Engage Your Employees in Generosity this Amplify Austin Day
Amplify Austin Day 2020 takes place from 6pm March 5 to 6pm March 6. Organized by I Live Here I Give Here, Austin’s most impactful day of giving brings together thousands of Central Texans and hundreds of local businesses to give back locally. Givers can connect with more than 750 local nonprofits working to address our community’s most pressing needs.
Giving back is good business! That’s why we invite you, our local business community, to join us on Amplify Austin Day as a Business Fundraiser. Create a custom fundraising page, empower employees to make a difference, set team goals, and uncover valuable metrics about employee giving. You may also choose to match employees’ gifts to make a bigger impact for the causes they love.
Your profile is free and easy to create! Just follow these simple steps to get started. Join the local generosity movement today and show the world how generous Austin (and your team!) can be!
Don’t just take our word for it! Learn how some of Central Texas’ top business leaders are participating in Amplify Austin Day and creating a culture of generosity in the workplace below.
Why We Give Here
By Allen Gilmer, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board, Enverus
Before I knew about Amplify Austin and what it stood for, I was very much against corporate charitable giving. I had investors and employees and didn’t feel like the company’s money was mine to give.
My management team and I had been discussing our ad hoc corporate charitable contributions policy for some time. Few of my CEO peers had my reticence toward corporate giving, viewing it as one of the many perks that accumulate to the CEO suite. This philosophy made me feel profoundly uncomfortable, because I didn’t actually own my company outright. I always had investors, and considered our stakeholders to be investors, clients, and employees. Why should my choice of charitable contribution beneficiary prevail?
And I found it rather easy to dodge the subject when approached.
Investors were easy. I could return their money and not use it for my charitable contributions so they could use it as they saw fit. Clients were easy. We support all sorts of charitable endeavors for our investor community, and we look at it as marketing. I expect many other companies view giving the same way
Employees? They were not easy
And then I Live Here I Give Here brought us Amplify Austin Day. It was a turning point for me to say the least.
With Amplify Austin, I Live Here I Give Here gave us a platform to empower all of our employees to give charitably. In 2013 for our first Amplify Austin Day, my wife Riki and I decided to personally match employee donations to the charities of their choice. Further, the company agreed to match a certain amount of employee contributions to encourage the giving. The results were spectacular, largely because our employees had deeply personal connections to the charities they donated to.
Not only did we raise record amounts of charitable dollars from nearly all our employees, we created a real sense of pride within our organization. We set such a high bar… higher than any other company in town. With nearly 100% participation, we raised more money than companies much larger than us. And we did it for five years until we were finally toppled from the top of the podium by a great effort from Cirrus Logic. And so I’ll warn you now, team Enverus doesn’t like to lose—ever—let alone twice.
As the CEO of an organization, Amplify Austin Day provided a wonderful insight into what our employees individually cared about—their passions—far more effectively than an HR file. As a result, Riki and I have donated to a myriad of charities we would never have known about were it not for the program. Some have become permanent fixtures in our annual giving program. For instance, one employee’s family had adopted an orphan, little girl from Colombia who was facing a future of sex slavery when she was rescued. Not only did we learn his family story, we learned it wasn’t a problem a world away but in our own backyard. And through Amplify Austin, we learned there was a way we could help others in such a terrifying situation. In fact, this story moved us so much that it became a major plot line in the movie Riki and I recently produced called “Death in Texas.”
That is only one of many touching stories brought about by Amplify Austin Day.
Sure, there were some checks we wrote for which I had no real natural affinity, but even then, what I got out of it was a deeper understanding and appreciation of what a particular employee values. I can’t think of a better way to learn about a person than to learn about what makes them passionate.
So how did we become a five-year consecutive champion?
In a word … competition. Humans are competitive animals, and they like to win. Providing an incentive like a match induces people to give and share their stories with the rest of us.
Competition versus other companies. A great inducement to give just a little bit more!
Competition versus other internal business units. We give prizes and recognition.
Matching. Everyone likes to see their favorite charity benefit extra from their own efforts. We match at corporate levels and each department will have department heads match in line with “for the next hour only” or “the next $200.” Then there’s personal matches. Everyone gets in on the matching action.
A recognition party afterward. Our folks are the charitable ones. We want to recognize and reward this quality and hopefully lifelong habit.
Heather McKissick, Senior Vice President of Community Impact, University Federal Credit Union, shares:
"UFCU prioritizes community. Our employees love an opportunity to give personally, knowing we support their generosity."
Kent Radford, DISCO Co-Founder and General Counsel, says:
“At DISCO, we believe to help is human. We encourage our employees to use the inventor’s spirit to inspire compassion, service, and kindness in our community. We are thankful for organizations like I LIVE HERE I GIVE HERE that help us achieve those goals.”
Sergio Cavazos, Vice President, Client Service & Support, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., shares:
“Volunteering and helping our community is a big part of our culture at Charles Schwab. While we have programs that celebrate generosity year-round, Amplify Austin is truly a day of celebration and local-giving at Schwab. Last year, our employees gave nearly $60,000 to more than 250 different central Texas nonprofits. I can't wait to see what our team accomplishes during Amplify Austin Day 2020!”
We are so grateful to our Annual Business Members and Business Fundraisers for all that you do to give back local and foster a spirit of generosity across our community!