When is a toolkit not a toolkit?

… When it’s weapon in your community relations arsenal.

A couple of weeks ago I told you about the Avnet Cares Governing Board (ACGB), our employee volunteerism group. This recently formed board is succeeding with military-like precision. They just created a new initiative to help Avnet employees in the Americas launch their own local Avnet Cares groups. In cases where employee community service groups already exist, ACGB will provide assistance and resources to help employee groups leverage best practices and provide the opportunity to join the larger Avnet Cares network.

In my last blog on this topic, in very nonmilitary-like fashion, I gushed about how great our committee members are. It’s like they went to boot camp together or something. They really work well as a team. The members, who all have full time jobs that they are very busy at right now because of the tough economy, do not shy away from serving the hard time required to form this board, to get policies and best practices in place. They are good to go.

In less than a year they created by-laws, a logo, a tagline, an interactive web site and launched three huge initiatives, one being Dollars for Doers, a program that supports individual employees and their volunteerism efforts.

Now the board has assigned themselves the rank of “Geo (Geography) Champions,” which means that, on top of everything else, they are going to serve as a resource to help all the Avnet locations across the Americas to establish and maintain successful Avnet Cares groups. Each board member is responsible for a region (dare I call it a battalion or is that going too far with my analogies?) and they will make themselves available to the employees in that region, and provide whatever assistance/advice that is needed.

The board created a “toolkit” that in an unbelievably comprehensive resource to help other Avnet Cares committees succeed in their community outreach efforts. This toolkit is web enabled and covers every topic you can think of from forming a new committee, to revitalizing an existing one. It talks about things from how to take better pictures, how to get media coverage of your events, to what kind of forms and procedures you need when you do events.

We’ve already got employees who are very excited about these opportunities, which is a good sign. I know our campaign will succeed … these Geo Champions are our secret weapons. It’s one thing to give your soldiers their plan of action. It’s quite another to get down in the trenches and march along side of them.