On Thursday, January 24th 2019, HeartPress teamed up with NetSquared Victoria to create an event that enabled businesses and non-profits to speak the same language. Afterwards, we sat down with one of the panelists, Britt Shannon, Director of Customer Success, to discuss philanthropy at Race Roster.
Tech & Philanthropy: Giving in the Tech Sector
One of Victoria’s booming industries is the tech sector with many of these companies wanting to do good. Yet often, non-profits and businesses run on different timelines so some difficulty in connecting can result. There are many roadblocks for non-profits looking to make meaningful relationships with businesses. HeartPress Founder, Lori Munoz Malcolm moderated the panel and provided meaningful and thought provoking questions for an all-female panel of non-profit organization superstars!
Who is NetSquared Victoria? They provide a space that allows for Social change makers and technological forerunners to come together for events to mix, swap stories and ideas and most importantly build new relationships. The event was compiled of 50+ attendees all curious to hear from the panel of tech-based philanthropists.
Why we partnered with NetSquared Victoria on this event?
We’re passionate about this topic because of the collaborations that can be obtained by bringing together these two sectors together. With the help of communication between non-profits and businesses we can begin to close that gap that lies between these two and create meaningful and beneficial relationships.
Meet one of our panelists: Britt Shannon of Race Roster.
Britt is the Director of Customer Success at Race Roster. Her experience in fundraising began at a small society before joining Power To Be to work on donor relations and signature fundraising events. Combining her interest in technology with a passion for fundraising, Britt jumped into the tech space in 2015. Today, her role involves leading a Customer Success team, responsible for exceptional donor, participant and event organizer experience on Race Roster. When away from her laptop, you’ll find Britt travelling to events or running trails.
Race Roster is a world-class event registration system that allows Event Directors to oversee participant signups, donations, and event revenue all in one dashboard. Events working with Race Roster give their participants an unmatched experience that allows them to fundraise and recruit their friends to the event. Read more www.raceroster.com
Here we have a few questions that Britt answered during the event:
Share a recent charitable success that your company has had with philanthropy – and identify what you believe is the reason for that success.
Our office in London, Ontario worked together to support Movember this year. An internal champion came forward with the idea and really carried the momentum. He recruited a few other team members to create fundraising pages and join in a common goal. As a management team, we found ways to support these efforts through donations, staff time and room for office activities. From there these internal champions leveraged Slack and team meetings to spread the word. Together they raised funds for the cause and increased awareness for our team on how the cause has evolved. Slack is incredibly powerful for keeping the internal and remote teams engaged in fundraising activities, allocating this dialogue in designated channels, and minimizing disruption to workflow.
Race Roster Internal Champions
What is preventing your company from being its most philanthropic self?
Time and focus. In our industry in particular, nearly all customers have a cause component. This can been seen as both distracting and something to celebrate. We have to choose how we contribute, through reduced fundraising platform fees, extra time/energy or monetary contributions. Right now our philanthropic behaviour is spread thin to please a wide range of customers. As we grow I can see a need for more definition, and boundaries that allow us to rally around causes as a team and intentionally contribute to them.
Race Roster Events
We hear from many charities that the “tech sector is a hard sector to get to know and engage with.” What are your thoughts on this statement and how does it relate to your company?
Speaking from our organization, the culture internally is fast paced and innovative. When considering partnerships with vendors, customers or charities, we are looking to connect with like-minded organizations who can meet us where we’re at. This means making the fundraising initiatives and donation opportunities modern, easy and mutually beneficial. It also means being open to feedback and ideas on improving the experience year over year. Human resources in the tech sector are scarce and expensive, which leads us to carefully evaluate where the team participates in philanthropy, and what that time away does for employee satisfaction at work.
Race Roster’s Innovative Event & Fundraising Solutions
The event was successful and led to many conversations along with new growth in relationships between businesses and non-profits especially in the tech sector. By continuing to engage in the area of communication HeartPress is hopeful to generate more positive results similar to these that were made possible with the help of NetSquared Victoria.
