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Katie and Carol talk about Tips 18 and 19 from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership.
Tip #18. Use a team meeting to select a local non-profit project and decide on a plan to support it over the next year.
Better yet, let your staff make suggestions for charities they would like to support. Then give them two weeks to lobby on behalf of their project, giving everyone an equal vote as to which non-profit they support for the year.
This is a terrific approach to teambuilding for a small office or department.
We have included a community-focus tip here because we women are such natural players in the charitable world. We have a high awareness of the importance of community and the greater good. And, of course, we are terrific as leaders in non-profit organizations.
Tip #19. Encourage your employees to give back to the community. Support them.
Formalize your policy on charitable time. Tell staff they can have one hour a week or month to donate to a charity of their choice. Get a letter from the Executive Director of the charity that your employee is in fact donating his or her time.
[insert warm, fuzzy feeling here]
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Hello and welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, the podcast to help you get the support, validation, and skills you need to accomplish your goals and really succeed in a male-dominated world, all without having to give up your incredible female strengths.
Katie: Always filled with great information for you. Lovely Skirt strategist, to follow us through a track for women’s leadership. We’re covering tips from the book Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership.
Carol: And we are all the way into Tip Number 18. We’re going to cover 18 and 19 together today. Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense. And they both have to do with giving back, which is very nice.
Katie: This is how you can differentiate your office from other offices if you don’t already.
Carol: Right. Being a female leader means we can be different. We are. We can be different and one of the differences is that we can kind of openly just give back.
Katie: I’m not going to say we’re more community minded because I know a lot of men that are community minded but I do think – I do know that women have a more holistic focus in our lives, because we are balancing so many different areas of the world.
So Tip Number 18, why don’t read Tip 18 Carol.
Carol: Use a team meeting to select a local non-profit project and decide on a plan to support it over the next year.
Katie: Even if you are a team of one –
Carol: Even if you are a team of three, how nice that you are all working towards the same goal for the same nonprofit. Now sometimes it doesn’t work, in which case we’ll go on to Tip 19, which is Encourage your employees give back to the community and support them but I think the camaraderie of this first one, picking a project in your community and then supporting everybody in doing that project – just recently on my staff, we work with restaurants and so Restaurant Impossible came to town and they were asking for volunteers to help a local restaurant and it ended up being one of our members, volunteering to help them spruce up their menu, their décor –
Katie: So this is a reality show?
Carol: It actually was a reality show.
Katie: Fun.
Carol: Yeah it was really fun and so the staff – and actually I couldn’t participate because I was having my gallbladder out but my staff volunteered and went out into this restaurant and spent a day really working hard and one of them actually made the cut and she’s on the show.
Katie: Oh how exciting!
Carol: Very fun. So it can be something that is really fun but we gave back to our community. It’s a community that we believe in and that we work for all the time and you don’t think of restaurants and being charitable but this one really was a charity case. It was about to go out of business.
Katie: And it’s maybe now not.
Carol: Hopefully.
Katie: Well that’s fun. Well I think you can identify a community project. If you are looking for where to start, your local United Way has nonprofit members so generally charities belong to United Way organizations and United Way becomes a central point for knowing who is out there in the community. That’s one area.
Carol: It is. It’s a great place to begin.
Katie: Find what your passion is. Is there something along the lines of what your business does that would be a good fit with a certain charitable cause. Like the restaurant association, a food pantry.
Carol: A food bank – easy.
Katie: A kid’s cooking camp. Donate pots and pans.
Carol: If you’re a realtor, what would be something good for?
Katie: Well I’m thinking that you can be a thrift shop because you can get things at a thrift shop that help fill a house.
Carol: Sure. So help volunteer at a local thrift shop. No there are wonderful things you can do and here is someplace that you can also ask your staff.
Katie: Yes well think also if there’s a project that you’re going to be a part of, like the local 5K Run for Breast Cancer – they are always taking volunteers. Is there a way that you can have the Susan Komen T-shirt or whatever they might give you as a volunteer, as well as a button on it that have your business?
Or if it’s a project that you are doing yourself, like you want to do a book drive in the neighborhood, the neighborhood businesses and you send out a flier and ask all of them if they would over the next two weeks collect books for children and on one Saturday you come along door to door and pick it up.
You can your office T-shirt on or some sort of a shirt that’s got the logo on it and now you are like the good guy in the neighborhood. How fun would that be?
Carol: Very nice and part of our tip here is that – to let your staff make suggestions for charities they would like to support. If you’ve got a bigger staff this would work, then give them two weeks to lobby on behalf of their project, giving everyone an equal vote as to which nonprofit they would support for the year.
Katie: Oh good one.
Carol: Little bit of competition and team spirit in that. If you have a large enough organization that you have people who have their own charities and would like to lobby on behalf of their charity, I think that’s a fabulous thing to do.
Katie: I went to a lunch yesterday for the Junior League and it’s the not so active people anymore. We are called sustainers. So it was our annual spring sustainer lunch –
Carol: An old lady group?
Katie: And they are some old ladies there and there’s a lot of 30 and well some 40’s, most of us are probably 50’s but because it is the has-been’s, we get together now instead of doing what we did when we were active, we actually get together and we socialize but we always have some sort of a – at two of our annual things, I think it’s a Christmas and in the spring when we get together – we make sure that we do something during that luncheon, in this case it was a lunch, to collect some money. Something that’s fun, that’s free, that we can give back to.
Carol: Not just to collect money for yourself.
Katie: Exactly. So a friend of mine – actually two friends of mine that were putting it together and it was one of the banquet rooms at a local restaurant, a very nice room, so the two of them ahead of time got 6 or 7 raffle items donated, a membership to the museum foundation, a couple passes to go soak in a hot spa, that sort of thing.
So things that women like – put them out on a table, put a little bag in front of them, and then you sell raffle tickets, and everyone buys raffle tickets and they put a ticket in front of each of the bags that they want and we pull one from. This was doing nothing. We raised $450.
Carol: Right. Nice.
Katie: Turn right around and give back to the League, you can do that with your office.
Have a chili cook off. Have people vote. Buy tickets to vote for which chili they liked the best and then turn around and give the money back to the nonprofit that you’ve chose en. So it doesn’t have to mean that you are out in that nonprofit with your arms – sleeves rolled up and getting your fingers dirty, but I always recommend doing that.
Carol: Yes, every once in a while.
Katie: But you can always do it from afar as well.
We also did – this is a good one if you have an evening event, everyone brought – this was another Junior League thing, part of the admission to come to the dinner, was a bottle of wine. So you brought a bottle of wine and we put all the wines together and we raffled them off in groups of six.
So about one out of every six people went home with a half a case.
Carol: Wow. You know what we did? We had people donate wine and then we sold – some of it was very high-end, you know, you could get a magnum bottle of Opus 1 or you could get some Mad Dog.
So we sold the tickets for $25, people knowing that they could get this bottle of Opus and whatever, and then quite a few other really high-end wines. We had over 100 wines there and everybody walked out – so it’s a brown-bag and they just grab one and it’s either going to be a really great bottle or a not so great bottle and they’ve just given so a charitable cause so it’s okay.
It worked out great. I think the person who got the Opus actually gave it back to us. We have it to raffle again.
Katie: Oh you’re not just going to consume it? That’s unselfish of you.
Carol: It is, isn’t it?
Katie: I’m being really kind.
Carol: Yeah I’m thinking about draining it and re-corking it.
Katie: This is – clever. This is a great way to build team man-ship – doing things together. This is a great way to be out in the community. This is a great way to give back to somebody that needs it anyway.
Carol: Right.
Katie: Easy and fun. I love it.
Carol: It is and I do want to mention that in Tip 19, encourage your employees to give back to the community and support them. This may mean that you have to formalize your policy on charitable time and how you’re going to – because you’ve got one person who’s gone half the week doing their charitable duties and then you’ve got another person who never does anything for charities.
You really do need to formalize – we’ll pay for you to – half day once a month in order to deal with your charitable duties and we encourage you to do that and then get a letter from the Executive Director of the charity that your employee is in fact helping out.
But it makes a difference to the rest of the team that you are being consistent with that policy.
Katie: Often if we at Skirt Strategies are out doing a book signing or speaking event, I’m willing if they’ll do a little promotion about the book and help us sell some at the event, we’ll turn around and give some of that back to a nonprofit that’s sponsored us or to a nonprofit that associated with whatever organization we’re in there with.
Carol: Yeah and we’ve always talked about doing a skirt drive or a suit drive as we are out in the communities and we have not done this yet, only we haven’t had it presented to us in a way that we could figure out how to do it and people don’t really take charitable gifts to travel. So when we’re doing it here we do have to remember that – get people to donate an old business suit that we can give to women who are looking for jobs.
Katie: Dress for Success is a nonprofit in many cities across the country that help women get back into the work force with professionalism and skills and they can use some outfits.
Probably can’t use my outfit but –
Carol: Yes, you’d be surprised.
Katie: I hope so.
Carol: How many women of your stature? Then of course there’s me who’s got the oversized clothes.
Katie: Isn’t it funny how different we all are but we love our sellfie. What else?
Carol: I think that’s about it. Just get out there in your community. Remember to give back always. It makes a difference and I’ll tell you what, it makes a difference cosmically. You may not see it right away, but what you give out comes back.
Katie: It puts positive back into the universe.
Carol: It does. And if you’re in a position to do that, so take advantage of that.
Katie: We believe in that. Namaste.
Carol: Namaste.
That’s it for this episode of the Skirt Strategies podcast. Thank you for joining us and please be sure to leave a question or comment at Skirtstrategies.com. Remember that success comes when you lead using your natural female strengths.
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