We’re so glad you’re here! If you’ve been inspired by anything you’ve seen or read on our site, we hope you’ll take the next step toward getting joy from your personal or company giving.
Below are a few ideas to get you started. Use these or come up with your own.
The most important thing is to GET STARTED. We can’t wait to hear your stories!
Personal / Family Giving
The most important thing is to be on the look-out for opportunities to be generous, and then GO FOR IT when you get the nudge to do so.
Business / Company Giving
Encourage your company to get involved in things the employees and leadership believe in. It can be simple giving, projects used for team building, or setting examples of philanthropy for your team, market, community or industry.
Most importantly, give where your heart is led, and then share the joy with others!
“Your spark can become a flame and change everything.” – E.D. Nixon
Personal and Family Giving
Level 1: Easy-peasy steps you can take THIS WEEK!
Buy someone’s coffee who is in the drive-through line behind you. They’ll never know who you are, but they’ll be totally blessed getting free coffee and they might just pass it along to the car behind them. You could start a drive-through of generosity!
Donate stuff: Take 20-30 minutes to go through a closet or a few drawers in your home and donate things you rarely/never use to someone who would use them a lot! If you search “donation drop off __your city name__” you’ll find several places that will gladly take your gently used goods. You could make someone’s day who is cold and needs one of your warm sweaters!
Give a 100% tip: Next time you go out to eat, give a 100% tip on your bill (e.g., if your bill is $35, give a $35 tip; if it’s $120, give a $120 tip). Bonus: find out your servers’ name and tell them what a great job they did. You could make a server’s day – through generosity with both your words and your money!
Engage your kids and put some envelopes of cash together ($5-$20 is great) including some of their money (so they get the joy of giving too!). Have your kids draw a picture or write something kind on the envelopes and then set out together to deliver them to whoever you come across. It could be the guy at the end of the off-ramp, it could be a gal at the grocery store – whoever your heart is prompted to bless. Bonus: if you’re planning to bless homeless folks who are outside…take along some plates of cookies to give them. We did this one year and gave a guy an envelope of cash and a small plate of cookies and he gave us a huge grin and said, “I LOVE cookies.” Made my year!
Level 2: Fun steps you can take when you’re ready to kick it up a notch.
Do a food drive at your workplace by contacting the local food bank and your company’s HR folks to get it approved and in place. Bonus: Find out specifically what the food bank needs and put a list on the collection bins so folks know exactly what to buy and the food bank gets just what they need for the folks they serve. Bonus number two: Create teams at your workplace to create some competition that will increase the food you collect – you could even encourage folks to “show their support for their favorite sports team” and have different bins for each team – so they will compete to make sure their team wins! Food is a basic human need, and you could bring LOTS of it to some hungry families by taking a few extra steps to engage folks in your workplace.
Invite your friends to support your favorite organization: Contact your favorite nonprofit and ask if one of their staff could come to your home or office for a short evening event to share about their work with your friends/colleagues – and then invite your friends/colleagues to support the organization. This is generosity of influence and relationships, and takes great courage, but could provide far more resources to the organization you love instead of only what you can give them. Be brave! Go for it!
Go on a site-visit: Do some research to find out a bit more about an organization you love and then go visit to see their work (around the corner or across the world!). This will open your eyes and heart even more to the needs the organization is meeting, and you’ll feel great about the donation you make afterward. Bonus: take your family or friends with you on the site visit so their hearts can be moved too!
Level 3: Meaningful steps you can take when you’re ready to take your generosity to a whole new level.
Create your own giving model (see ours). Spending the time and intention on this will help provide a great framework for all your giving going forward.
Open a Donor Advised Fund or start a Private Foundation to use as your giving vehicle. This will enable you to give in a more simple and potentially tax efficient way so you have more to give and spend less time managing your giving!
Hire a philanthropy advisor to help your family or company set up a giving mission, strategy, and focus areas, so you can say yes or no with confidence to any request or giving opportunity that comes your way and be on the same page as a family/company about the who/where you’re going to give! (Contact us for a list of philanthropy advisors we know and trust.)
Business / Company Giving
Level 1: Getting things rolling inside the company – things you can start THIS WEEK!
Assess current company giving and see where there are opportunities to grow (examples for growth below in Levels 2 and 3).
Create and send a simple survey to employees that asks about causes they care about and giving opportunities they would be interested in. Give them a week to respond, and then tally the responses and report the results back to the whole company – with a promise that you’ll discuss the results with company leadership and decide which opportunities to pursue. You can find a simple survey to use here (feel free to edit it to make it your own!)
Inventory hard assets and donate anything unused or under-used (e.g., unused office furniture could be donated to a nonprofit that has old or no furniture; unused vehicles could be donated to an organization that helps single moms get cars; etc.).
Do a food drive at your workplace and tell employees the company will contribute $xyz in relation to the food they contribute (e.g., for every pound of food contributed by employees, the company will donate $10, so if 20 pounds of food is collected, the company donates $200 in addition to the food). Bonus #1: Find out specifically what the food bank needs and put a list on the collection bins so folks know exactly what to buy and the food bank gets just what they need for the folks they serve. Bonus #2: Create teams inside the company for some fun, friendly competition and to increase the food you collect – you could even encourage folks to “show their support for their favorite sports team” and have different bins for each team – so they will compete to make sure their team wins! The food bank will be grateful for the nonperishable food donations, but also for the cash to help them buy the fresh items families need.
Level 2: Growing your company generosity.
Assess employee wages (from the leadership to the janitor and everyone in between) and see if there are employees you need to level up or be generous with internally before ramping up your giving externally. Doing so will build a lot of goodwill internally, and make your employees more excited about participating in the company’s external giving because they feel like the company has “taken care of family first.”
Make a commitment to increase your company giving this year by $___ or ___%.
Create/enhance an employee matching program for employees who personally donate their money or time to charities. A good start (depending on your number of employees) is to match up to $1,000/year with a 1:1 match. Giving company money to things your employees care about builds a lot of goodwill and helps with employee retention. This document outlines an employee matching program for donations/volunteer time – use and edit if helpful!
Volunteer as a company at a local nonprofit. Work with a nonprofit to find an opportunity in which multiple people can volunteer and then invite employees to give their time on a specific day (you’ll get more engagement if it’s during a workday), and enjoy the company camaraderie! Bonus: make a cash donation in addition to the volunteer time to the nonprofit organization.
Level 3: Spreading the joy through deeper engagement in your giving.
Inventory ALL assets and make them available – think through ALL of your company resources and what could be useful to the community and make them available (e.g., letting a nonprofit that has little/no office space use your conference room for a meeting; letting a group do a bake sale/yard sale/farmers market in your parking lot on the weekend; donating company trucks for weekend use to nonprofits who deliver food to communities or deliver furniture to newly housed refugees or low-income folks; donating employee expertise to nonprofits who need it, etc.)
Put together an employee team to direct charitable giving (some of them may have self-identified in the survey). This team could be commissioned to do any/all of the following:
- Find quarterly volunteer opportunities for employees to engage in as a group.
- Find organizations in the community in the priority cause areas identified in the survey, and learn about them to discern whether to support their work. (This process could include grant requests, etc. if you want to make it official – reach out if you have questions about that.)
- Put together employee events around cause areas of interest and host happy hours or “coffee talks” to learn from each other in those interest groups – or bring in a speaker on that issue to grow the knowledge of the whole group.
- Plan site visits for employees to organizations in the community – these could be in conjunction with a volunteer opportunity or a cause area interest group.
- Plan fun ways for employees to engage in company charitable activities.
Hire a philanthropy advisor to help your company set up a giving mission, strategy, and focus areas, so you can say yes or no with confidence to any request or giving opportunity that comes your way and be on the same page as a company about who and where you’re going to give. The Advisor can also help set up and guide your internal employee giving team, source volunteer or giving opportunities for you, create and implement matching gift programs, etc. (Contact us for a list of philanthropy advisors we know and trust.)
