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A: We have approximately 800 different ways that our program participants can donate to charities. [We work with] Karma Currency. Ashley Rosshandler founded Karma Currency, a national independent charitable, not-for profit organisation that seeks to revitalise the philanthropic landscape in Australia. It is a registered charity that has deductible gift recipient and income tax exempt status approved by the Australian Tax Office. My business partner David Jackson is an executive director [of Karma Currency] and met with Ashley at a tradeshow back in 2008. At that time we were keen to expand our philanthropic offering and Ross was just starting to promote his business, and so it was fortuitous really that both companies met.
A: Interest has definitely grown over the past few years. Clients certainly see the value in what these CSR initiatives bring to their corporations and their people. The participants love the fact that they have the opportunity to contribute to charities - and a very large variety of charities.
A: In terms of the kinds of physical rewards that people can receive we have over 4000 different rewards that a participant can redeem, for example, if they earn points in a sales program. In addition to using those points to donate money to charity we also offer programs for incentives and conferences, as you know, and we do many events as part of our conference and incentive programs that have CSR orientations.
One example was when we were in Thailand. As a team-building exercise we got 300 sales people to build some bikes for some orphans in Phuket. The orphanage had been set up for children who had been orphaned as a result of the tsunami. So the sales people knew that they were building these bikes for the orphans and that the bikes would be delivered to the orphanage. But when they’d actually completed building the bikes we said wouldn’t it be much nicer to give these to the kids yourselves? And we flung open the doors and all these kids ran into the area and the delegates were absolutely overwhelmed at these kids who were just so excited to receive a bike.
The participants decided that they wanted to do more for the kids. They learnt about the orphanage and decided they wanted to raise some money to build a new kitchen for the orphanage. And I guess they thought they might raise $5000 or $10,000 but they actually raised over $60,000 through the delegates and those people back in their office. The day that they were due to leave they asked us whether we could organise for them to leave their hotel early and go to the orphanage. They wanted to see the kids again, see where they lived. So we got some coaches organised. On the way they asked for the coaches to stop and they got out and bought bags of rice, powdered milk, any items they could get their hands on to give the children. Bag after bag was loaded onto the bus until we literally couldn’t fit anymore on. They arrived at the orphanage and handed out the food, toys, everything they’d bought. The delegates even donated the shirts off their backs. The whole event was incredibly overwhelming. We haven’t literally seen so many grown men and women with tears in their eyes.
There are many examples of helping the local community in terms of things that we do. When we [had a program] in Africa, for example, we approached the local community and asked them how they would like our help. They wanted help around housing and water for their village, and your immediate thought is we’ll bring whatever you need to build houses. But their houses aren’t bricks and mortar, they’re purpose-built mud huts, so that’s what we built. We got down and dirty and used the materials from the local area. The locals were involved, and basically managed our delegates to help build the huts. Again we’ve done something similar in Fiji where a local school needed a lot of help. We helped with water and sewerage [works], and we helped rebuild part of their classroom. Everything we do is to give back to the local community, and to keep our carbon footprint at a minimum.
You asked about projects where people plant trees and so forth. We try to go a little deeper than that. We try to actually make a visible difference so the delegates can see what they do is positively affecting the lives of the people in the country they have had the privilege of visiting and enjoying.
A: That’s right. Very often, especially in international destinations that aren’t wealthy nations, we are most likely to make recommendations to a client that we do something to contribute back to the local community. And corporations are more and more interested in doing this, in making a contribution in their delegates experiencing and helping others.
It really is a wonderful experience. Our job for our clients is to give their delegates a memorable, once in a lifetime experience and it’s wonderful that we can do that by some of these CSR initiatives. For many of them these are their most memorable experiences. It’s an experience that lives with them forever.
A: If you talk about incentives from the perspective of sales incentives there hasn’t been a dramatic change. In fact, during difficult times there is more of a need to keep sales people engaged and motivated to make sales. Those companies that significantly pull back their incentive plan will do so at their peril. Good sales people will move to greener pastures when the good times return if they don’t believe that they are being well recognised for their efforts. There has definitely been some corporations that have looked more closely at their budgets and maybe tightened their budgets a little bit, but we haven’t had a client that I can think of who has stopped their sales incentive programs during this time. We’re more likely to see [that] on the conference and events side where an organisation may have gathered their people together for a conference of some kind where they may look at other vehicles to communicate their message. But in terms of incentives, there is still a strength in the incentive market.
In terms of what hasn’t changed, what hasn’t changed is the need to motivate people to increase their discretionary performance to drive sales results. Non cash rewards will continue to have a complimenting role to cash, commissions, and the overall strategy to maximise performance improvement.
A: Any manager should clearly know the effectiveness of their incentive program by their ROI analysis – of the sales results versus the investment in the program. Engagement can also be measured by engagement surveys, and the effect on staff retention can be a measurement. If you are looking at, for example, a conference, again there are surveys that our clients do after every program so both our direct clients and the delegates provide significant amounts of feedback in terms of their experience of the program. With any incentive program there should be very clear measures.
A: Solterbeck started a long time ago, predominantly as a marketing consultancy. In 2000 the company changed part of its service offerings. We had at that time two streams: one was marketing consulting and the other was travel, conferences and events. But on the marketing consulting [side] we changed that part of our service to the area of performance improvement. That now is incentive recognition, reward and employee communication. And we didn’t take on any more consulting clients, and so now we specialise on the whole area of performance improvement. We have over 40 staff. In 2000, I think we had about seven.
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