Giving Thoughts

Allstate Foundation: Turning Employees into Advocates

By Vicki Wray, Author, Communicating Social Impact

The Allstate Foundation, a philanthropic arm of Allstate, is playing an important role in the company’s evolution from insurance company to lifestyle brand through the engagement of its internal audiences, which include employees and agency owners. Giving back is part of the company’s DNA, according to Patricia Lara Garza, The Allstate Foundation’s director, strategic philanthropy. In the context of repositioning the brand, this long commitment to improving local communities is also recognized as a way to demonstrate its community presence not just when an accident occurs, but on a daily basis.

“Our charge in the foundation is to move stakeholders to action and, in the case of employees and agency owners, have them advocate on our behalf,” Garza explains. The Foundation worked with the research and advisory firm Reputation Institute to understand all stakeholders’ perceptions around Allstate’s community involvement, which helped pinpoint the gaps an internal communications program would need to address and led to the “When Good Hands People Give Back” campaign.

“Our goals were pretty straightforward: We wanted to increase awareness of and participation in our community involvement initiatives,” says Jennifer McGrath, The Allstate Foundation corporate relations manager. “A significant shift in our communications strategy was to move from simply telling employees what we are doing to showing how we’re impacting their local communities through stories told by our employees, agency owners, and others involved.”

To create and execute the program, the Foundation formed key internal partnerships with a number of groups, including community engagement, internal communications, media relations, legal and regulatory, and social networking. The first step in raising awareness of “When Good Hands People Give Back” was an internal road show. The Foundation also turned to employee resource groups to help spread the word “organically” throughout the company. “We decided to employ ‘surround sound’ tactics to reach employees, hitting all the existing internal communications vehicles, including some nontraditional ones like a wrapping on campus buses with our messaging and branding,” explains McGrath. The Foundation set a goal that 40 percent of the stories on the company’s intranet would be about community involvement then reached out to interview employees to tell their stories. Videos on the intranet and elsewhere use both employees and agency owners to be “the voice” of the program.

On the company’s social internal media platform, it developed a “Good Hands” vertical where employees can talk about community work that draws participation from all levels of the organization. The Foundation also refreshed its website (www.AllstateGoodHands.com), which is geared toward employees and agency owners. (Although it’s a public domain, the site is hidden from internet searches.) The Foundation specifically asks employees and agency owners to take action in their communities, and the website provides numerous tools to help them become involved and communicate to their peers or customers.

At the same time, the “SaferLives” program was built around issues identified by agency owners and delivered through communications targeted specifically to that audience. (The selected issues are teen safe driving, disaster preparedness, and domestic violence survivors.) Toolkits, sent on a quarterly basis in both English and Spanish, help fuel the momentum, as does showcasing agency owner participation and linking it to profits. The results? “This has become part of our employee value proposition—Good Work. Good Life. Good Hands,” states Garza. It is considered both a retention and recruitment tool. Participation from employees and agency owners is trending upward, and the program is credited as one of the reasons the company has won numerous external awards, including listing on the 2012 The Civic 50.

About Communicating Social Impact

This case study is taken from Communicating Social Impact, the report of a 12-company research working group convened by The Conference Board that examined how leading organizations have effectively integrated promising communications practices into their corporate social responsibility and social impact work. Available free, the report is one of a range of publications on social impact measurement that The Conference Board has published in the past 12 months. The other publications, including Framing Social Impact Measurement, are available to members here.

About the author

Vicki Wray is a communications consultant, helping leaders at all levels of an organization engage employees and drive change in support of business goals. She brings over 20 years of employee communications experience to bear on such challenges as executive communications, strategic organizational communications, crisis communications, CSR communications, and large-scale change initiatives, including mergers, acquisitions, and restructurings, in addition to annual reports. You can contact Vicki at [email protected].