Your Guide to Volunteering Your Time
Volunteering; building a community bond, and assisting your local needy. To quote the old saying, charity begins at home. The obvious problem is that organizing your schedule so that you’re free to volunteer often squanders time that could readily be put to better use. And as everybody knows, if you volunteer as part of a team effort with friends or co-workers, it’s likely to be far more fun. This is a call, then, for companies to take a cue from far-sighted firms like Connecticut’s Adaptive Marketing LLC. In addition to financial and shopping benefits programs like Credit Diagnosis intended for the benefit of consumers, Adaptive Marketing takes on the organizational necessities to give its employees the time to give back to the community.
Fortunately, company-supported volunteer activity now goes beyond annual donations to charity. Looking at just one company, Adaptive Marketing has offered staff an opportunity to help with anything from tennis shoe recycling efforts to local tree replanting weekends. For these events, the dates, times and locations of the events were announced, ensuring that staff knew what to expect, and the precise amount of time each event might specifically require from them. There should always be a opportunity to select projects. Employees of Adaptive Marketing, the firm who developed the program Credit Diagnosis, can choose from an assortment of local events. Previous and current projects have ranged between areas as diverse as help and support for children and young adults, green projects, and events helping local arts and culture. Adaptive Marketing’s members of staff are presented with such a choice that they’re certain to have a project they’ll enjoy getting involved in, ensuring they’ll spend their time happily as well as effectively. Most often a company-supported charity initiative — fundraising with a local school, for example, or assisting at a homeless shelter — is either done on a regular schedule or as a one-off event. Staff may well say they don’t have the free time, though one would be surprised if they honestly cannot free up the hours to lend a hand with an event taking up merely a single day. Making the time to extend a helping hand has long been a tradition at many companies. Like many other companies, Adaptive Marketing sponsors volunteer programs to support the people of its home town and to generate positive feeling within its home community as a result of the efforts of its employees. Helping around your home town leaves you feeling like a better person — exactly what you need, of course, to make members of staff motivated both in their daily work and their volunteer activities. By now, we think, the positives for everyone involved of a company supported volunteer initiative are ought to be self-evident for everyone.
