Keeping Helping Hands fresh through innovation & meaningful partnerships

FROM THE JUDGES:

Great ingenuity to introduce new partners while maintaining established partners with short and long term initiatives that engage team members.”

INNOVATION + IMPACT

  • Taking an innovative approach to fund charity partners to pursue big scale initiatives not traditionally supported via workplace giving
  • Introduced a rotation policy and fixed term partnerships for charities
  • Appointment of a dedicated workplace giving team member
  • Successful transition of team to maintain levels of participation

 OVERVIEW + HIGHLIGHTS

  • The ‘Helping Hands’ workplace giving program has been at the core of team culture at consumer goods retailer JB Hi-Fi for the past 11 years
  • Looking for ways to keep the program fresh, JB Hi-Fi conducted a national staff survey, where it was identified some cause areas team members were passionate about were missing from the program
  • The challenge was how to introduce new causes and charity partners, whilst keeping the number manageable and maintaining the high levels of participation and connection with existing partners
  • The solution was to introduce a rotation model that would create opportunities to introduce new cause areas that better reflect the interests and passion of the JB Hi-Fi team. This was developed by the Helping Hands committee (which included the CEO and Senior Executives) and communicated to the team and charity partners
  • The program was expanded from nine to ten charity partners. A new category – ’Helping Hands, Helping Out’ – was created to support big bold ideas for a short term
  • The JB Hi-Fi team loves a challenge and thrives on the feeling they are working towards a shared goal. As such, both the rotation and short term partnership strategies allows Helping Hands to fund charity partners to undertake defined projects that would otherwise not be possible from traditional workplace giving or donor funding
  • The size and scale of the JB Hi-Fi program (donating in excess of $20 million since inception) means a charity partner can pursue a big scale idea with some certainty of funding and support
  • One new charity partnership has been able to fast track its ambition to move beyond their current state operations through a fully funded feasibility study and detailed plan of how and where scale makes most sense to extend their services of preventing youth homelessness
  • Helping Hands Helping Out is supporting an organisation for women and children at risk of family violence and homelessness to expand its unique service model into new areas. The funding is will create more accommodation for women and children so they can live without the fear of family violence, establish social connections and find their way into meaningful work