PITTSBURGH — Eager to engage its millennial employees in charitable giving, Pittsburgh-based paints and coatings producer PPG invited them to breakfasts and afternoon cookie-and-coffee breaks to get the word out about the company’s annual workplace campaign to benefit United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
To make the actual donation process more accessible, the company pushed out internal emails and promotions linking directly to UPledge for Good — a new United Way giving platform designed largely to resonate with workers in their 20s and 30s by providing more options of where to donate and more details about where their money will go.
“It’s very important for millennials to see the impact,” said Linda Jones, United Way’s senior vice president of community philanthropy and fundraising.
For instance, the site allows donors to direct money to specific organizations that support causes they care about, such as struggling women, veterans or children. It also spells out how a $550 donation could supply basic needs to 11 homeless people or provide one hour of in-home support services to 33 senior citizens.
The site also allows businesses to add customized appeal messages from their top executives, corporate logos and photos “so the corporation feels like it’s their own campaign,” Jones said.
Encouraging giving
Finding a way to make giving more meaningful to millennials — the generation born from the early 1980s to 2000 — was a driving force behind developing UPledge, she said.
While baby boomers may be accustomed to receiving a form letter from their company’s top executive asking them to consider making United Way payroll deductions, “for the millennials, the message from the CEO doesn’t mean as much,” Jones said. “They’re asking about how they can volunteer.”
United Way tapped a Pittsburgh software development firm, Summa, to design UPledge. The agency spent $677,000 over two years for the technology, and United Way expects the investment will boost total dollars raised as well as total donors, Jones said.
Last year, United Way generated almost $35 million from its annual fundraising campaign.
Although that amount was up 1 percent from the prior year, the agency knew it needed to establish a stronger relationship with the next generation of workers who change jobs more frequently than their parents.
“The way my father gave is very different than the way I give,” said Orion Wolff, 43, client-partner at Summa who acknowledged that he is older than the millennials but still is part of a younger demographic that typically doesn’t work for the same company for 30 years.
To help United Way track donor preferences and priorities, Summa partnered with San Francisco-based Salesforce.org to develop a system for UPledge that captures user demographics such as age, gender and “which charitable causes are important to you,” Wolff said.
Eventually UPledge — which can be accessed from laptops, smartphones and tablet devices as well as desktop computers — also could engage with users about volunteer opportunities, he said.
“United Way wants to be a one-stop shop for philanthropy and philanthropy comes in many forms,” Wolff said. “It’s not always fundraising and financial gifts.”
The new site could generate revenue for the agency in another way: Its technology team has demonstrated UPledge to United Way affiliates in cities around the country, including San Francisco, Denver, St. Louis and Minneapolis.
Those agencies could purchase the system from the United Way in Pittsburgh.
At PPG, UPledge is a dramatic step for a workplace campaign that until this year was conducted using paper pledge forms.
“This is the year we wanted to innovate and modernize,” said Paul Holcomb, manager of strategic sourcing in global supply management and United Way campaign chair for PPG’s seven sites in the Pittsburgh region.
Of the company’s 2,500 employees in southwestern Pennsylvania, about one-third are millennials, Holcomb said.
“The millennials have student loans, car payments, and are just starting their careers, so that’s a challenge and we need to actively engage them,” he said.
Besides the on-site breakfast and cookie networking events to raise awareness of United Way, PPG offered millennial workers a chance to participate in its Day of Action in September, during which employees spend time outside the office on volunteer projects.
A group of 60-plus millennials went to an area Boy Scouts of America camp, where they painted and built a foosball court.
“They wanted engagement and a lot participation and the Boy Scouts camp was exactly that,” Holcomb said.
