1. Community Conversations at Companies to Strengthen Your Campaigns
September 14, 2010

2. What are community conversations?
Dialogues with employees that help you identify which employees care about issues (starting with education)
Builds a different kind of relationship with individual employees
A new opportunity United Way can offer companies
Connects employees to change efforts in their community
Provides an opportunity to connect corporate CSR agenda with employee campaigns
An avenue for ongoing, year-round employee engagement
Engaging employees in community conversations will result in more giving, advocacy, and volunteering and stronger relationships with corporate partners

3. How do they work? Hour-long Focused on listening and learning
Focused on aspirations – about the community and for education (income and health coming in 2011)
Identifying employees who care about the issues and want to stay connected to United Way
Can be part of a national report
Findings will shape important decisions
Can be part of ongoing employee engagement – not just in the fall

4. What’s in it for United Way?
Better connections to individuals
Shows we care about and listen
Helps us understand our donors
Gives us a sense of the pulse of the community
Helps make our work better
Positions us differently to our donors
Can improve donor recruitment and retention

5. What’s in it for the company?
A chance to be recognized as a community leader in education
The potential to build better relationships with employees
Potential branding opportunities
A way to integrate CSR agenda with employee campaign
A way to learn how employees can be better engaged, which can lead to better retention

6. What’s in it for the employee?
A chance to be listened to and engaged as a valuable member of the community
Opportunity to share their ideas to help shape local, state, and national change efforts in education
A way to be personally connected to community work

7. Turning Outward Harwood Institute-United Way Collaboration
The Power of Turning Outward
If we turn outward and become more intentional in our choices and judgments in creating change we can have greater impact and increase our relevance and significance in communities.

8. Tools at http://online.unitedway.org/commongood
Harwood Toolkit
Conversation Workbook
How to identify a conversation leader
How to set up the room
Tips for Leading Conversations
What to ask - Community Conversation Guide
Figuring out what you heard- Note Taking Tool
How to identify themes
How to share what you’ve learned
Conversation Guide and Annotated Guide for Facilitators
Online training module for tools
Tools at

9. Support Weekly support calls: Bring your questions, and get answers!
Wednesdays at 3 p.m. EDT
(888) p/c #
Technical assistance (phone calls) with UWW as needed
Peer-to-peer support via the Community Engagement listserv
To subscribe, send an to with the following in the message: “SUB CommunityEngagement-L FirstName LastName” (subject line does not matter)

10. United Way of Santa Fe County Deepening relationships in the workplace
Shifted campaign kick-offs to short engagement opportunities
Some companies inviting employees to a community event, followed up with longer workplace conversations
Using the hand out and Poster as talking points and ways to engage Individuals in the workplace about our work, their aspirations. Sometime have only 15 minutes but instead of showing up and “throwing up” this tool truly engages people as individuals. They also have the option of giving personal contact information to us
Fall Speaker event on Early Childhood Education as Kickoff event- is a catalyst for the conversations to follow.
Partnered with corporate friends with similar focus as ours. CEO’s have agreed to send out electronic invitation, endorsed by them inviting their employees to come to the speaking event, and inviting them to a follow up community conversation in the their workplaces. Conversations using Harwood guide for conducting conversations.
Hospital (program partner), community college (has an early childhood center), Large corporate donor (education focus to all or their outreach and community support)
These workplace conversations are a great way to access a naturally diverse population for Conversations.

11. United Way of Santa Fe County A larger donor retention/recruitment effort linked to impact
Multi-pronged approach to engage individuals:
Direct mail (donors giving less than $2,000)
E-blast
Major Donor engagement ($2,000+)
All plays off the same general theme
1st General direct Mail piece – includes snail mail survey option, or going to the website for on line giving or survey options. 2 more letters/asks will roll out before the end of the year; one at least will have additional survey questions that are a bit more in-depth.
E-blast replicates this same message and offers online survey response and giving options
Constant Contact tool tallies all responses and prints out the narrative responses, that can them be themed by us.
All survey questions are meant to compliment or replicate Harwood suggestion questions but are modified for the snail mail or online usage.
Major Donor letters going out in September, reference the invitation they will be getting to join us at the speaker/appreciation event in Oct. Also in the Major Donor letter is specialized Survey card with a sixth question, asking them if they would like to join us in a special conversation consisting of our most valued friends and donors post Dave Lawrence.
We will personalize their invitations to the event with a special conversation invitation led by the chair of our Major Gifts campaign.

12. United Way of Santa Fe County Putting what we learn to use and communicating back
Great opportunity to communicate with our individual donors, major givers, and workplace employees
Ways of sharing learning include:
“Theme-ing” responses
Sharing via the web
Leveraging the next direct mail blast
Town Hall gathering
Thank you notes
We are still thinking through the best approach across all sectors but in general we anticipate it taking the form of:
Themeing all responses
Posting responses on website
Sending out in an
Including in the next direct mail blast
Town Hall type gathering
Thank you notes
The feedback really gives us another reason and opportunity to communicate with our individual, major donors, and workplace employees

13. How to pitch this to companies
Try to get access to the CEO or minimally, your ECM
Thank them for their ongoing support of the community through United Way
Tell them of your overall efforts to engage the community in conversations about education and how to make progress
Ask if you can plan a 1 hour meeting at their company to facilitate a conversation with their employees, ideally during campaign time (but acceptable in 1st QTR 2011)

14. How to pitch this to companies
Tell them that you will be asking for their employees personal contact information to keep them engaged in the ongoing conversations. Employees would voluntarily provide this information. We will not release this information outside of UW.
Tell them that we will be accumulating feedback from these conversation and others and reporting the results to the community and to United Way Worldwide
Upon approval, move immediately (making it a priority) to set up the community conversations – follow instructions in the packet.
Be sure to follow-up with the company CEO to thank him/her and report back on the results of the conversations.

15. What has to be in place for this to work
You! Your commitment to making this work
A space at the company
A facilitator – United Way or volunteer
A way to share themes and knowledge
A way to collect contact info

16. Getting started
Consider signing up for the Campaign for the Common Good (focused on education this fall) – you get visibility as a partner in the campaign and access to online tools and supports
Select a facilitator or facilitators
Review the online training module
Join the weekly Harwood support calls to get help and connect with other peers
Find one or a few companies that might be interested in education as a place to pilot this approach
Hold some conversations using the tools, collect what you learn, and share it with us

17. For more information

18. A few frequent questions
Can we do listening conversations if our United Way already has education strategies?
Do the conversations have to be an hour?
Will people expect our United Way to take on everything they bring up as an issue?
If people want to get involved beyond the conversations, what do we tell them?
How will this benefit this year’s campaign?

19. Thank you