Top 5 tips for causes using pro bono to support their COVID recovery
Good causes are now struggling more than ever before to meet their funding needs, while often at the same time struggling to keep up with demand for their services.
“One in 10 UK charities are facing bankruptcy by the end of the year as they struggle to cope with a £10bn shortfall caused by soaring demand for their services and lost fundraising income due to the coronavirus pandemic”, the Guardian reported on June 9th. And the same article stated that, “Most UK charities expect demand for their services to increase in the next six months”.
At MarketingKind our community of marketers come together to play supporting roles in helping causes that are reorienting their activities as a result of the pandemic.
Our online gatherings offer marketers the opportunity to learn more about important social or environmental issues and to work together with causes that are providing solutions to those problems. And the result is better marketing that strengthens the causes’ work.
At the moment we’re supporting many small charities and social enterprises by connecting them with individuals and groups of marketing volunteers to help with rethinking their business plans, or their fundraising, marketing and delivery strategies. And although pro bono support is given for free there is of course a real cost in staff time spent working with volunteers, so these relationships must provide a clear return on the time invested.
As co-founder of MarketingKind and with nine years’ experience running the pro bono marketing matching platform Pimp My Cause I’ve seen what factors most contribute to building successful pro bono relationships.
Here are my top five recommendations for small causes embarking on this journey:
Involve your leadership team in your pro bono relationships. If you are not leading your cause, make sure that the ultimate boss is fully aware of your work with volunteers and buys into the expected outcomes at every step of the project. If your cause’s leaders are not involved the goal posts may move and the completed work is much less likely to be used.
Have realistic expectations for the timing and scope of the work. Pro bono work can progress at a slower pace than paid work, due to the volunteers’ needs to work around their other commitments. Volunteers also often report delays as they wait for a cause to provide more information to help move a project forwards. So it’s useful to keep these factors in mind when working to deadlines. And although volunteers can take on the delivery of some work, there are almost always large amounts that have to be completed by the cause’s team directly.
Set a clear brief, but remain open to change. Your brief should include the scope of the project, your needs, resources, goals and how you will measure success. Volunteers may not have charity sector experience, so it can also be helpful to include examples of past successes and failures to give greater context to the project. You can of course involve your volunteers in helping you to refine the brief and more experienced professionals will often want to start by questioning your brief to make sure that you are setting the right goals and that your assumptions hold up under scrutiny.
Communicate clearly and often. Projects almost always change as the work progresses, so it’s important to stay in close contact with volunteers to avoid redundant work and confusion. And a volunteer may have different expectations than you in terms of the pace of progress, so checking in often can help to avoid miscommunications (for example I have heard from many volunteers who are questioning if the cause liked their work because they didn’t get a quick reply upon completion of a project).
Understand what each volunteer wants to get from working with you. Volunteers get involved for a variety of reasons: they may want to give back and have the satisfaction of using their skills for good, they may want to challenge themselves in a new way or they may be looking to build their portfolio and perhaps make themselves more employable. It’s important to understand their reasons and to support them in achieving their goals in whatever ways possible. This can be as simple as writing a LinkedIn testimonial or allowing them to showcase your work together on their website. And we know that above all volunteers and businesses that provide pro bono support want to see that their contributions are making a difference, so make them a part of your success story.
As you can imagine causes that are appreciative are more likely to engage volunteers and keep them coming back over and over again. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, but a simple thank you letter or email can go a long way to creating a word of mouth effect amongst volunteers that you are a cause worth supporting!
For example, we recently ran an online event called The Marketing Help Desk. It was a simple format requested by causes that was an hour-long panel discussion with four marketing experts fielding questions from cause leaders on how best to use marketing to help their causes emerge from lockdown.
After the event we surveyed all of the causes that participated to find out what was most useful for them. Two of the cause leaders provided particularly detailed highlights and feedback, which was incredibly useful. And as a result we are much more likely to go back to them when we’re looking for causes to feature in our pro bono marketing events or for causes to recommend to our partners.
If you have any questions about making the most of pro bono work whether you are a cause representative, a marketer or from a company interested in pro bono marketing work, I’d be delighted to hear from you. Please get in touch at anna@marketingkind.org.