Written By: Heather Hunter, Synergize, Marketing and Communications Coordinator
If you’re at all familiar with Synergize, you’ve probably heard about our group’s impact in the community. As a business that brings together givers and friends, we have a unique opportunity (and, we think, a duty) to change the world for those around us.
4:30 Meetup, which launched in 2020, is the place for leaders to build friendships and make everlasting impacts. By sparking synergy between our members, these events become catalysts for world-changing impact! We raise thousands of dollars to benefit those who need it most. The feeling in the room at a 4:30 Meetup is electric; there really is nothing else like it.
We partner with 12 local nonprofit organizations each year in order to spread the ripples of impact as far as possible. As the Synergize movement picked up speed in 2020, our 4:30 Meetups took on a life of their own. During our first year in business, our group gave over $32,000 to our nonprofit partners! That’s a mind-blowing number, especially given everything that the year threw our way. In 2021, we’ll double that impact by raising at least $60,000 for charity.
As a business, Synergize supports as many causes as we can. But the best thing about our impact is that it inspires our members to find their own ways to contribute. Some of our members sit on boards for our beneficiaries or other members’ organizations. Many of them have become regular donors to our causes, funding AEDs in police cars, cancer research, and community resources.
We’ve even helped some of our members found new nonprofits, and we try to support their growth in any way we can. Members of Synergize are passionate about a lot of different causes, but more generally, they love to help others. We’re humbled by their goodness, and grateful that we can help them change peoples’ lives.
Some people don’t understand why community impact is such an integral pillar of Synergize. They argue that we could build amazing friendships with a smaller focus on impact (and make a lot more revenue doing it). That’s true, we could – we just don’t want to.
In 2021, we’ve decided to carefully track our ROI. Why? Because we’ve chosen to define it not as our Return on Investment, but as our Ripples of Impact. Sure, as a business, we have to make money – but as humans, we need to prioritize taking care of each other. That’s why it’s so important to us to make a lasting impact. We directly help organizations that change the course of people’s lives.
Ultimately, our goal is to grow our Ripples of Impact into a wave that spreads farther than we can see. A legacy of serving others sends shock waves into the future, but a legacy of serving ourselves dies with us. If the Synergize movement outlives every one of our current members, and continues through new givers providing hope, then we’ve gotten all the “Return on Investment” we could ever want.