Effective Strategies is devoted to sharing ideas that can improve your business performance. Last issue, we discussed the resources for getting advice and information to make your business successful. This issue, we look at business lessons to be learned by volunteering your time. If you missed the last issue,click here to read it. Feel free to forward this e-mail to anyone who can benefit from this information. To sign up to receive this e-zine, send an e-mail to carrie@soarhigher.com.

What I Learned about Business While Working for Free

Year-round, I invest time in my community in volunteer roles that I feel benefit others. One of these is my commitment to supporting the Creative Referral Network (aka the Rogers Friday Coffee) and the other local networking groups. However, I spend a good portion of the second quarter of my year in what I call my fund-raising season. The last three years, a time-intensive piece of that time is devoted to coordinating a motorcycle show and poker run called the Cancer Road Challenge. It is just one part of the Cancer Challenge (www.cancerchallenge.com), a three-day annual cancer fund-raiser in Northwest Arkansas. Other events include a massive golf tournament, tennis tournament, run, and trap shoot. This isn’t any normal fund-raiser — it raised over $750,000 this year.

You may ask, “Why would you sacrifice valuable time from your already packed schedule for this event? You don’t even ride motorcycles!” Close to this June event each year, I even ask myself that question when I’m working late hours trying to make up all the time I spend on the event.

	It’s really good experience to personally invite people to attend your fund-raiser. The ability to extend a personal invitation is an important business skill. Customers don’t invest their time and dollars with organizations that are apathetic about whether or not they do business with them. Many customers jump from one business to another because they were personally invited to do so.
	Charity involvement is a smart part of your marketing strategy. Whether you want to realize it or not, you are your brand. There is no better way to promote your company and your abilities than by getting out there face to face with the community and being a good corporate citizen. When all things are equal between you and your competitors, your passion for community service can become a deciding factor for your potential clients.
	You can learn a lot about business from a well-run nonprofit event. You not only learn about budgeting and projections, you learn about building teams and managing relationships. I'm proud of my ability to recruit the right volunteers. Some of the most effective volunteers I’ve met were stay-at-home moms running major fund-raising activities at their children’s schools. They were running lean organizations with high profit margins and rolling out programs in record time. They could teach the corporate executives a thing or two.
	Business success is often about who you know. People are more likely to do business with someone they know well. I locate professional speakers, celebrities, and trainers for organizations. While working on the Cancer Challenge, I rub shoulders with people who hire professional speakers and celebrities and purchase training for their organization. Because I have gotten to know some of them over the last three years, we have been able to form good relationships. It makes it nice when I have something to say when we see each other instead of, “So, are you ready to do business with me yet?”
	Volunteering is a great way to add influential people to your business referral network. Some of the most influential people are involved with charities. Instead of watching the news to find out what is happening in their community, they are out making news working alongside people like you. They are most likely to be deeply involved in event planning or boards. That normally means that they meet regularly with the people they volunteer with as they fulfill the group’s mission. When you see people more often, you build deeper relationships. The best referrals come from people you know well.
	Sure, you meet people by volunteering. More importantly, you make friends. Some of my closest friends are people that volunteer on the same projects that I do. The moments that we spend together in service are the fibers that make up a life worth living. We learn about each other and ourselves as we discover our strengths. I have a group of people I love to volunteer with and our relationships are richer because we experience the challenges of life together.
	Some of the best stuff on my resume is my volunteer service. The exciting thing about volunteer work is that you don’t need a certain number of years of experience or a particular degree to tackle anything you think you’re big enough to try. For many people, they volunteered for organizations to explore their talents and dreams and ended up working for the charity. Some like to do what they are experienced at but others feel a freedom to explore activities they’ve never tried. There is a reduced risk when your next promotion or raise isn’t riding on your performance. There is a deeper desire to excel because you are serving a higher cause. I worry less about making a mistake. Besides, what are they going to do, fire me?
	Sometimes you get a little publicity for your volunteer work that sparks some interest in your professional life. Reporters get bored just talking about all the money you’re going make for charity and what kind of food you’re going to have and how many people are going to be there. Most reporters prefer a human interest story so they write about the people behind the event. Here is a recent article that Bettina Lehovec at the Morning News of Northwest Arkansas wrote about my work with the Cancer Challenge. http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2005/06/12/our_town/05carrie.txt Okay, it was nice to be recognized and score some sincere publicity for my charity event. However, over the next three days, I had 1,500 hits to my website where people learned more about my company. At least 10 people contacted me that I had never met that I can do business with. People I had never met asked about my book and my training programs. Not only that, but when people do a search for my company or my name in the future, the online article will come up in the search engine results.
	Here is the most important thing of all — you get a chance to make a difference by serving others. At the end of the day, you will make a difference to someone in your community. At the end of your life, you will have served something bigger than yourself. How much better does it get than that?