Instilling corporate values in those with a clear financial stake can be challenging enough. But what about those stakeholders who have no financial interest but are the lifeblood of an organisation? How can they be persuaded to buy into the guiding principles? Jon Barker reports:

It’s easier to convince people to sing from a hymn sheet when you’re paying them a wage to do so. But what if you can offer stakeholders no financial chaser with which to swallow down your corporate values? Can you achieve the same singularity of purpose by winning hearts and minds, not buying them? That’s a challenge facing many not-for-profit organisations as they brace themselves for the slashing of aid contributions from recessionhit donors. Volunteers are at the heart of these organisations, so the need to continue to reach and motivate existing subscribers, while keeping new blood flowing, is as pertinent as ever.

Organisations such as the British Red Cross continue to engage and unite their stakeholders. But how do these bodies spread values to create a unity of message among recruits?

Well, for one, the British Red Cross has not shied away from being creative. A couple of years ago it commissioned an online game, Freefallfrenzy, to give volunteers, staff and supporters a fresh, entertaining

way to connect with the charity and support Red Cross Appeal Week 2007. It was only intended to be a prelude to the main event – whereby a team of skydivers jumped 18,000 feet over London’s Hyde Park and, a week later, 72 skydivers attempted to break the UK female skydiving record – but it became so popular that, before the jumps had even taken place, the game had already gone ballistic, garnering more than 250,000 visitors.

In tandem with the build up to the appeal, the British Red Cross also launched a comprehensive values and engagement programme - the fallout of ideas first discussed in 2004, following an evaluation of its brand. It was a moment of catharsis for the charity.

Evolved mechanisms

For forty-odd years, stakeholders had continued to volunteer their time and money for the charity guided by seven fundamental principles, which engendered a basic understanding of what it means to work for the Red Cross.

“We tend to find the people that are attracted to us already have a huge amount of buy-in beforehand,” says Tim Pemberton, head of communication coordination at the British Red Cross. “Our reputation and history are already out there, and we already have a clear mission and vision that people can buy into. It’s a strong starting position with which to promote our brand.”

“Following induction, there are a whole range of communication programmes to keep people informed of the charity’s work,” says Tim. “In general, we tend to communicate online with Red Cross staff, while volunteers seem to prefer printed communication via internal magazines and local area newsletters.”

The Red Cross has an evolved mechanism for getting people together. But five years ago it underwent a brand review in an attempt to embed its brand identity both internally and externally. Sparked by talks with the international brand consultants, Interbrand, the Red Cross set about formulating a values-based programme; building on its heritage and making better use of its pool of volunteers to align key messages.

“Interbrand suggested a need to derive a set of values from our governing principles and from these initial talks the values programme was born,” says Tim. “We approached the programme in two stages. Stage one involved speaking to more than a thousand staff and volunteers and asking them what they thought the values should be. It was important to us to formulate values from the foundation of the organisation. Stage two means agreeing those values based on an engagement programme of reaction. Currently, we have four core values to work with - courageous, passionate, dynamic and inclusive. We are now moving into stage two.”

Peer to peer

Working alongside the British Red Cross to articulate these values is internal communication consultant Jeremy Petty, managing director at Yellow Communications.

“It’s about creating buy-in and value for all your stakeholders,” says Jeremy. “Values are curious things in organisations. Many companies adopt the approach of deciding what the values are, communicating them to all colleagues and then expecting them to understand the values and to change their behaviours accordingly.

“In our experience, this leads to a ‘values gap’ – in other words, despite the organisation spending a lot of time and resource communicating what the values are through various channels, there is no change in behaviour and indeed a lack of understanding in how existing behaviour may support the company’s values.”

Instead, Jeremy likes to use ‘peer to peer’ storytelling techniques which promote stakeholders’ work through communications channels. “They can point to the values through the content of the stories and, in this way, ‘close the circle’ themselves,” he says. “This empowers them by enabling them to ‘discover’ the values and behaviours of the organisation through the language and content of the stories they are exposed to.

“The next step is to build momentum via the internal community,” he adds. “We want to allow stakeholders to upload their own ‘stories’ and begin to create a shared space which inherently promotes the values and the behaviours which help colleagues to ‘live’ these values.”

For the British Red Cross campaign, Jeremy is creating a whole range of communications activities to try and give people different ways to engage with the values. He’s currently looking at ways of articulating behaviours through online games and challenges, allowing staff and volunteers to think about and debate the values.

“Face to face events present a great opportunity to promote the company’s values,” says Jeremy. “A dedicated session to teams or round tables of colleagues spending an hour trying to put the chosen values in order of importance to them as individuals and to the organisation as a whole can be a soft way of pulling colleagues in. They will disagree about the order of importance, but this is a healthy debate. It’s an exercise which ultimately aligns colleagues thinking around the values.”

Of course, Tim and Jeremy only have a remit for the British Red Cross: the UK charity is just one part of the global movement, which includes more than 187 individual Red Cross (or Red Crescent – or Red Crystal) activities worldwide.

“Overall, we are bound together by seven fundamental principles of the Red Cross movement,” says Tim. “Some principles are rather prescriptive, so how they manifest themselves in terms of behaviour will vary from country to country. Our values programme in the UK aims to tailor and translate the principles into characteristics that can be embodied in to behaviours.”

Think local

It follows that differing politics between countries shouldn’t get in the way of communicating values at a national level. “Just so long as each country’s operation has some autonomy,” says Mike Blakemore, media director at Amnesty International UK. “Essentially, it’s about reading from the same script, but adopting values that reflect the views of the local audience.”

Internationally, Amnesty has a democratic structure to ensure all voices from within the organisation are heard: an annual meeting of national representatives and, every other year, international council meetings to decide policies for the coming year. The ‘bottom-up’ approach, it seems, applies to the national level too.

“In the UK we have a local membership structure which allows us a degree of autonomy and adaptability,” says Mike. The democratic structure gives consistency to our decisions and reflects a national voice. Globally, we all use the same script. It’s just how certain values are derived from that script, to give voice to local and regional needs, which differs.”

In Mike’s case, the ‘script’ is none other than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Amnesty’s core values, derived from the Declaration, are subscribed to by 2.2 million members worldwide, who each pay an annual subscription. But Amnesty also has strong support from its volunteers, some of whom might want to take action on the basis that the organisation is supporting an issue at a particular time or in a particular place. But they don’t necessarily want to become members.

“Often, our volunteers may be quite promiscuous; working on several different projects for many different organisations, says Mike. “Some only want a one-off commitment. But there’s a common theme which unites all of us: to have the opportunity to be part of an exciting programme of work that can make a real difference to people’s lives.”

In terms of keeping disparate volunteers on message, Mike says it’s very unusual for stakeholders to misinterpret Amnesty’s values. Besides, there’s a code of conduct for activists to sign up to. “When a member has gone off message, we can refer them to the code,” says Mike. “Of course, a volunteer has no such obligation to the organisation. But the fact that they are volunteering their time and are keenly interested in taking part, means there’s rarely a problem with anyone doing anything to undermine the brand and its reputation. After all, what would be in it for them?”

“Values are curious things.Deciding what they are, communicating them to

all colleagues and then expecting them to change their behaviours leads to

a values gap”

Repeat customers

Reaching out to more than two million stakeholders is no mean feat. But the methods are much the same for instilling values into volunteers as they are for members or employees.

“Ultimately, it boils down to how much time and contact you have with people,” says Mike.”Naturally, with our members we hope it will be a longer-term commitment. Many of our volunteers are only available for one-off projects. Obviously we want to encourage those occasional volunteers to become members, because we’d rather have an ongoing relationship with a set of like-minded people who already share our values. They’re the type of people we want to build a long-term relationship with.”

Tim Pemberton agrees. In a recent internal poll at the British Red Cross, 97% of staff and volunteers said they were “proud” to be involved with the organisation. “But the time we have with some shortterm volunteers, and the logistics of reaching 30,000 people, can be a huge challenge,” he says. “Some volunteers may only be with the Red Cross for a matter of weeks, and we must reach out to them too. With our values programme due to be rolled out at the end of the year, the main difficulty will be for all our staff and volunteers to have sufficient time to debate all the issues. By the end of the programme, we know we’ll have a workforce that is far more engaged.”

Ultimately, connecting to potential volunteers is not about changing “what” an organisation stands for, but simply finding the common language between the organisation’s values and the potential stakeholder’s values.

Maverick moments

• Volunteers for John McCain’s Republican campaign seized on a discredited rumour that Barack Obama was not a natural-born US citizen, but either Kenyan or Indonesian. While McCain dismissed the whispers, volunteers at rallies across Florida clung to the controversy, clouding McCain’s key campaign messages.

• The Democrats hit the buffers when a Fox News affiliate ran footage of a volunteer office in Houston decorated with a Che Guevara flag. The campaign issued a release to deflect the off-message brouhaha: “This is a volunteer office that is not in any way controlled by the Obama campaign.”

• In 2006, Boris Johnson told a fringe meeting he would “get rid of Jamie Oliver”. Earlier, Cameron had heaped praise on Oliver’s crusade to make school dinners more nutritious. In the aftermath, shadow foreign secretary William Hague said: “There is room for a maverick or an eccentric in politics. We don’t all necessarily agree with everything he says.” Johnson is now Mayor of London.