Organized Corporate Philanthropy: A New Approach

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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It’s tough to write articles like this in some ways, because it is going to sound as if I am being critical of the way that some organizations support charitable or community efforts. That’s not my intent, and I applaud any organization and any individual that goes out of their way to help organizations in their community--there’s no such thing as “bad” philanthropy. However, I do think that some approaches are more beneficial than others, and that’s what I want to consider in this article.

Many organizations are involved in philanthropy of some sort; most of those simply providing some kind of sponsorship, and that doesn’t really need any analysis here. I have come across a couple of corporate models that go beyond that, and that I think may form the basis of something more substantial that project managers and their teams can get involved with.

Current philanthropy models
The first model that I want to look at is where organizations offer employees one paid day off a year (in addition to their vacation entitlement) to volunteer in their local community. There’s no restriction on what that volunteering might be, just something that is important to each employee. I love this approach because it gives the employee complete control over how they donate their time; their employer is allowing them to volunteer their time …

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