21 | Adding Strategic Philanthropy to Your Business

Introduction

I’m afraid I’m going to have a hard time finding good goof material this episode; the topic is philanthropy and how to ingrain that into your business. James and Kevin have been busy with an eCommerce plugin that they acquired recently. Rob has been having an awesome summer, because he’s Rob.Jeremy has been doing nothing but vacation, and he has another vacation coming up soon.

The Show

In this episode, the hosts discuss how you can build philanthropy into your business. Rob gives an example of how the Alderman Group is going to be donating their time to local nonprofits based upon recommendations from their current clients. Rob claims all the credit for this awesome campaign which he’s dubbed Tag: You’re It!. James and Kevin talk a little bit about how they need to be better at giving as a business, although they do give their time and some money within the WordPress community. Jeremy talks about how BonLife makes decisions about which local charities to support with their resources. TL;DR - Don’t let giving to local causes be an accident. Work giving into your budget and create a plan for how you’re going to decide which charities you give to. It’s ok to give to a charity and get something in return, like exposure.

Our Recommendations

I refuse to label this section of the podcast “Tips and Tricks,” no matter how much Rob calls it that. Deal with it, Rob. Deal with it. Rob recommends that you listen to the Be the Kind podcast. See that Rob? It wasn’t a tip or a trick. You recommended that people listen to that show. Of course, Rob is in marketing, so I actually expected him to replace recommendations with something like one weird old trick. Rob is like a walking Buzzfeed. Anyway, Be the Kind is a podcast about kindness and people being awesome to their local communities. You can find it wherever you find great podcasts. Kevin recommends switching to GitLab from GitHub for your code repositories, especially if you’re a business. GitHub. GitLab. Why do tech people have to make up so many useless words? I mean, the word get already existed. Not to mention that git sounds like an English pejorative. It’s like leaving vowels out of words to be clever; you don’t need to do it. Apparently the Hub of Gits took down the Ninja Forms code repository a bit too willy-nilly for Kevin’s liking, so he recommends controlling the server where your code lives. James recommends finding local charitable events that you can use as both a way of giving back and team building exercises. Apparently James raced dragons in a boat when he worked at Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union. That helped his team get closer together and raised money, or something like that. Jeremy recommends the site charitynavigator.org. Their tagline is: Your Guide to Intelligent Giving. If you want to check out how charities spend your money before you give, you can find lots of details at this site. Again, I’d like to make fun of Jeremy here, but I’m coming up a bit short on material.