By the time you read this, United Way of the Ozarks will have officially announced its 2012–13 campaign was a great success, raising almost $4 million – almost 15 percent higher than the previous year.
Here’s a glimpse behind the curtain of an uber-successful United Way campaign. But first, two disclaimers: First, it was my honor to have served as chairman of the United Way Board of Directors this past year. I was humbled to have been asked. Second, I wasn’t responsible for the successful campaign. Read on, and that will become readily apparent.
As the incoming chairman of the board, I was responsible for recruiting the next campaign chair. The smartest move I’ve made in a long time was asking Drury University President Todd Parnell if he’d be willing to chair the campaign. Once we established that we both wanted to pursue a stretch goal, he was in.
These are two separate positions on the board. The campaign chair does all of the work with staff coordinating and driving the campaign; I signed checks and pretended to run the board meetings.
We then established a new position – associate campaign chair – and recruited Police Chief Paul Williams for this position. Serving as Todd’s right-hand man during this campaign, Paul will be the campaign chair next year.
Both Todd and Paul did an amazing job leading this year’s campaign. Next time you see either of them, thank them for the many hours they dedicated to this campaign. Also, Missouri State University President Clif Smart, and his wife Gail, did great work tackling the challenge of increasing our community’s “leadership level” gifts, an area where our benchmark studies show we are lagging.
The United Way board members are an incredible (and incredibly busy) band of characters – two university presidents, a county commissioner, a school superintendent, bank presidents, media CEOs and many other business and community leaders.
These are folks who could easily say, “Thanks, but I’m too busy.” And they’d be right. But they all embraced the stretch campaign goal, rolled up their sleeves, and jumped in with both feet, both hands and a slew of creativity.
The United Way staff is an amazing group. They work unbelievable hours during the campaign, sometimes making presentations to all three shifts of workers in a single day. They are the glue that holds the campaign together.
As a business leader, why should you care about the annual United Way campaign?
Let’s play “connect the dots” for a moment. The annual United Way campaign directly impacts the quality of life in our community. And if a community will be judged by the way it treats “the least among us,” then we should all be involved in next year’s campaign.
Do you think companies consider quality of life and the level of community “heart” when they are considering whether to relocate and bring jobs to Springfield?
Just connect the dots.
Greg Burris is Springfield’s city manager. He can be reached at gburris@springfieldmo.gov.
