Last week I was at the PCMA New England annual meeting, which started off with a workshop on charitable volunteering led by Brad Lewis, the Executive Director of the PCMA Education Foundation.

It has become a major trend in our industry to have some type of charitable opportunity or community outreach at our conferences and tradeshows.  It is a great way for informal networking and creating connections between attendees.  It appeals to the basic human instinct to give back.  It leverages large groups of people in one place at one time.

These events are also difficult to do and even harder to do well.  At the Association for Financial Professionals meeting in San Antonio last month they sent 60 attendees to a local community center where they spent a half day doing whatever the center needed:  they divided up into small groups who painted several rooms, cleaned up old storage areas, and worked on landscaping.  By the end of the day the center looked terrific.  It would have taken a year for them to get it all done with local resources.  The participants were excited and felt great about the accomplishment.

On the one hand, that’s a major success!  On the other hand: that was 60 people out of 5,000.  Should the goal to have more people participate?  If more people participated, though, what would they have done?  And while fixing up a community center is really helping a community, it doesn’t play to the strengths and talents of this particular group.  Is there a way for financial professionals to give financial expertise to the community?  Or for other groups representing other fields to give back in a way that uses their talents?

We put these and other questions to the guest speaker at the PCMA event:  Rick Wallwork, Associate Director, Boston Cares.  Boston Cares is an organization that knows the ins and outs of volunteer and charitable organizations in the Boston area and are experts in where the needs are.  They help events that come into the city, or organizations based in the community whose employees want to do community work, navigate how to find the right place to contribute their energy.  They function as matchmakers between supply and demand.

Rick identified several important points to consider:

  1. The main need is to feed people. Whatever the talents of an organization, the main, most troubling issue in most cities today is malnutrition.
  2. Most charities primarily need some help over extended time.  A food distribution center, for example, needs a dozen people a day…not 100 for a half day.
  3. The community center example is a good one for ways an event can help with a large number of people over a short time.  Or a summer camp or school.  When the large number can be divided up to conquer specific tasks.
  4. It costs money to donate time.  Many organizations do not realize that not only does the community center need people to paint, but they also need the paint.  So be sure to budget for the costs of all supplies when donating time.
  5. Volunteering in ways that meet the organization’s mission or skill set is harder but not impossible.  Yes, they can probably place a few financial professionals in community colleges and evening school programs to teach family budgeting.  But perhaps a larger group could create materials to be given to be used in grade school classrooms to teach basic family budgeting concepts.

There are also organizations that specialize in matchmaking needs with volunteers that are “skills-based volunteer” organizations, like Points of Light.  Again, place a high volume, short-period of volunteers can be an issue, but they can help place programmers, marketers, and financial execs with organizations that specifically need them.  I work frequently with open source developer conferences, who are familiar with the idea of “hack-fests”.  A group of programmers together in one room for a day creating software and eating pizza.  I wonder what they could do for an organization that needs an application?

The best example that was given was of an architects organization that had a contest for creating model buildings out of canned food.  At the end of the event all that food was donated to a very grateful food bank.  It created buzz, involved the entire membership base, and specifically benefited the community in the way it most needed.  Fantastic.