Since 2006, MS&L has supported Hands on Network (HON) through our staff volunteer program, Change minds, Change lives, which won a 2007 SABRE award for best workplace initiative and was named a finalist for outstanding public service. In August 2007, Points of Light (POL) and Hands on Network merged to create the world's largest volunteer organization.

MS&L staff have volunteered hundreds of hours in their local communities with other members of network, doing everything from planting flowers to painting murals for communities in need. To learn more about the program, read the following piece by MS&L Global CEO Mark Hass, who has served on the organization’s corporate service council for the past two years. 

Our Global Approach to Corporate Citizenship

Mark Hass, Global CEO

If you manage a public relations agency or corporate communications function, you know the importance of listening well to the two key constituencies that dictate your operational priorities: employees and clients. A year ago, I began getting the same message, stereo, from these two groups regarding the need to become a more critical and valued member of our communities.

Most Manning Selvage & Lee’s employees take part in some sort of community philanthropic activity. They give time at their places of worship; they coach a youth sports team; they donate money to local and national charities. The agency also participates in charitable events sponsored by key clients. Many of our offices do important pro bono work for non-profit companies in their communities. We believed we already WERE a critical part of our communities. But what I was hearing was about something else, and the message was clearly that we needed to do more.

First, an increasing number of new agency hires, the talented young men and women who were joining us from college or from an entry-level job they’d taken just after college, were asking us some unexpected questions during job interviews. After the anticipated queries about salary, benefits and work assignments, they wanted to know about the work-related opportunities we would give them to do “good” in their communities.

This post-Katrina generation places great importance on the importance of personal philanthropic involvement. The need to do it is a key part of their life plans, and they define philanthropy in a very specific way. They are about giving time, not giving money. This may be so because they have much more of the former, but more likely is the result of having watched our government’s ineffective response to Katrina’s devastation and the way private industry and citizens stepped in. These new idealists have the need to personally make a tangible, visible difference in the lives of those less fortunate.

At the same time, the CEO of a key agency client asked me to consider joining the corporate council of an Atlanta-based national volunteer organization, the Hands On Network. Like many public relations agencies, Manning Selvage & Lee often advises clients about the importance of having a strategic corporate social responsibility program, while approaching the same subject half-heartedly as an agency priority. A similar phenomenon affects our colleagues working in corporate communications: They advise their CEOs about the importance of CSR and publish CSR reports, but lead few organized efforts for their own team members to get personally involved.

What distinguished the Hands On Network (www.handsonnetwork.org) and made it so appealing, especially in light of the feedback I was receiving from younger employees, was its emphasis on the active involvement of corporate employees in real-world projects designed to benefit local communities. Sure, cash donations are appreciated, but their emphasis was on putting together willing volunteers organized in corporate teams with local schools and neighborhood groups that needed help. We liked what we saw, and we joined.

So, on a sunny September morning during the nation’s annual Corporate Month of Service, I led a group of Manning Selvage & Lee employees from our New York office on a day of carpentry, painting and landscaping to help rehabilitate an aging school building in an underserved area of the city. At other times that month, groups from agency offices across North America – Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Detroit, Toronto, Boston – took on similar projects in their communities, working alongside teams from client companies and others. All wore white T-shirts with the agency’s distinctive logo; all worked together as task-oriented teams without regard for the traditional hierarchy of the agency. (I took instruction on shelf installation from the finance director of New York, and happily lugged bags of dirt for account executives and assistants planting mums.)

The program was a huge success, with agency employees logging more than 1,000 hours of service in September alone as part of this organized, agency-wide activity. Our agency culture includes a core value to work together with one another in the right way. It’s collaboration with a focus on the success of our clients and the agency. So, the process of putting our “hands on” inside our own communities, working side-by-side with our colleagues, was spot on in terms of reinforcing that culture and will certainly have an impact on retention and future recruitment.

Key learnings for communications organization and PR agencies from our efforts to organize and institutionalize philanthropic activities:

• It’s not enough to provide arm’s-length charitable support. There is an expectation, especially among young employees, that we will organize and provide community service opportunities in a direct and “hands on” way.
• The communications function, whether agency based or inside a corporation, should be the functional center of these hands-on activities. As PR professionals, we need to walk the talk.
• For agencies, partner with clients on community projects; inside a corporation, have Communications lead activities that integrate other key externally facing groups.

Visit Local Initiatives & Programs to learn more about some of the ways MS&L is involved in its communities.