Written by: Heather Hunter, Director of Marketing
If you’ve been to a Synergize 4:30 Meetup, you’ve seen firsthand that we love to support nonprofits with our finances. By combining a portion of our membership dues with event tickets and extra donations, our group can give a significant donation to a different local cause every month. In 2021 alone, we’ve given back over $85,000 to nonprofit organizations serving Carmel, Indianapolis, and other surrounding communities.
However, “community impact” doesn’t always mean financial donations. As a small start-up company with most of our impact fueled by our generous members, Synergize is always finding creative ways to support good work in our community with our other resources. Our non-monetary impact means we’re able to open the door for continued support of our featured nonprofits, even after the 4:30 Meetup is over.
If you’re looking for ways to serve others this Giving Tuesday but it’s difficult to make a monetary donation, try one of our other tried-and-true ways to give back!
- Grab some friends and use your time. All members of Synergize are passionate about community impact. Many of them step up to lead volunteering shifts and organize drives for things like socks, diapers, and food.
As a business, we do our part by publicizing our members’ impacts and joining them up with the right people to boost the outcome. It’s pretty common for a big group of Synergize members to band together and use their time to serve a greater purpose.
Do you have a few friends who care about serving the community? Wrangle them together and go volunteer with a cause in your city! If there’s one thing we know in Synergize, it’s that giving back is great… but giving back with your best friends is even better.
- Use your talents to fill a gap. In Synergize, we have a lot of members who sit on nonprofit boards and committees. These awesome peeps are using their distinct talents – event planning, business acumen, people management, and more – to serve a purpose in a specific way that only they can. Even our founder, Arron, serves one of his favorite organizations in his spare time!
Think of the one thing you’re best at doing, then connect with someone from an organization you care about and ask how you can use that skill to help them with their mission. Making those connections is something we LOVE doing in Synergize! Many of our members have been introduced to the organizations they serve through other members and Synergize events.
- Utilize your network to make a helpful connection for a cause you care about. One of our initiatives in Synergize is to change the definition of ROI from “Return on Investment” to “Ripples of Impact”. To do that, we foster close friendships between our members – especially our Legacy Members – so we can help them make a greater impact together than they could make on their own.
You don’t have to be a member of Synergize to do this yourself! If a nonprofit you love is looking for someone with a specific talent, or a business that serves a specific purpose, take a few minutes to make an intro between them and someone in your network who may be able to help. Odds are, you’ll be able to make a bigger impact by connecting them than you could make yourself… and that’s SYNERGY, baby!
Finally, speaking of synergy…
- Join others to serve others! The financial donations that come out of our 4:30 Meetups are just one way Synergize supports our featured causes. By organizing and promoting the 4:30 Meetups, we’re able to give nonprofits a stress-free, enjoyable fundraising event. All they have to do is show up!
We also give our featured causes a designated time to speak to the attendees about their mission. This is a great way to increase awareness of the nonprofit in Hamilton County and the surrounding communities. It’s also a way for the nonprofit to introduce them to a group of true givers with diverse talents, which means they’re more likely to connect with a Synergize member who can give back in both financial and non-monetary ways.
Finally, Synergize joins up with our friends at various media outlets to run a press release (completely free to the nonprofit) about the event and the nonprofit’s mission. Thanks to one of our Presenting Partners, Current Publishing, each featured cause can also run a free ad in Current during the following month!
We can credit a lot of our success to help from our members, our venue partners, our sponsors, and our media connections. Synergize is just the catalyst that brings these key people together to create life-changing impact in our community. That’s something anyone can do within their personal network!
To sum it up…
As an individual, what teams can YOU build to create the kind of impact that doesn’t stop after writing a check? Who do you know that you can rally around a cause? What do you do that complements your friends’ skills and jobs, and how can you work together to make a bigger difference in your community?
If you’re consistently asking yourself those questions, you’re already on the right track to giving back in creative non-financial ways. And if you need some help finding lifelong friends to serve with, you know who to call.