Why CSR and Social Impact Leaders Should Attend bbcon 2024
This year’s bbcon will be an action-packed three days of content and collaboration for corporate impact professionals. With more customer stories and program spotlights than ever, informative thought-leadership sessions, and inspiring keynote speakers, there’s something for everyone at this event.
If you’re not familiar with bbcon, it is Blackbaud’s annual conference that convenes thousands of change-makers, designed to fuel your impact and help you find your community. This year’s destination: Seattle!
YourCause and EVERFI from Blackbaud are thrilled about the bbcon 2024 Corporate Impact track. Attendees will get a chance to hear insights from industry experts as well as partake in some exciting discussions around CSR and employee engagement best practices.
This year’s agenda for companies has a ton of exciting new elements, as we plan to bring together employee engagement, inclusion, and social impact leaders to present sessions around workplace culture strategies for DEI recalibration, fostering inclusive workplaces, community impact through holistic health and equitable education, as well as driving employee engagement in giving and volunteerism.
The session lineup is curated to strike a chord with professionals working in CSR, ESG, HR, or DEI – really anyone looking to engage employees and create impact! We encourage you to read on and learn more about the content and connection-building possibilities we have in store for our Corporate Impact track at bbcon 2024:
Draw inspiration from client stories
Employee Fundraising: Activate Employees to Drive an Impactful and Creative Fundraising Campaign
Presented by Applied Materials
Hear from the Applied Materials team about how they lead employees across over a dozen sites to raise $1.7 million for food banks throughout North America each year through a competitive team fundraising effort. This session will include a detailed breakdown of the campaign leadership structure, communications strategy, and how the team leverages YourCause® CSRconnect® to enable nearly 6,000 donations to 58 food banks within one month. The team will also share creative ideas for employee-led fundraising events (turns out, you CAN throw a pie in your executives’ faces and get away with it!).
Grants to Individuals: The Rise of Trust-Based Philanthropy
Presented by Wells Fargo in partnership with E4E relief
Trust-based philanthropy’s origin story and foundational principles include the concept of sowing and reaping: the more organizations sow into individuals affected by disaster and hardship, the more those individuals in turn help communities reap a positive harvest through their positive societal contributions. Learn how, from a CSR perspective, trust-based philanthropy has quickly become the gold standard for company leaders who place a premium on workforce stewardship and a collaborative approach to investing in employees’ overall wellbeing.
Speakers will share the social and business outcomes they see directly resulting from grantmaking to individuals and other programs that boost trust and yield high results. They will also discuss how the preservation of individuals’ dignity, autonomy, and human capital-grounded trust-based philanthropy is the baseline for company leaders interested in offering employees the opportunity to both contribute to and receive emergency financial relief.
Empowering Students to Explore Their Future and Make it More Equitable
Presented by the Center for Audit Quality in partnership with EVERFI from Blackbaud
What did you want to be when you were in high school? What if you had the opportunity to explore rewarding careers that you hadn’t heard about before? How might that have affected your life’s trajectory? That’s the opportunity we’re providing every day to high school students across the country – the knowledge and resources to inspire students to pursue a career and future that matches up with their goals and dreams.
If you’re wondering – “What does that look like?”, “How do you reach students who would benefit most?”, and “What kind of impact can you actually make?”, then this is the right session for you.
Learnings shared will be applicable to all CSR professionals who are exploring how they can connect with schools and students in innovative and engaging ways to help drive a more equitable future through career-related and other foundational opportunities for students.
Leveraging Global Ambassadors to Drive Impact
Presented by MillerKnoll
This session is focused on harnessing the power of employee volunteers from diverse backgrounds in 30+ communities around the world to amplify strategic philanthropic initiatives on a global scale. This approach taps into the unique reach and persuasive power of ambassadors to transcend cultural and geographical boundaries, thereby driving significant impact in targeted areas of concern.
We’ll cover strategies for selecting the right ambassadors, aligning their strengths and platforms with organizational goals, and creating symbiotic relationships that benefit both the ambassadors and the cause. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on building and optimizing ambassador programs to achieve measurable outcomes and foster sustainable change.
Informative Thought-Leadership Sessions
The State of Employee & Community Engagement
Presented by the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP), the Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose (CECP), and YourCause from Blackbaud
This session is focused on providing critical data and insights to help drive action and impact. Several key external factors can influence and impact our employee and community engagement, but there are also key corporate social impact sector trends in volunteering, giving, and broader philanthropic activity that can help provide insights into ways that CSR strategies and programs can further evolve.
In this session we will explore a mixture of data and insights from the YourCause 12th Annual Industry Review, ACCP’s 5th Annual CSR Insights Survey, as well as key points from various 2024 data and research reports from CECP. In turn, we will explore the intersection of broader sector-wide investments and trends, insights into trending levels of engagement tied to various programmatic offerings, and the corresponding pressures and impacts on corporate social impact professionals and leaders.
Harnessing the Power of Responsible AI and Data for Social Good
Presented by Blackbaud and True Impact
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since the 1940s, but generative AI has exploded on the scene with the popularity of ChatGPT and BingAI. In turn, generative AI has accelerated how individuals, nonprofits, and companies should think about the impact AI will make in the future. In this session we will discuss the evolution of AI, the importance of responsible, ethical, and accessible AI and Data policies and practices, the practical uses of AI and Data for the social good today, and the ways results and impact can be brought to life, from numbers to narratives, through tools like Blackbaud’s Impact Edge.
Community Engagement and Community Health
Presented by Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) and EVERFI from Blackbaud
The health of communities is impacted by various socioeconomic factors that moderate access to healthcare, healthy food, and high-quality education. Nonprofits and corporate social impact programs can be significant support networks that help alleviate inequities associated with those factors through the provision of ideas, philanthropic resources, and other aids to communities striving to achieve their community health goals.
A critical component of these partnerships is to consider insights from both communities and companies when aligning grants and philanthropic loans to community needs. When companies’ corporate social responsibility strategies consider the diversity, values, and perspectives within communities, they are well-positioned to collaborate on initiatives that promote healthy, thriving communities.
This session will provide examples of how communities and companies can partner to comprehensively address community health needs, including sharing community health education opportunities for K-12 students and adults.
How to Lead Inclusively in an Increasingly Complex Workplace
Presented by YourCause from Blackbaud
Workplaces today are more diverse than ever, as employees bring a wide variety of backgrounds, experiences, communication styles, beliefs, and values to work. But simply having a diverse team isn’t enough to unlock its many business benefits. Leaders must be intentionally inclusive so everyone on the team can contribute fully.
In this session, we’ll explore how you can become a more inclusive leader by modeling inclusive behaviors and skillfully navigating employee differences and conflicts, so you can create a thriving team culture where all employees feel like they belong and are valued.
Unlocking the Powerful Connection Between Employee Well-being and Engagement
Presented by YourCause and EVERFI from Blackbaud
Join us as we explore the pivotal role your employee well-being strategy can have on corporate social impact programs. While there are many levers that drive and inspire employee engagement in corporate social impact initiatives, too many organizations fail to see the intersectionality between well-being and engagement.
In this presentation, we will delve into the research that identifies why organizations need to prioritize employee well-being, outline how HR, DEI, and CSR colleagues can collaborate on transforming their work environments to support well-being, and share strategies to increase employee participation across volunteering, philanthropy, and Employee Resource Group (ERG) initiatives. Attendees will also have a chance to participate in group discussion to learn from peers and share their own insights and challenges in this area.
Recalibrating DEI: The Movement Toward Holistic Inclusion
Presented by General Mills, Medica Health Plans, and Blackbaud
During this open conversation, we’ll dive into how many organizations are evolving their approach and recalibrating their diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies and programs today. The session will begin by examining the state of the diversity, equity, inclusion landscape, to understand how it is impacting organizations. We’ll then explore how organizations are taking a more holistic approach to inclusion across identity groups and the entire employee experience.
Panelists will share examples of how organizations are applying the inclusion lens to employee engagement strategies, such as ensuring CSR programs are inclusive or breaking down silos between DEI, CSR, HR, and Sustainability functions. Join this engaging session to learn more about the innovative practices shaping inclusive workplaces in 2024 and beyond.
Register now!
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect with industry experts and take your CSR and social impact efforts to new heights. Register now for bbcon 2024 and unlock a world of knowledge, networking, and actionable strategies to amplify your impact!
