Volunteering Your Time
I expect you know that volunteer work is a great way to strengthen community bonds and at the same time assist the needy. But how much time does it take to plan? And actually, it’s significantly easier to get involved when another party has planned the event. And don’t you agree that with your colleagues working alongside you, you’d all have a better time while volunteering? Following this logic companies like Adaptive Marketing LLC, that developed financial benefits programs like Passport to Fun, have stepped up as organizing points enabling their employees to find the time to help.
If you think of company supported charitable effort, you probably think of blood drives, perhaps an annual donation drive, nothing more, but this is simply no longer true. The staff of Adaptive Marketing have been given the opportunity to participate in community initiatives with more and less effort required. In cases like these, the times, locations and dates that had been arranged were announced, making sure that employees knew what to expect, and how much time each event might really require. It’s hardly volunteering if there’s no choice between activities, naturally. Employees of Adaptive Marketing, the company who developed the program Passport to Fun, select from among a number of local initiatives. Previous and current projects have ranged between areas as diverse as aid and assistance for children and young adults, environmental programs, and events supporting artistic projects. Adaptive Marketing’s staff have so much to choose from that they’re certain to choose a project they’ll enjoy participating in, making their time fun as well as fulfilling. Most often a company sponsored volunteer program – fundraising with a homeless shelter or helping out at a local school – is either for a one-off event or on a regular schedule in pursuit of a bigger goal. Staffers may well claim – and even assume – that they don’t have any free time, but even they can often find enough hours to lend a hand with one instalment of a longer project.
Turning their profit-making skills to the benefit of their community has long been a tradition at many firms. Goodwill comes from the actions of Adaptive Marketing’s members of staff over the course of company-supported programs like the ones touched on earlier. Volunteering to help others leaves you feeling much better about yourself – just the sort of feeling to leave employees motivated both in their regular work and their volunteer activities, too. By now, we think, the positives for everyone involved of a company-supported volunteer initiative are should be plain to grasp.
Filed under: Politics