Who: John Campagna, president of military intelligence and operations support strategic business unit.
Company: Chenega.
Charitable giving: Annual golf tournament has raised $125, 000 for Azalea Charities, a nonprofit that supports wounded soldiers.
Tell me about Chenega’s corporate philanthropy.
After I retired from the federal government and went to work for Chenega, one of the things I noticed was the family feeling. When I took over one of the companies within Chenega, they asked me to identify a charity that we could give back to. I’m retired military, and working with veterans has always been of interest to me. Azalea Charities was really coming into place as an attractive, local charity that was doing work with wounded soldiers returning home. It not only focused on the soldiers’ financial or medical needs but also tried to give them a good family setting and ways to get medical attention beyond Veterans Affairs. We started exploring ways to help out. Five years ago we thought we would plan a charity golf tournament for them. We put it together in like 30 days. We raised $10,000. The rest is history.
How was the company giving before the partnership with Azalea?
We were doing things but with the larger charities. We would make a donation or sponsor an event. What I wanted to do is rather than have a broad sweeping agenda, I wanted to identify one single charity to commit to.
What challenges made it necessary to narrow the focus?
If someone would ask, what’s your philanthropic agenda and we responded, “to help people,” it’s like wanting to cure the common cold. Well, identify one disease and work on that. If we could focus our resources and work with the charity, we would probably do better and go further because as years would pass, we would get more recognition and we would be able to leverage our relationships from previous years. And it worked.
How has it worked?
Positive feedback from partner companies, agencies and contracting officers within the federal government. When you think about Wounded Warriors, often times you think of Chenega because we’re their largest single supporter. Whereas with Susan G. Komen, you could probably spout off 150 companies that support it. Azalea is a bit smaller and doesn’t have the national reach that Komen has, but we’re synonymous with that organization.
Any challenges with the Chenega giving model?
Our tournament is in June so [around] February is our kickoff but the biggest challenge is gaining the momentum and making sure the commitments are still there. Around T-minus 45 days, you really start to panic because you start to see where you are compared with the previous year. This year the economy was awful and we didn’t really think that we would break $25K, and we doubled it.
What key strategies gain the momentum?
We start off with save-the-dates then we follow up with phone calls. Then we follow up with newsletters about the previous year. Then we bring Azalea in so they can help get the word out. We show where we made the investment last year, who benefited and who received medical support or a new house. It’s a big information advertising campaign. The team works like maniacs from February to June.
— Compiled by Vanessa Small
Loading...
Comments