The Impact of Involvement

by United Way of Central New Mexico

Each year, we have significantly increased the number of members in all of our Affinity Groups-Tocqueville Society, Women in Philanthropy, Young Leaders Society and Hispano Philanthropic Society. To ensure that membership has meaning for every donor, we evaluated each aspect of engagement with our Affinity Group members: events and activities, grant funding and volunteering.

We wanted to discover what kinds of events and activities were most meaningful for our Affinity Group members, so we asked. Through surveys and purposeful conversations, we realized that less is more-more events does not mean more engagement-because every event should have a goal and a connection to the work of our Community Fund and/or community issues, which allowed us to make strategic cuts to traditional events.

We also realized that although each Affinity Group had some specific interests, members of all the groups also had some interests in common, particularly, family engagement and community development. So, we have begun experimenting with "combo" events-inviting all Affinity Groups' members and their families to have fun, volunteer and learn about our community's needs together.

Read full article.

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Over the last 4 months, UWW Investor Relations staff has been conducting a needs assessment to gain a deeper understanding of opportunities to increase dollars raised from individuals.   Your feedback and input is invaluable to help us support you with tools and resources to grow your relationships with individual donors and increase their support. 

Please take a few minutes before November 2 to answer the questions on the e-survey at the link below.  Your input, along with the findings from the needs assessment, will help us re-shape and/or sharpen the work we do to support you.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TSGJ6BB  

Please direct questions to Kathy Parker or DJ Hampton

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Think of a map of an unfamiliar place.  You know where you want to end up, but you don't know where you are relative to the goal and how best to get there. 

The Database 2 survey is a critical tool to help United Ways navigate their way to greater resource development success.  It collects information about where United Ways are and how they are performing in the area of giving, advocating, and volunteering.  United Ways can see where they are excelling and where they have opportunity for improvement.  It can provide guideposts to other United Ways that are doing well in particular markets or RD practices.  It can measure the network's progress in resource development performance relative to our expectations.  It can illumine advocacy and volunteer engagement strategies that work.  It can help United Ways manage many diverse relationships, implement LIVE UNITED, or support and aligning community volunteerism with our long term goals.  By understanding where we are as a network, we are better able to set paths towards greater success in Advancing the Common Good through Education, Income, and Health.    

United Way is a powerful movement, the largest charitable organization in the United States as measured by our annual Database 2 survey.  This is our opportunity to acknowledge our collective strength and resources as a network.  You will find the most recent Database 2 results here, with additional reports and data to be release throughout the fall.

Contact Lisa Wilder if you have questions. 

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Dear United Way CEOs:

I am a member of Orange County's United Way Tocqueville Society Million Dollar Roundtable.  At the United Way Worldwide Community Leaders' Conference last May, a group of Million Dollar Roundtable members and other United Way major donors from the United States and several other countries gathered to share our experiences and best practices with United Way philanthropy. The value of this peer to peer exchange of ideas caused us to speculate on the powerful, positive impact on communities a network of United Way major donors could have if we worked together to encourage the personal involvement of societal and business leaders in the work of United Way.  Not just in giving, but as advocates and volunteers for education, income and health initiatives on a local, national or worldwide level.   

As a result, we have formed the United Way Worldwide Leadership Council with the goal to increase the number of Tocqueville and Million Dollar Roundtable members and to increase their involvement in United Way initiatives.    We will do this by providing forums for these leaders to work together to advance the common good and to learn ways to inspire others to do the same.  We are recruiting members for the Council now, with the intent that half of a 20 member Council will be from the US.   As of early October, we have a total of 10 members from California, North Carolina, Kentucky, Colorado, Ohio Florida, Romania, Canada, Mexico, and France.

One of the first decisions we made was to re-institute the Tocqueville Leaders' gathering, an event that brings together Tocqueville Society Chairs and other Tocqueville leaders with Million Dollar Roundtable members for the purpose of learning from each other how to grow membership and how to apply the resources of those members to build education, income and health initiatives in our local communities and in our nation.  We know this format is effective.  In a five year period, 17 million dollar gifts were given to their local United Ways by donors who attended the gathering and United Ways cities who sent their Tocqueville chairs experienced a greater rate of membership growth than those that did not.  The key factor is the peer to peer connection as we inspire and sometimes challenge each other to greater levels of giving and volunteering, and as we trade best practices for how to engage our peers at home.   

In the next few weeks the Council will be sending to United Way Tocqueville Societies invitations for their members to participate in any of the three major gatherings we are planning for 2013.   We've identified primary target audiences for each gathering, and we'll build the agenda around the interests of that group, but all donors are invited to participate in all of the meetings.  To most effectively engage our fellow Tocqueville and Million Dollar Roundtable members, we need your support and your advice.   If you have suggestions for the agendas, for Tocqueville/MDR members to involve in the planning or on the Leadership Council, or for ways that we can most effectively involve you, please email them to me at Mike.Hayde@unitedway.org.  I look forward to our conversations.  

Regards,

Mike Hayde

You may have noted that requests for sample documents have been flooding the listservs lately. Everyone is looking to either jazz up their old materials or try something new so why re-create the wheel if good samples are already out there. We'd love to post some recent samples in an easy-to -find location on UW Online but in order to do that, we need your help! Do you have sample letters (thank you, solicitation, etc.), newsletters, brochures, step-up materials or major gift plans that you are proud of and willing to share with the field? If so, please send them to Becky Bogle. We can all benefit from the great things you are doing.