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CMP SERIES CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE
FIRST, DEFINE SUCCESS Most meeting planners work with nonprofit part- ners when creating charitable programs. But you can’t assume that just because a charity is in the
“good-making business,” it’s doing good, Stern said. It’s very difficult, he said, to assess the real, long-term impact that a charity has on the people it seeks to help — frequently even for the chari- ties themselves. A first step for nonprofit organizations, he
said, is to come up with a responsible way to define success. One of Stern’s most frustrating experiences at NPR was when he’d go into a board meeting and the group would spend the day talking about measuring success. “There’d be 25 different definitions of success. It turns out it’s really easy to be successful when you get to change your definition of success,” Stern said. “It’s really important that you get a consensus measurement and you stick to it, because that allows for stakeholders to — not necessarily agree or disagree with the measurement of success
— but to measure your actions against it and to know whether you’re moving in the right direc- tion. Otherwise, people are making things up as they go along.” Unfortunately, most charities don’t spell out
how they define success. There are some mark- ers that charities make available, such as how long they’ve been around, how stable they are financially, and their long-term prospects, Stern said. “All that usually can be gotten through pub- licly available data,” he said. “I would say if the organization is not making that data available on its website in a transparent way, I would be care- ful about them.” But if you try to dig deeper, Stern said, you’ll
find that few charities are transparent on their website about their goals, how they measure themselves, and how they’re doing against those goals. “Those are all, to me, indicators of very good, positive, forward-looking organizations,” Stern said, “and you’d be shocked at how few actually do that.”
‘Love of Mankind’ Meeting professionals “are in a great leadership role,” said National Philanthropic Trust’s Eileen Heisman, “because when you gather people, you can influence the way they think or behave or act, or educate them.” While you might offer CSR activities for attendees to participate in, Heisman believes that “some people can be in- credibly charitable with money but not that interested in volun- teering — and other people love the volunteering and do not care about money. I think you have to have things if you can for both people. Some people might be moved by something and want to write a check rather than volunteer.”
Heisman offered ways that planners can add chari- table elements to their meeting
programs that appeal to volun- teers and non-volunteers alike:
› During the convocation (or opening session), have a non- profit representative talk about a social problem or social issue and how they make the world a better place.
› Using crowdfunding, a group collectively decides that everybody is going to give a certain amount (it could be as little as several dollars each) to a local charity. As part of the meet- ing program, give two or three different charity spokespeople an opportunity to do a mini fast pitch, where they each get five minutes to convince participants why their organization deserves funding. Have the group vote, using an audience response system or app.
› If you have an ice-breaker exercise during the meeting, when people introduce them- selves to each other, ask them to talk about some giving-back event that they participated in that has been meaningful to them. Or use this as a topic for a speed- dating kind of networking activity. “Philanthropy actually means ‘love of mankind,’” Heisman said, “so the reason I use this example
— where you did something for somebody or something else and expected nothing in return — a lot of times it has nothing to do with a charity per se, but it can just be an act of kindness.”
Learn more about National Philanthropic Trust at nptrust.org.
AUGUST 2013 PCMA CONVENE
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