigns. And now we will start with Jesse at the University of Houston, Victoria. All right, Suzanne, thank you very much. Yeah, again, great to great to be here and great to share with you. And I think the way we thoughts is and I thought this would be a great way to present it is just as two case studies. Right. Two very different institutions, but very similar in that we are we're serving students. We're trying to engage all of our faculty and staff in that effort. And so as case study number one, University of Houston, Victoria, we're going to talk about our employee giving campaign. And I certainly think that there will be some nuggets you'll be able to take away from this that you'll find valuable and hopefully can implement some elements of these in your own employee giving confidence at the University of Houston, Victoria, you see, we have branded our campaign the same for all 15 years. In 2006 we developed the one for All, all for one campaign logo that you see here and and the slogan one for all of the one. This is the employee giving campaign at the University of Houston, Victoria. Some campaigns vary annually with a different campaign approach. We have found success in having the same branding in the same message in year after year, and it has really helped us all employees, all staff, even those who don't yet participate in the campaign, which is the minority of them. They recognize this, they recognize this logo, the little jaguar around the one. And they they know what one for all is. And that's just a common within the sort of the lexicon is that way to be. Just to explain a little bit about the brand, because we think that is important one. So this is one cost, right? One clause, which is that the the mission of the University of Houston for you, the students we serve research that the faculty dotted all that word is repeated twice. One for all, all for one all means everybody is involved. And as you'll hear from both myself and Susan, getting everybody involved is always the goal. So all repeated twice as an important word. You see the one in the middle, Of course, it means for one mission, but it also alludes to a part of our campaign which specifically recognizes donors who give a little bit more. So we have what's called the president's circle. And the president's circle is made up of those faculty and staff who give 1% or more of their gross salary during the course of the year. So that's a substantial a really, really puts them into a significant category. We had about two dozen of those this past year, so not a lot. But we want to recognize people who get it a little bit higher level. So the one also refers to that 1% goal that we that we do promote. And then there's a Jaguar. We are the Jaguars of our sports teams. Our mascot. So it's all about school spirit as well. And we think that's pretty important. 2006 to the present 15 years. That's almost an eternity in advancement, isn't it? So in a way, the story of these Employee Giving campaign is the history of an annual giving campaign that worked and endured. You see a couple of quotes. There are a couple of pictures, one from our director of Marketing and Communications, one from our recently retired past president, Dr. Morgan, and a little bit about their thoughts. It's been very important to really have this not certainly it's a led by the Office of University Advancement, but really the force behind it and the force that makes it makes it successful is having employees from all departments and all levels really bought in. And then that's a momentum that just builds on itself. One thing that I that I think is very important about our campaign and I would encourage you to try to consider for your own campaign one for all of the one at HP is an example of the quest for what I call staying power in annual giving campaigns. When you think of annual giving in a broad sense, there are so many efforts that we start and maybe they last for a few years, but to keep something going for 15 years is no small thing. I've only been here for six years, so I can't even claim to to contribute to half of that timeline. On the left hand side, you see Robin Abel. She was our advancement leader back in 2006 who started this campaign. She's still a very involved alumni, a leader in our community. Then on the other side of that area of Pyramid, our current director of alumni relations. And so from Robin to Chiara, over 15 years, we've managed to keep it going. And I think if you can do that, if you can build the strength of a brand over time, it really makes a difference in your overall success. You hear me referring to annual giving, you might be thinking, Well, this is about employee giving. Well, I consider an employee giving campaign a substantive annual giving, annual giving. Being the broader term. I define annual giving is the amount that any donor of any category would be reasonably expected to give to your organization each year. So for some people it's $50 or $25. For someone else, it might be thousands of dollars. But absent the campaign, absent special commitment, this is that amount of money that they could give every year if you're on on their list, so to speak, of charity. So that's what annual giving gifts. We kind of start with that background, some assumptions of annual giving. So your annual giving donors, which includes those employees who give to give to your institution, you're not probably giving to just one nonprofit each year. Right? They're probably giving to a number or maybe even ten or 15. And there's a hierarchy to both the nonprofits they support and to the causes they support. I say fluid because they may be passionate about education right now, but a few years from now, maybe animal welfare will become a little bit more important or religion will be a little bit more important. Maybe their church is on that list and it's kind of vying with their alma mater or the university or college they work at as a place they could get to. When you get an annual gift from a donor, it means you're on their list, their list of charities that they support, probably a pretty good sized list. I like to say the size of that and you get determined to where you are on that list. 25 or $50? Yep. Is great because you're on their list of charities, right? But the size of it a much larger gifts could suggest you're in the top one, two or three, and that's really where you want to be. Of course, we make the assumption that there's nothing automatic about annual giving with employees, with donors, with anybody. We have to cultivate and stewards of those gifts. And we do believe and we have a story that I'll share later, that annual giving regular giving, even from faculty and staff, is a good indication of an estate year. This is how we we define what a good employee giving campaign looks like. An effective employee giving campaign engages a high percentage of an institution's employees the habit of financially supporting their organization each year. If you can do that based on successful employee giving campaign, we believe, and that's the definition that kind of drives everything that we do. We look for giving toward different causes. We look for giving from new employees. We look for giving for employees who give every year for ten plus years, all those different things. But at the end of the day, our North Star is is that definition of success. So within that, we look at our top two quantitative metrics that define success. So for us to be to say we have a successful employee giving campaign, there's really two things. And I would say the number one metric that we look at is the number of employee donors each year. So the number of employees that your institution has is going to vary. Probably not a whole lot right out of you. Maybe in the last year you may have lost a few. But the overall number of employee donors, that's what we're looking at. That's what we're striving for. And then the percentage of employees who are donors each year is very important to You heard Suzanne and I both mentioned in our intros what percentage we had recently achieved. So that's a that's a top metric that I and I would encourage you, as you're looking at your employee giving campaign to really build and focus primarily on those two things, it's not the only two things that we would focus on, but I think those are the top two. So here are and I'm going to present a number of quantitative measures from these 15 year history with our one for all, all for one giving campaign. And each one of these graphs, each one of these quantitative metrics has a story behind it or has an important fact that we that we think is very important. So this is looking at average annual wage B employee giving. So the amount of money that our employees collectively gave in a year on average over 15 years, that was $56,000. Okay. And it's interesting, when you look at this graph, you can see some really high years, 2012, you can see a low year, 2011, coincidentally back to back. But overall, you know, you can kind of see it trending up in the last five years or so. But not a whole ton of difference. And I would say largely that's because the size of our employee base hasn't exactly grown that much. It's grown. But not tremendously. And unfortunately, the amount our employees get paid is not necessarily grown very much over the years. So not a ton of difference, especially if you take out kind of the outliers, the lowest and the highest year of what that range is. But we do look at that. The amount that's given is an important metric, but it's not the most important thing to look at. Another important thing to look at in your institution, especially in colleges and universities and especially in universities, usually on average, your faculty earn a little bit more than your staff. So if you were to look at the average of all faculty, all full time faculty and the average of all full time staff, you would see a little bit more with faculty. So if your percentage of your employees that are faculty is high, then you have people with a little bit more giving capacity than if you have a lot of staff relative to faculty. So here at FBB, we're almost 2 to 1 staff to faculty, so are slightly lower paid on average part of our employee base, our staff are 2 to 1. What those who might make a little bit more money our faculty are paid. So that's an impact that will drive the dollar amount that's raised to some extent. And you can just see through the years. I mean, back in 2006 when we were we were really low on faculty. Our faculty has grown, staff has grown, too. You can actually see that overall we've shrunk in size a little bit from 2016. So the idea that I set of not necessarily expecting to raise a whole lot more dollars per person, but just getting more people involved is really the goal. This graph is important and one that we look at because this this looks at the average amount given per employee, including non donor. So we take the total amount of money or maybe $70,000 and we divide that not by the number of donors, by the total number of employees. And I'm very pleased and we've been very pleased with that. To say over a 15 year period on average, our employees, all employees, including non donors, have given $150 a year. Again, though, as you look at this graph across a decade and a half, you can see a really low year and you can see a really high year. But from $178 in 2006 to $185 in 2001, it's almost uncanny how close those two numbers are. So that average amount per employee has not really changed that much, ebbed and flowed a little, but overall, not a huge change. This is a perhaps a more pertinent stat that we look at, and this is the average amount given for employee donors. So those employees who actually have what's the average amount of data and we've been very pleased with $380 over the course of the campaign. Now you do have a year in there that was very, very high. Our last few years have been between 240 and 270, $72. They're on average. So we feel that that's a strong amount for what our employees make for them to be giving on average $380 per year per employee to the institution. We think that's strong. The the black bar on the bottom shows our number of employee donors, which we'll get to a little bit more directly in a moment. So this is a fascinating slide. And for those of you watching who may not only be involved in employee giving campaigns that are thinking about annual giving or advancement overall, you'll love this one. So this is looking at what impact do our employees donors have on our overall donor base. So back when we started in 2006, 51% of all donors were employees, were faculty and staff. Half of our donor base were our own people, which is pretty amazing, right? That has dipped to less than a quarter on average over the past few years. It's been about a bit of our donor base have been employees. So that's really a testament to the fact that our donor base has grown substantially over the last 15 years. So even though we've added more employee donors, we've added way more donors overall. But over 15 years, about a quarter of our donors have been our own employees. Year after year. This is the second most important metric or one of the top two metrics I should just say that we looked at and I said a few minutes ago, this is simply the average percentage of employees who are donors. So every year we're looking this is our this is our benefits eligible employee count. And what is our percentage? I find it very interesting that way back when we started this campaign, when we had a lot of momentum, 2006, I wasn't even here, but I've heard stories about how exciting it was. They had 66% participation and it took us 14 years to get back to that level. And then this past year in 2020, we had 69% of our benefits eligible employees who are donors across the course of those 15 years, on average, 43%. So that's some we're very proud of. But on the other hand, 43% means that over half are not participating. So this is certainly a number until until that 69% becomes 100%. We've got work to do. And then perhaps our most important metric, or certainly one of our top to this is just looking at the number of employee donors every year. And we are delighted with the past four years beginning in 2017, we've hit a record every year. You might find a little bit of humor in looking at that first number. In 2006, we had a 188 donors, and then all those years later in 2017, we had 189 one more donor. So that year we set a record by one and then we go out from there. And as we're as we're talking about this, my staff and I, our goal is to 83. I mean, our goal is to grow that if nothing else, at least by one. So let's talk a little bit about employee giving and some tips and some things like that. I think it's easy, especially maybe at the vice president level or the more the senior leadership level in larger advancement jobs to overlook the importance of employee giving just a little bit. And I would just encourage anyone not to do that. The donor pool of alumni I'm sorry, of employees is relatively small compared to other giving people such as alumni of thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of alumni. You have an almost an infinite number of potential friends, right? Not alumni, individual donors. So the employee pool is small. It's a finite segment. It grows very slowly. As a matter of fact, we that we have actually shrunk in size in terms of the number of employees over the last few years. And I know with the pandemic and the economic downturn, there are certainly some institutions whose employee count has dropped a little bit. So it's it's a small segment that you have to work with. And of course, most of the employees and we're talking about custodial staff, dining staff at their in-house employees, faculty, receptionists, secretaries, deans, every level of the institution. They don't necessarily have the capacity for larger gaps, even in the context of annual giving. Right. And the other thing that's also true is even when you hit a high participation percentage, you're not necessarily going to give a high dollar amount. Now, Susan, I know has had some great success with getting some big thresholds and large institutions can do that. But in our world, you know, we're getting 50 to $70000. That's important and that really makes a difference. But it's not something that really moves the needle in terms of multimillion dollar metrics. Right. And then number five, I think this is particularly important. It's one thing to ask an alumnus for. Yeah, but it's one thing to ask a local business leader for a gift. But to ask your own coworkers to make a gift just feels maybe a little awkward and can be a little bit more difficult. So I think that's why it's sometimes easy to overlook the importance and impact of employee giving. Let me share this with you, and I hope you find this as interesting as I find it. So this is, again, over a 15 year period. When you look at the total dollars given, that's the first slide, 6.8% of all dollars given to me over a 15 year period came from employees. Right. So that's that's small, but it's appreciable. So if you're if you're used to looking at the metrics of your institution, you probably have categories of donors that are actually smaller than 6.8%. I know that private foundations are very important to us here at UHC and a number of private foundations. We have not the dollars they've given, but the number is smaller than that, right? We have student giving their percentage of giving. It is smaller than 6.8. If you look at the other graph, you can see employee donors at 27%. These are the individual donors. So over the course of 15 years, as I said, 27% over a fourth of all of our donors were employees of the institution. So employees are making a huge impact when it comes to the size and the health of our donor base. The dollars they give is a much smaller impact. But as maintaining the size and vibrancy of our donor base, they're having a huge impact. An employee giving matters. If you're watching this webinar, I know you agree with that, but an employee giving campaign that's robust, that's exciting, that's vibrant and do a lot of good things, it can help you have an institution wide culture of philanthropy. We talk about that a lot, right? A culture of philanthropy. Well, there's no better way to establish that internally than to have your own people involved in giving your own faculty and staff involved in this. It's amazing to how when you have a good employee giving campaign like we do the work of the Advancement Office as well now, instead of the foundation or the Advancement Office kind of being this thing that's out there and you ever notice how people can't even define what advancement is, and they're the people that get the money or they have the fun parties or the dinners and you're always like, Oh no, we do more than that. But when you have a good employee giving campaign, it's amazing how your fellow faculty and staff have a better understanding of what your your office does. And then I love the stories that that come out. There are so many great giving examples that come from your own employees. You talk about employee who's we had an employee recently who retired a facilities supervisor. He had given every one of those 15 years and he said, I'm retiring, but I still want to keep giving. And, you know, we set up a recurring, recurring gift. So many great stories. You can share those with other prospective donors, local businesses or foundations. And it's amazing how when you can talk about how you're giving your own staff and faculty are giving how they're be, they might be more inclined to give. It allows your coworkers to feel like they're part of a celebration of donors and philanthropy at your institution as opposed to sidelined from it. And this is a very important point. Have you ever noticed that your institution, when you celebrate large gifts or donors who are able to give $1,000,000 or 250,000 or something like that? You know, I think there's some of the faculty and staff who might feel like, Wow, that's amazing, that's great. But boy, that's not me. I'm a I'm just not part of that. They don't think of themselves as a donor because they're not giving it that big level. But when you have a robust employee giving campaign, all of the faculty and staff feel thrilled about being a part. They feel like they're really part of it. And I think it creates some unity across faculty and staff. That picture there at the bottom, every one of those people I know, incidentally, the gentleman with the arrow pointing to him, he is a recently retired. You work here for 40 years, used this campaign to set up an endowed scholarship in memory of his mother and is talking now about in the state before to add to that and he's just been such a champion of that. You can see over on the left that that poster there on the easel, those were our 2017 employee donors. So every year you walk around our campus, you're going to see big posters appreciating and giving thanks to our employee donors. So as they walk around campus, you're not just seeing names of local philanthropists and people who give big dollars. They're seeing their name on a list and they're encouraged by that. So keys to success. As I as I started beginning to wrap up my part, we focus on the number of donors, not the number of dollars. Okay. That's very important. We do reward larger donors, right? We have that president's circle where we recognize people who give 1% or more of their salary in the course of the year. So we do recognize them, but we're constantly doing recognition. We're sharing stories via email, we're having events, we're walking a little thing over to their office, doing a pizza party for departments who have 100% participation. One of the very important things is a payroll deduction program where you can sign up to have $10 or 15 or $5 a month taken out of your paycheck, recurring gifts on credit cards, all that makes it so much easier. And the dollars really add up. We have a matching program, which I'll tell you about in a minute. That's been very important. Having a big event to kick off and celebrate. We do this in September. Our fiscal year starts September one. So about the second week of September, we have a great barbecue launched this year in south Texas. Right. What else would we do? And have giveaways and fun stories and fun things. Everybody's invited, not just donors. And we're there to celebrate the success of prior year's campaign and kick off the new campaign. We have an external campus located about 100 miles away, and we do a separate one there so they can do this. Well, we're constantly tracking. We're constantly trying to set goals and reach them, keep momentum and positive energy high, and share stories of success. We feel that's very important. So for us, the One for All for One campaign matching has been a key thing. And I share this with you because I think I think it's important that every institution can do this. But years ago when we started the campaign, our executive committee made the decision that we were going to take some unrestricted endowed funds that we had and we were going to put them toward a dollar for dollar match just for employee giving. So if one of our employees gives $50 to a general scholarship fund that actually brings in another $50 from that unrestricted endowment. And just promoting the power of that match is really something that has caused people to want to get engaged. We've just had widespread support. All departments, all levels, all salary ranges are all involved. We focus on having a big September, getting a lot of people signed up, a lot of people giving that that kickoff and celebration luncheon. And then we do giving Tuesday at the end of end of November, early December. And so we get a lot of faculty and staff to get involved then. And so having a big September and a big December is very important for us. Last year, one of the things that helped us set a record was our student emergency fund and our student food pantry. Our faculty and staff love our students and they wanted to give specifically to those causes. So if you create causes and promote funds that are of particular interest to your faculty and staff, that can make a huge difference. And then it's a top priority of our advancement office. It's not a secondary thing. It's top of mind, top priority for everybody, and that makes it be successful. All right. Well, that's that's good for me. And I am excited to hear what Susan has to share. So with that, I will go ahead and turn it over to you. Susan. Thank you so much. Jesse, I loved hearing your presentation. I love hearing about how much support you're getting from employees or your students. And I love hearing about all the recognition and celebration and your incorporating that really makes for a wonderful culture. So that was great to hear. Thank you. Hi again. My name is Susan Summers and I'm with Lone Star College Foundation, and I'm here to talk to you today about our employee giving campaign from a little bit of a different environment and perspective. I thought I would start first by telling you about Lone Star College Foundation. We are the philanthropic arm of Lone Star College, and Lancer College is a multi campus community college system that serves 93,000 students within a 1400 square mile service area in Greater Houston. The Foundation for Lone Star College started with a $20,000 donation from the college in 1991, when they realized that financial aid was just not enough for our students. We now have more than $36 million in assets. We are celebrating our 30th anniversary this year as a foundation. It's estimated that we have awarded $15 million to 16,000 students, plus more than $7 million in program support since the inception. Our major initiatives are probably not any different from what anyone has, is they're initiatives. He's watching this webinar, major gifts from individuals and big corporations, lots of community partnerships, two big fundraising events per year, our annual gala and our annual golf tournament. And now since 2015, Employee giving the mission of the foundation. I won't read it word for word, but I will tell you that I put the words relationship building in red because that is solely what we absolutely rely on to help our students at the level that we're able to every year at Lone Star College. So when we decided to take on employee giving in a formal best practices campaign, we as a group meaning the foundation office and some employee volunteers came together to decide on some goals. The goals we came up with for employee giving were to partner with the college in achieving student success. As Jesse mentioned, a lot of times, the general college doesn't quite understand what advancement are the foundation for development, what they actually do. So it gave us an opportunity to partner and align with the college even more because we are part of the college and also to provide an opportunity for employees to participate in giving to the foundation in a way that's convenient and confidential. A really important word in this bullet point is to empower employees asking employees to talk to other employees about donating money can be challenging at times. Some people are just not comfortable with that topic. So we focus a lot on empowering them by encouraging them to talk about the opportunity to give and how to give should they want to, but not asking them not to treat it as a closing of the deal and also to achieve a high participation rate. Because as advancement professionals, we all know that is a great story to tell external donors that we are fiscally sound from within and supportive from within. It's a wonderful testimony and also, of course, to raise funds for students, scholarships and college programs. But as Jesse mentioned, donors first, then dollars. We take that same approach. We focus more on participation rates, we focus more on education, about how supporting our students impacts outcomes and of course, raising funds. Just it happens when all of the other things are in place. So that is our focus. I'll give you a little bit of our employee giving campaign history, short as it may be. The first formal campaign was in 2015, pre formal employee giving campaign participation and giving to the foundation was just 2%. There was not ever a formal ask to give through payroll deduction or on any kind of recurring basis. But we did have some employees who gave just because they wanted to, and that would amount to about $30,000 a year in donations to go towards students scholarships and programs from employees. Our current participation rate for 2900 full time employees is 39%, as I mentioned, that is something we absolutely would love to increase and it started off in 2015 at 49%. And so hopefully we're getting ready to go on that upswing like we saw University of Houston in Victoria do. The current average amount that is raised each year is $185,000 per year. Our current pledge fulfillment is 97%. That is something that we are very, very excited about. That gives us hope for increasing participation in the future. Of course, we have so many employees and a lot of people might venture to say, Hey, 39% of nearly 3000 full time employees. Great. And we're thrilled with it. But of course, we always want to do more for our students because we can never do enough for them. But this availment rate makes us really happy. People with their pledging to give in the beginning, they are giving by the end of the calendar year, that academic year. And this was a really big celebration this year, cumulative dollars raised since 2015 is $1.1 million. So that was a big celebration that we exceeded $1 million from our very own employees within the college. I don't have things that separate out faculty versus non faculty. Jesse's working with Jesse and putting all this together has given us some great new metrics to seek in the near future. One thing I'd like to mention is this History has has occurred despite some really tough times in Houston, including the 2015 tax Day flood, the 2016 Memorial Day plan, 2017 and 18 Hurricane Harvey. And of course, in 2020, COVID covered Houston floods. Why do we flood? We had a few really rough years with so many students and faculty and staff underwater. So it's been rough and we've still been able to achieve these things. So I feel really excited about the future of increasing percentage and and for employee giving, the way that we started this was asking, okay, how do we get the word out? So we went ahead and did what we do for most of our fundraising efforts is we put together a volunteer structure so our ambassadors and team leaders are called our campaign Council. This structure starts at the foundation board and chancellor level. Those people are the ones who choose ambassadors. So at each of our seven campuses, we have two ambassadors, one for faculty and one for non faculty. And then we also had two system offices, which has our departments like us, the Foundation, Human Resources, Finance, Facilities, management, all of this. There's the business side and we have two one, two, two ambassadors from each system office. The ambassadors then recruit team leaders. They recruit enough team leaders to represent each department and division within each campus or system office. So that number varies depending on the size of the campus or system office. And then the goal is that with those levels in place, we are getting information out on the employee giving campaign and on that opportunity to give to all of our employees and we end up with about 100 people on our campaign council every year. So that's their great their enthusiasm stick. And it's also it's come to be seen as an honor and a leadership opportunity to be part of the campaign council. So we're excited about that campaign council oriented ocean is a huge part of this success, and these are some tips we have found to just make it make it even better. First, I point out in the picture we used to do these in-person meetings, we would have a couple big ones at more central locations, and then I would go out and do smaller satellite meetings and it would just take forever and ever. So a couple of years ago before COVID, we started doing them via WebEx, and that was that's been very successful. People find it. They're they're able to more easily attend. It's definitely more time efficient on the end of the foundation. So we've been doing that even before the pandemic. But we find the key to successful orientations is keeping it short and sweet, packed full of information and accessible so they're never more than an hour. We make it part of their job description as an ambassador or team leader to attend an orientation session. We make it accessible. We have multiple that we that I present live. We also record sessions for people who can't see them. I do make them interactive. I ask people to turn on video and ask ask questions along the way. So we do prefer a live attendance, but if they can't attend one of the six or eight sessions that we offer live, they can see a recording. And also I host open discussion sessions. So I have about a two week period where I host these live orientation sessions and then a week. So after that I just have open discussion sessions where people can get on after they've had a chance to look at the information, talk to their colleagues about what they want to do for employee giving, and then they'll just come on and toss around ideas and opinions and ideas from each other. So those have been helpful as well. Some open discussion sessions have been 20 minutes, some have been an hour and a half. It just depends on the topic. That day, the training materials were also very important and I'm happy to share any of these at any time. You can always reach out to me. We create documents such as talking points, which are fun, fun facts about scholarships and how they affect persistence and GPA and completion information in general about the foundation. These gifts are coming through the foundation. So we like them to know things like we are accredited by the Better Business Bureau. We have achieved the gold seal, the the gold seal transparency from GuideStar for the past five years. It's things like that. We also give them an actual script, how to talk about employee giving and an employee giving epic document which is dynamic. We add to it and change it every year and basically tell the ambassadors and team leaders, If you know this information on these materials, you can talk really enthusiastically and intelligently about employee giving. Another training source that has been awesome is an Internet site. This is for volunteer access only. So basically our has everything on here, the PowerPoint presentations at the orientations and videos of students, scholarship recipients who have been blessed with they with the scholarship and how it's impacted their lives. Marketing assets such as e blast headers and email signature. As we do, I initiate all the communication from my office so that they can then share, tweak, personalize. However they see fit because I want them to feel empowered. I don't want them to feel stressed out. I want them to spend their time engaging with their colleagues because this peer to communication is so important. I don't want to spend time creating e blasts and fliers and things like that. So we really give them a nice a briefcase of things to use. Ask them what we keep on this intranet site is any communication that each campus sends out so they can go in and get ideas, copy and paste, or be inspired by things that other campuses are doing. This took a couple of years to get people really engaged in using it, but once they got the hang of using it, they're on it all the time. They're calling me saying, Hey, I just sent this email out 10 minutes ago. It's it's not on the on the Internet site yet. So definitely they're excitedly they're excitedly using it. Let's talk about theme. So for years well, five years, six years, we we had like a fun theme, something pop culture or maybe even a little kitschy. These are just a few of our favorite themes that we use. And honestly, it was a lot of pressure. It was a lot of time. It was a lot of just resource to come up with this different theme and all of this, you know, topping last year's theme was just always a theme. Last year's theme in the top right is one. Let's see a little bit from a lot of people was the winning combination. One LSC happens to be the first cultural believe of Lone Star College and last year we went with just straight up cultural believe nothing pop culture because it was such a trying year. We thought, Let's just get down to bare bones here, why we're really here. And it went over really well. And then I saw just this idea when we worked on another presentation of a branded theme, and I absolutely unabashedly so it because I just think it's great. It creates a brand for this campaign, but we do it up a little. So on the left is our new one, LSC Lonestar College Foundation and Play Giving campaign. That is our employee giving brand. What you'll see on the right is how we're using it this year. That tagline Helping our students reach for the stars aligns with the theme of Lone Star College registration and open houses. Our marketing department is amazing. They're award winning. We are just so blessed to be able to work with them. They create a theme every year for registration and orientation. This upcoming year, it's going to the 21. 22 year happens to be a space theme. So we came up with this tagline helping our students reach for the stars as part of it. The one LSC Lone Star College Foundation employee Giving campaign. So that's how we plan to use our branded theme every year. We will always see this and then we'll partner with the college at yet another level by aligning with their registration and open house theme for the fall, which was when we do our campaign. So great idea from Jesse. We absolutely our whole staff love that and I'm getting good response from the employee giving volunteers that I'm testing it on. So far, collateral materials are a very important part of this and the success of so many volunteers. Like I said, it's most important for them to have peer to peer interaction with their with their colleagues. I don't want them spending time creating things. So we arm them with just this whole briefcase of collateral materials. They get blast letters and email signatures. They get informational fliers on the campaign on how to participate in payroll deduction. These can all be hard copy. These can be virtual, it can be both. Just depends on how they want to use it. And again, I'm pushing out these communications to them all the time for them to just take and run with so their time is sufficient. Other collateral materials that we pull together for them are donor and student testimonials, signs, posters, stickers for that say I gave. There's there's a website for the entire employee audience at Lone Star College. This is from the Internet site, which is strictly a library for campaign council members. This website is for the entire employee audience, and we also I send out every week an impact fax blast, which they're free to print and distribute or just orbit along. And that gives fun little tidbits of information like did you know that scholarship recipients GPAs are 5/10 of a point higher than non scholarship recipients? Did you know that the 2020 graduating class we had 1300 foundation scholarship recipients? We just find all these fun facts about scholarship recipients and and how our students are doing because of scholarships and incorporate them into impact facts, which we send out weekly. Also, I put together a communications timeline, and the building blocks for this timeline are separated into these three categories. And this is something that really keeps these hundred people moving along in their efforts to promote and educate and inform about employee giving the community the building blocks of this communication timeline are based on pre campaign and weekly communication and then a periodic category. So pre campaign, I give them a bunch of text that they can share with leadership at their at their campus, maybe their college president or at their system office, maybe their vice chancellor. And even for the chancellor of the entire college system as well. And we put that together so they can suggest, hey, can you send this out to kick off the campaign to do a soft launch when people see information coming from that level of leadership, they listen also weekly. So many things go on weekly during the employee giving campaign, and ours is only a month long, by the way. We just do one month. And that's what we've been doing for a while, 4 to 6 weeks. And I don't see a big change in that coming any time soon. But back to communications as far as weekly, I do these go team emails to our ambassadors and team leaders with reminders and just telling them what a great job they're doing and letting them know that I'm there for them. We can anyone in the foundation office can help them with anything. I also do ambassador and team Leader updates specific to their area. So for our Lone Star College side Care campus, I'll send a blast out to them. Only to those the ambassadors and team leaders only saying, Hey, your campus right now as it is at 27%. This is where you were last year at this time. Here's some here, some impact facts or require some information or a video of a student that might be able to help. How can I help you? So they get a little more personalized attention to as much as can get to 101 hundred. And then we also do you from the foundation, we send all employee updates on a weekly basis. And then of course, I update the Internet all the time. And then periodic is just payroll deduction reminders and things like, yeah, we send out something a couple of times during the campaign. The people whose payroll deduction is scheduled to end soon, if they've set an end date on it, because a lot of times people don't realize that they've done that. So just kind of helping them walk through that process So from the building blocks of this communications timeline comes this beautiful, lovely, shiny color coded communications time line. I share this openly with them from the beginning. This is last year's and this this helps the campaign council really own it. So they know what to expect when they know when they're getting an update on their specific campus. They know when we're getting an all employee update, they know when to expect impact. That's for them to plan their activities or outreach for the week. So it's really gotten to where they follow it. They're reaching out to me before I've even sent something saying they're excited to get it. So I'm sharing these details, really engages them in owning this timeline as well. Some tactics for the actual activities of the Employee Giving campaign. These have been our favorite in-person types of events and activities to promote awareness and to promote involvement and employee giving, kick off events, tree cards, copy cards, silent auctions and raffles. They coordinate all of this at their campus or system office level level theme days. They even do open labs where a bunch of computers are set up and there's someone there to show them how to set up their payroll deduction. Last year, because of the pandemic, obviously we we resorted to a completely virtual campaign and we were excited with how well it went. Employees got really it. Our campaign council got very creative about the types of things that they did, and of course we'd always done it last, but they started doing virtual roundtable discussions, just inviting people to a WebEx to see a PowerPoint that included a student scholarship recipients. And the video in there. And those are things, again, that I prepared for them. So they just all they had to do was hit, go and get the people together and start engaging with them. Lots of virtual events and activities like online, online trivia games and Jeopardy and Bingo and Scavenger Hunt. There was a talent show. It was online. It was awesome. It was so entertaining. These were really good bonding, fellowship, engagement activities to bring employees together. I do agree with Jesse so much that employee giving really helps enhance culture and brings people together for a specific cause, and it's just a really good thing for the environment. A lot of our faculty and staff produce their own videos just from their iPhones or their iPads. We usually try to do a video from our marketing department that they can use that's professionally done. Last year, we we just couldn't do it. We weren't all together. We were all working remotely. And so faculty and staff just made their own. And they had a lot of fun with that and did a great job some other virtual tactics. These are just this is just a resource in case anyone is interested. These were the favorite sites that our campaign council members use for their trivia games or bingo for scavenger hunts. And again, you'll have access to all of this if you want to take a look at what they've used and then some have you examples here. What were some fun virtual activities? One of our ambassadors is part of the YouTube tribute band, so they did a virtual concert on a Friday afternoon. Another another group did a virtual coffee break where they all shared gourmet coffee recipes. Try each other's recipes on a virtual coffee break and rated them and gave feedback. It was a lot of fun. They were playing like they were some pretty insane chefs. And then also scavenger hunts, bingo, things like that. And the reason that I'm sharing these is because these were just these were just a few examples that went really well. And something important to note is that they started each virtual event with a message about employee giving, and they ended each virtual event with the message about employee giving. And in between they did something fun and bonding and interactive with each other. So that was those events went really well. So that is basically the major components of how our campaigns have been successful, how we hope to keep that success growing as as as we move on throughout the years. Definitely. We took a more virtual approach last year, and it's important to know that we're going to keep a lot of virtual components as they worked. I know people do want to get in-person, maybe add some more in-person components to their plan, but in the end, I think it's going to long term be a real combination of virtual and in-person activities. And I always like to end everything with just a reminder of this is why we do what we do. This is Rachel, one of our scholarship recipients. She's amazing. She got her associate degree at Lonestar College, and then she went on to improve A&M University, and she's now a nurse and she's working in the hospital system that some of our board members work in. And they know her because she's spoken at board meetings and such. So we just really Rachel is just one of the many we really seem to sort of go through the ranks. And she graduated from Lone Star Debt free because of our scholarships. And so we couldn't be more excited to be just a small part of the story of a student who is who is on the front lines now helping everybody. So that is basically it. I, I didn't want to end Austin by saying thank you so much on behalf of myself and Jessie, please feel free to reach out to us any time. Here's all of our contact information. We welcome conversations, feedback, ideas and are happy to share any of our materials with you. We really appreciate you taking the time to view this webinar today. We hope it was helpful and we look forward to staying involved with Case. And thank you very much for allowing us this opportunity. And that concludes my portion of the presentation. Thank you so much, Jessie and Susan. This concludes the webinar. Today's program is copyright 2021 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, with all rights reserved for additional case on demand webinars, please visit W WW that case dot org slash on demand.

employee giving campaigns

University of Houston, Victoria

Lone Star College Foundation

philanthropy

participation rates

average amounts given

employee donors

strategies and tactics

campaign council