Love Where You Work

Giving Cards is a product and process that creates micro activations for employee engagement and social good.

We excel at building community and connectedness in our covid-impacted world by bringing a shared experience to both onsite and remote team members.

Cards Given

What We Do

We send your people two Giving Cards: one to use for themselves, and one to pay it forward to others.

They use the second one to do something personal and meaningful for someone (or a cause) that they love.

We collect writeups and pictures of what your team did, and then we deliver all of those digital assets to you.

Your organization can now share authentic, original stories of supporting community connection and CSR.

(your questions will be answered in order by scrolling down, but feel free to jump to a section or meet the founder)

Corporations tend to overthink and overspend on employee engagement and CSR activities.

There’s nothing wrong with cutting big checks to trusted nonprofits and worthwhile causes, but when it comes to improving the connectedness and well being of our teams, we’ve been conditioned to buy into complicated and expensive SAAS platforms that all too often deliver poor results.

Sometimes the answer is deceptively simple: Give your people free money in a fun package to go out and do something good for someone or something they love.

Emphasize creativity and a personal touch.

Make it easy for them to share the results once they’re done.

If you give people the freedom to be creative and do something they enjoy, they’ll surprise you with amazing stories. Giving Cards offers a fast, affordable, simple way to blend your internal engagement and external CSR efforts into an as-needed activation for social good.

It’s not a persistent web platform – there’s nothing to sign up for or sign into. It’s just a one-time, one-cost activation where we take care of everything from start to finish, and you get to collect dozens of original, authentic stories of social good from your people.

Your team will love telling their friends about it and sharing it on social media, and your business will be able to show and tell much more compelling corporate CSR stories than “we cut another check again this year.”

Primary Use Cases

Connectedness & Engagement

Shared experience for the whole team, both in-office and remote

Empowers people to give back how THEY want to, in fun ways

Demonstrates corporate empathy and drives brand affinity

You can tell dozens of authentic, organic CSR stories with assets

Conferences

Hand out Giving Cards to generate excitement at the event

Build positive email touchpoints over the next three weeks

Organic, brand-positive social sharing over the next six weeks

Tell your own stories with the assets provided by all participants

Special Events

Great way to represent your brand at public community events

Fosters team-building across geo locations or leadership groups

Gives your leaders a way to give back in addition to holiday bonuses

Add a card to a client or employee gift box for something unique

How It Works

We’ve built a process with a high adoption rate and demonstrated success stories for brands large and small, both in digital-first and physical-first organizations.

It’s specifically designed to build community in the covid-impacted world, where most organizations now have a healthy mix of people working in-office and remote.

Here are the basics:

You tell your team that you’re giving them free money in a fun, hand-crafted package to go out into their world and make a positive, creative impact on any organizations or individual people that they love
We design any number of Giving Cards to your specifications (including visual branding, physical and digital campaign messaging, card value, etc)
We handle all logistics from start to finish, putting cards and letters in hands anywhere your people live, email messaging for guidance and reminders, and a simple collection mechanism for visual media and stories once they’re done (along with social sharing suggestions on how to tag your company if desired)
We provide you with all the original digital assets shared by your team, so you can retell their stories across your owned platforms

Story Examples

When you create a Giving Cards activation within your organization, your team will surprise you with the touching and creative ways they use their cards for good. Not only are you certain that each person is happy with how you supported them, but you also get dozens or hundreds of authentic and organic pictures, videos, and writeups in order to tell any kind of community connection and social good stories you want. Additionally, offering perks like this to your people is what gets them talking to others about why they love where they work.

(full submissions are longer and more descriptive, with additional pictures)

Birthday Bags

I used my Giving Card to make birthday bags for my local food pantry, so families with kids celebrating birthdays can have something extra to look foward to, even when times are tough.

The Actual White House

I was working in the White House, so I left a couple of Giving Cards (and personal notes) for others in the building to find. I hid this one behind a clock just outside the Oval Office!

Kids, Cups, and Cash

I bought several copies of “The Three Cups” by Tony Townsley and 12 white ceramic mugs. I chose some adorable 6 year olds-and met separately with each of them to help teach them the value of saving, spending, and giving.

Taking Care of Others

I am using this card to do something special for a woman I know who is lovingly looking after her mother-in-law. This particular lady is a very selfless person, often sacrificing her needs to tend to someone else. She is an angel on earth.

About Nate St. Pierre

I’m a recovering agency strategist who now specializes in community building and employee engagement for brands from $10MM to $1B+, with an emphasis on employee well being, corporate/brand empathy, microgiving, and CSR.

I’ve done work for NBC, Howard Stern, Harley-Davidson, Wolverine, Groupon, Applebee’s, Cinnabon, The Motley Fool, Silicon Valley tech companies, and more. My writing, projects, and other work have been featured in top publications, including CNN, The Atlantic, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, and The Washington Post.

In addition to building out activations for client companies, I’ve attracted over 20,000 people to participate in my own social good projects, and been invited to speak at or consult with dozens of blue-chip brands (including early Google, to direct their internal community giving) and conferences.

Now I’ve started my own boutique creative firm to use these powers to put more good into the world in a sustainable way 🙂

As a business owner, there isn't a more powerful endorsement to give a digital strategy consultant than this: Nate's ideas WORK. Yes, he's efficient, effective, experienced, intelligent, skeptical in the right moments, and plenty of other superlatives that are nice to have. But above all, Nate delivers ideas and plans that deliver results.

Nate is loaded with great stories, examples and inspiration of how to really make purposeful impact. He's also an extraordinary visionary, who has a 'je ne sais quoi' for coming up with remarkable ideas that spread, that people follow and that turn into movements. He's insanely talented and anything he touches turns into something remarkable.

Nate's one of the most creative and authentic people I know. He brings a certain kind of fire to his work that's rare these days, and he's not afraid to stand up for extraordinary ideas and find a way to make them happen. While Nate's an awesome professional, he's just a downright awesome individual. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

I feel lucky to have been able to work with Nate. He is a phenomenal storyteller and overall awesome human being. During Nate's time at GiveForward, we were covered by dozens of media publications including the NY Times, CNN, WSJ, Huff Po, NPR, Vice magazine, Today Show, Good Morning America, Yahoo News, etc. The best thing, however, about working with Nate is his authenticity - his moral compass is uncompromising. It's a great quality to have and one I wish more people exhibited.

Nate is well-respected for his creative mind, communication skills, and experience. He's also just an awesome person, sharing his thoughts and wisdom freely and bringing out the best in others. His drive to change the world is inspired, genuine and infectious. He is an inspiration and someone I will always follow with great interest.

Simple Pricing

The Giving Cards model is not a persistent web platform or SAAS – there’s nothing to sign up for or sign into. It’s just a one-time, one-cost activation where we take care of everything from start to finish. You don’t even need buy-in from the whole company, either. It’s affordable enough that you can easily try it out with a single department to see how it goes, and if you like it, you can expand from there.

All-In Pricing

Card Production Cost: Face value of card + $10/card
Includes branded design for card art, vendor production cost, hand-personalization of each package, and delivery to recipients

Campaign Fee: 25% of Card Production Cost
Includes campaign strategy meeting with Nate, custom communication and social sharing messaging to recipients with four touchpoints (one letter, three emails), user story collection, and final story asset delivery to client

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The Fine Print

* Minimum card value $50
* Best value $100 (bigger stories and better sharing)
* Minimum order 30 cards

Here are a couple of real-life examples so you don’t have to pull out your calculator:

Ordering a single $50 card for 30 people will cost a total of $2,250
Ordering a two-card box set at $50/card for 30 people will cost a total of $4,500