Capturing the Canadian conscience
By Elisa Birnbaum
November 27, 2006
Do you ever wonder what would happen if 161,000 independent organizations came together under one banner and adopted a singular message? Would each entity be instilled with a heightened sense of purpose? And if, as they say, there is strength in numbers, would every organization achieve a greater level of influence and potential for growth and success? Well, you can stop wondering. Thanks to the recently christened Values Added initiative, the not-for-profit sector can finally put these theories to the test.
One final delivery
Representing the culmination of much discourse and debate, the initiative is the end result - and very last deliverable - of the Voluntary Sector Awareness Project. Organized in the fall of 2005, that project brought together more than 1,500 representatives of local nonprofit and charitable organizations who underwent a series of 74 “community conversations”. Then, seven national organizations joined forces under the administrative eye of Imagine Canada with the aim of finding the best method of building awareness for the sector. The result? Values Added.
It’s easy as one, two, three
The idea behind this project was simple enough. Create a slogan that would help the sector raise awareness as well as bridge the commonality among all nonprofit organizations, strengthening the impact of each. Then, to deliver that message, create a web site that helps fulfill the dual purpose. A user guide provides nonprofits with various tools, such as tags, banners, wallpaper and other devices to help integrate the new, cohesive slogan into their communication programs. Second, the site informs and educates the public - whose interest has been piqued by the soon-to-be-ubiquitous slogan - about the sector and its contribution to their quality of life. A grandiose objective, perhaps, but its execution couldn’t be more user-friendly and straightforward.
“The initiative is an attempt to create a brand for the nonprofit charitable sector in Canada,” explains Georgina Steinsky-Schwartz, president and CEO of Imagine Canada. And when the project got started, the time truly seemed ripe. Statistics Canada had just released a report providing a long-awaited tally of nonprofits in Canada; the 2004 National Survey of Nonprofit Voluntary Organizations revealed more about the sector than ever had been known before. “We now had a definition of who we were,” she says. And, armed with that definition, “it was time to get out there, talk about it and explain it to Canadians.”
Achieving self-awareness
But before the sector could talk to others, it first had to talk to itself. “Prior to going to the public to raise awareness, we had to raise awareness inside the sector, to acknowledge that we are a sector, because we don’t think like that,” says Paddy Bowen, project manager of Values Added. After all, only a cohesive group can adopt singular messaging. Dialogue then became the word of the day for a consortium of leadership organizations, each representing different nonprofit sub-sectors. From health to sports and from arts to the environment, each cause had a place at the project’s table. For Bowen, a well-known and long-term leader in the voluntary sector as well as past-president of Volunteer Canada - a position she held for eight years - this was a strategy from which she would not waver. “My view is that the truth of the voluntary sector for most people is experienced in sub-sectors. That’s the world they know,” she explains, adding, “so the only way to capture and engage the sector is to acknowledge the ecology of it, the way it's formed.”
How do we add value: let us count the ways
The desire to acknowledge all the varied parts that make up the whole was also instrumental in choosing a title for the project. Trying to capture one frame that could hold a thousand different pictures wasn’t easy, says Bowen. But before long, ‘values added’ seemed the obvious choice. What could be better than a name that addresses a sentiment shared by all members of the team. “It’s a play on the economic term, but it’s also something that we heard in all our community conversations,” she states. After all, every sub-sector feels they add value to their respective community, a source of deep pride for each.
Take the sports sector. “Sports matters because it can make a difference,” states Values Added partner, Ian Bird. Once a professional field hockey player, Bird now plays the part of senior leader at the Sports Matters Group, an organization dedicated to promoting the contribution of sports in society and to collaborating on sport policy issues. “Something remarkable happens when we all find a way to connect,” he says. “It so happens that we connect on values and our experience says that this is the most crucial element of any shared endeavour.” And what prompted this well-regarded organization to take a seat next to Imagine Canada’s Paddy Bowen and five others in the establishment of Values Added? A belief that the shared contributions of the nonprofit sector make a greater impact than those taken by an organization on its own. “It really connected with our thinking at Sports Matters that the best contribution you can make is the one that you wish to do,” Bird explains.
But is it contagious?
Now that the web site is up and running, Bowen is busy traveling the country getting the word out about the exciting new initiative. Her hope is that, in time, the Values Added slogan will become an automatic identifier in the communication messages of the not-for-profit and charitable sector. “And then you begin to create the impression, the understanding that there is a commonality, that this organization is also part of this bigger thing,” she explains. But this veteran of the voluntary sector knows all too well that in order for the project to take flight, to truly spread it wings, it must take on a life of its own, long after Bowen and her partners have moved onto other projects. “It’s an experiment in the viral approach,” she says. For their part, Imagine Canada has committed to keeping the web site going while each of the consortium partners have agreed to keep encouraging the involvement of their sub-sectors. But the rest is up to the varied and multifaceted organizations who add value and quality to our daily lives.
Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Toronto.
