BuiltEnvironment

Handling requests for donations

We are quickly approaching that time of year when firms start getting emails suggesting they make donations before the current tax year ends. And, of course, the donations should be to the firms emailing the suggestion.

But how do you decide which donation request to approve and which to decline?

And even with sincere-sounding names and messages, so many turn out to be scams that will cash your check and run. They even create fake websites to look real if you check them out.

I once worked for a firm where the president couldn't say "no" to any charity asking for help. Someone in accounting alerted the marketing department and we realized that we were getting no visibility for our contributions.

But how could we control the good-hearted nature of the firm's president and make sure the donations were going to organizations that really existed and were aligned with the firm's goals and desires?

In the end, all our concerns were answered in one word: PROCESS!

In all four organizations where I have been a full-time employee, I helped create processes to make donation decisions. The basic steps are as follows:

First, look at your firm, its needs, the industry you're in, and factors relevant to how you do business. Select types of charities that make sense for your firm. For example, in all four A/E firms where I was employed, we decided to support causes related to children and education, especially technical education. In addition to writing checks and adopting schools, we also supported programs like the Mathcounts competition/club.

Then look at local and regional politics. We decided to contribute to social causes, especially those that could have a positive outcome for the firm, but not to individual political campaigns. The exception was one city where we had an office, where mayor had a history of vetoing the selection of any firm that wasn't on his list of contributors. We gave $100 to every mayoral candidate so we'd be covered no matter who won.

We looked at all the scammers trying to separate us from our money. I learned that sending information on a fake charity for the purpose of scamming money was considered "mail fraud," a Federal felony. So I told everyone who contacted me to send their information via US Mail. Anything delivered in person or by courier, faxed or emailed would be trashed, unread. This totally kept the scammers away.

Finally, consider the potential for public visibility: would we be thanked publicly or just get a receipt in the mail; would we see our name listed in an advertisement; would the donation give us access to someone we wanted to meet, and so forth.

I believe strongly that individual charity should be anonymous so that it doesn't adversely impact any relationship that might exist between giver and receiver. But that's individual contributions. Corporate contributions, on the other hand, can be considered a form of advertising.

So we determined how much we could afford to give (in one firm, a percentage of revenues; in another, a more arbitrary decision) and where we could get the most impact for our contribution, and set our budget accordingly.

A firm's donations MUST be a business decision. Even large foundations would quickly go broke if they gave huge sums of money to every group that applied for funds. For a small company with fewer resources, such decisions must be made with care.

Focus on strengths, not weaknesses

In my almost 30 years as a marketer in the A/E/C industry, I have seen principals, managers, supervisors and coaches develop exercises to work on an individual's weaknesses, forcing those people to spend inordinate amounts of time focusing on the area(s) where they are weakest.

I am convinced that this does little more than remind people of the ways they don't measure up.

If you take someone who is pretty weak in one area and improve their performance by 20%, have you made them strong? Or have you just made them less weak? And does your client care about this kind of improvement? I don't think so.

But suppose you take an area where the individual is already competent and give him/her the additional education and experience to turn that competence into a real strength. Then you have helped them grow into someone who has value to your clients and, therefore, who brings value to your firm (i.e. builds business) above and beyond just their capacity for billable hours.

Your client wants to know that your firm's best people (the "A" Team) will be on the project, that the strongest resumes are in your proposal, that your most expert staff members will be advising him/her and managing his/her projects.

So the focus really needs to be on identifying each individual's strengths, building those strengths further, and giving those strengths wide visibility through a variety of opportunities--in other words, promoting those strengths to your clients and to the technical and professional communities.

Hence all the current discussion about visible experts.

When your technical folks achieve name recognition within the local A/E/C community, you may have more teaming opportunities. Prime firms want you on their teams because your visible expert enhances the client's perception of a proposal team.

When your technical folks achieve name recognition in the broader business community, you may have suddenly be seen as having the technical "chops" to propose as a prime because your person's visibility enhances the owner's perception of your firm's capabilities.

How do you make your experts more visible? By helping them get their ideas to the eyes and ears of the people who promote and/or hire expertise. Your marketing staff can help.

Marketers can help identify the groups whose members need your expertise, the magazines those people read, the associations they belong to and the conferences they attend.

Then, your marketers can look for opportunities to get your experts writing for magazines those people read and speaking at conferences those people attend.

Your marketers might even parlay these successes into interviews with local newspaper business editors and business press--maybe even local TV stations. Ultimately, your experts will be called by reporters for quotes about related subjects, and the broader community will begin to see them as experts, too.

By the way, make sure there's a place in your firm's website to publish your experts' writings. In this day of self-publishing, if a local paper is not interested in a subject, you can still give your expert visibility by publishing his/her writing on your website, announcing it to the world, and making copies available. And if people have to provide their contact information to get the "free" article, that's even better.

Creativity and value

We all think that creativity is about the development of something new--an idea a process, a product, etc. If it's new, it's creative. Period. That's it.

But I recently heard a speaker say, "creativity is the process of having original ideas that have worth" (Sir Ken Robinsin, in a 2006 TED talk).

In business, it seems to me that the second is the more rational definition.

As soon as a new idea is deemed to have no worth, why would someone spend/invest any more time to develop it further? Time spent developing an idea, product or process that has no value is time wasted.

I have also heard it said that sometimes the person working hardest is the one staring out the window. They are thinking, or maybe even dreaming, and the result of the time spent in such a flight of fancy gives us new products, new processes, and new ways of looking at the world and all its components.

Personally, I believe that creativity CANNOT be taught; that if a child is not curious about the world around him/her, how it works, why it works, if/how something can be changed and improved, they are not creative, and they won't become creative as they grow up.

Schools can guide creativity. They can expose a child to a broad range of things that will refine his or her creative bent. They can show a child the works of Renoir and Picasso, the Elgin marbles and Calder mobiles. Or they can play the works of Mozart and Glass, of Chopin and Stravinski. But a child who is not inherently creative is never going to paint or compose a masterpiece.

Robinson makes the point that "creativity, in education, is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same respect." Unfortunately, as he implies in his TED talk, once the schools identify creativity, they are much more likely to kill it than foster and guide it.

Schools are too focused on every child learning the same thing at the same time in the same manner. And they are equally focused on every child using what he/she learns in the same manner toward the same ends.

We are educating our children for a future we cannot even imagine or envision. So how can we be sure that making all children fit into the same box is the answer for the brightest of possible futures.

Certainly, forcing square peg children into round hole roles and ways of thinking about the world is not the answer. We must find ways to identify creative children and give them safe places to play and experiment without the limitations schools currently impose on their students. We must let them play "let's pretend" and stop telling them they need to "grow up."

If we keep killing all creativity in our children, where will we find the next generation of architects and engineers who can respond to a client's needs and enhance the place where a project happens, and do so in a way nobody every thought possible before?

Who will develop new structural systems to keep a 300-floor building standing even in an earthquake?

Who will figure out new and more effective ways to protect the natural environment while building roads, bridges, pipelines and other necessary infrastructure?

Who will figure out how to do these things in ways that are so elegant in their simplicity that the rest of us can merely look, shake our heads and wonder where such ideas come from?