Sector and AuSAE News

  • 12 Jun 2015 3:45 PM | Louise Stokes

    Written by Ursula McGeown, Sydney Morning Herald


    I often get asked what makes a successful charity. From how to measure success to what challenges we face that are unique to the not for profit sector. I also come up against the occasional view that it's easier to run a successful not for profit than a thriving business. This is simply not the case, and in my experience – we all face similar challenges, but it is often how we deal with them that results in a successful outcome.


    So are we that different, and what can SMBs learn from not for profits?


    Understand your purpose. If you know your purpose, and your staff have a clear understanding of what success looks like, then everyone will be on the same journey. Leading with purpose will also inspire an engaged work force that are all working towards the same goals.


    Be hungry. The not for profit sector is highly competitive. Those that are hungry and believe in their cause are often the ones that achieve the best results. Many not for profits – despite servicing different customers – are often competing for the same pool of money from government sources, corporates or foundations. Hunger and passion go a long way, whether pitching for government grants or funding from investors. It doesn't matter if you're running a successful small business or a well-regarded charity; people buy into passion, determination and people. You need to get all those pieces right, to secure investment.  


    Know what's at stake. As a charity, not getting access to funding could mean you're not in a position to provide support to those in need. For this reason, charities are often thirstier and push harder for results than the average business. Through helping staff understand what's at stake, people are more likely to know the true value of every opportunity and work harder to achieve it.


    Be resourceful. Successful not for profits are often experts at doing more with less. From identifying and implementing efficiencies to leveraging relationships, success often depends on a team's ability to critically analyse its own strengths and weaknesses. Being resourceful may also occasionally mean staff get their hands dirty, and are not afraid to step outside their typical roles to get a job done. Charities do a great job of inspiring a culture of doers, who are committed to getting results.


    Build your networks. Like in any business, building a like-minded network of people committed to a cause is integral to success. As a charity you also need to get creative with building a network through things like events or sponsorships. At Dress for Success we've recently partnered with Charlotte Smith – owner of Darnell Collection – to showcase outfits that bring to life 100 Years of Power Dressing. Held on the 17th of this month, this event will not only enable us to get in front of new audiences but will also helps us raise awareness around the importance of helping women in need.


    Take an outward-in perspective. Even when things are going well, it's important to still seek counsel from your external stakeholders. Engaging with customers and other supporters, who see your business from an outside perspective, will often provide valuable insights and ensure ongoing success.


    Celebrate the small successes. Charity staff or volunteers are often at the coalface of some pretty confronting issues – from hunger and domestic violence to terminal illness. To help keep staff motivated and engaged, it's important to celebrate the small successes. Recognising minor milestones as a team can increase productivity and boost job satisfaction – whether you're a charity or an SMB. 


    So what makes a successful charity? In my view it's the same things that make a successful small business  – passion, knowing what's at stake, being resourceful, a strong network, having an outward in perspective and celebrating small successes. Charities or SMBs that manage to unlock these elements will go a long way towards achieving success.


    Ursula McGeown is the CEO Dress for Success Sydney

  • 12 Jun 2015 3:39 PM | Louise Stokes

    Written by Martin Laverty, AFR


    My employer doesn't pay tax. It's an 87-year-old company. It's internationally recognised and trusted. Yet never a cent has been paid in company tax. There's no rort involved. No offshore avoidance scheme. My employer is an income tax exempt charity. Australia's most reputable charity, according to last year's AMR Charity Reputation Index.


    Charities have tax exempt status because governments, communities, and millions of individual Australians depend on them. It's a responsibility charity leaders take seriously. For charitable organisations paying no tax, tax is still essential to their work. Treasurer Hockey's tax reform plans could prove even more essential to the future of charities and their social contribution.


    The tax reform options paper, responses to which are now being assessed by Treasury, invites thought about the role of charities within the Australian community and concessions they receive. The main concession registered charities receive is exemption from paying income tax. The exemption recognises the essential service role of charities to communities.


    The income tax exemption also recognises charities don't make profits to be taxed. Charities raise funds to deliver community benefit. It would be absurd to seek donations to pay a tax liability.

    Receiving donations that are tax deductible for the donor is one of the other big concessions registered charities receive. It is a central – and for many charities – main service funding source.

    Options to lift donations and philanthropy were not canvassed in the tax paper. They should have been. More importantly, stimulating charitable giving must form part of the Government's response. Three proposals to increase charitable giving were this week outlined to the Treasury.

    110 PER CENT NEEDED

    The first is to increase the rate at which donations can be deducted. One hundred per cent of a donation to approved charities can currently be claimed as a tax deduction by the donor. If the deductible rate was lifted to say 110 per cent or higher, a donor's propensity to give – and to give more – would be increased. Corporate donations in particular may be stimulated.


    The second proposal is for donations of individual wage earners to be paid from before tax or gross wages. Doing so would save the wage earner the income tax they currently pay on donations made. The United Kingdom adopted this pre-tax option in 1987.


    The scheme is administered through payroll-giving programs, where employees make donations direct from their pay packet before tax. Thanks to the incentive, roughly two per cent of UK employees now Give as You Earn. Two per cent is not a lot but almost double previous rates. Employers often match their staff donations.


    The third proposal is to extend deductibility for charity event tickets and auction item purchases, where the price a donor pays obviously includes what would otherwise be treated as a donation.

    Current tax law says when a purchaser receives a benefit, the payment is not tax deductible. Fair enough. Yet often the generous ticket and auction prices paid far exceed the benefit obtained.

    Martin Laverty is CEO of the Royal Flying Doctor Service.


  • 12 Jun 2015 3:23 PM | Louise Stokes

    Sourced directly from ARN, Written by Chris Player


    Australia’s first website designed to link Australian charity organisations with free IT-tech support has been launched. CharityWorks.com.au is a new platform that matches under-resourced charities with under-worked or inexperienced IT candidates looking to bolster their CV while gaining real-time work experience and contacts at the same time. The program’s founder, John Christian, said undergraduates and new-comers to the IT industry are often looking for pro-bono work they can add to their portfolio of work while they attempt to enter the industry.


    “Resource-poor charities are always looking for help with their IT-tech infrastructure, so we believe CharityWorks.com.au is a win-win,” he said.


    The Brisbane businessman broke into the IT industry by volunteering himself at Queensland & Northern Territory Multimedia in 1997. “The objective of CharityWorks is to bridge the gap between the two - free of charge," he said. “Most charities in Australia are historically horribly under-resourced and one of the areas that is normally overlooked is a charity’s IT-tech infrastructure. “Undergrads or people looking at a career change in the IT industry don’t necessarily find work immediately in the sector. “CharityWorks.com.au works by linking these two groups together so the charity groups get the crucial IT-tech support and advice they so desperately need while undergrads and/or new-comers obtain some vital experience they need to kick-start their careers.”


    Mr Christian said there are enough websites, like e-lance or Freelancer, taking work away from the Australian technology industry as the work is outsourced to primarily India, China or Russia.


  • 12 Jun 2015 3:17 PM | Louise Stokes

    Sourced directly from The Association Contrarian Report, Jeff De Cagna


    Saul Kaplan does a superb job pushing back against what can be a reflexive preference for an organization-centric change management approach to business model reinvention, while making a strong case for sustaining the stakeholder-centric, design oriented approach over time. With membership-centric business models facing real challenges in the years ahead, association boards and CEOs must be vocal champions for playing in the business model sandbox as much as possible.


    There’s plenty of time for change management, once we’ve demonstrated new business models worth changing into. Exploring and testing new business models is strategy development before it’s change management. Business model innovation is a persistent and generative exploration of entire new ways to create, deliver, and capture value. Leaders vested and working in the core must be prevented from leaning against and blocking ongoing R&D for new business models. When we treat business model exploration as change management, we are too likely to squash any concept that feels transformational or disruptive. We have to make business model reinvention safer and easier to manage.


    It’s urgent because business models don’t last as long as they used to in the Industrial Era. The Netflix, Airbnb and Uber stories are everywhere. Too many industries and companies are playing defense, trying to lean against disruptive business models. No effort to strengthen and protect the core will prevent it from being netflixed or uberized! The only way to play offense is by doing R&D for new business models, even those that might disrupt the core. New business models are coming, whether we like it or not. Why not be proactive? Business model innovation is a strategy question before it’s a change management question.


    We have to make it easier to move business model concepts off the white board and to prototype and test them in the real world. If you screen early stage business model exploration with the same questions, metrics, and investment stage gates used to select projects to improve the core, you will never do anything transformational. Incremental improvements will always win out. Business model innovation requires a different approach.


    Business model innovation is an iterative design process foreign to most Industrial Era leaders. Lets face it, trying more stuff isn’t exactly what they taught us in MBA school. Business model R&D is the new strategic imperative. Implementation starts with the creation of a business model sandbox tasked with managing an ongoing portfolio of real world business model experiments and a platform to capture, share and act based on what is learned. The new must-have organization super power is demonstrating minimum viable business models in the real world. We can use low fidelity prototypes to explore new business model concepts faster and cheaper in the market. Business model prototypes are not expected to scale, they’re expected to help us answer one question, does the model demonstrate a better way to deliver value to a small number of real customers? We can then start addressing scalability questions for only those models that work at the prototype phase.


    A high performing business model sandbox operates as a connected adjacency to the core. The biggest advantage existing companies have over start-up entrepreneurs is access to resources, networks and capabilities from the core to enable business model R&D. Most are not leveraging their advantage with capabilities stuck in the straitjacket of the current model protected by line management. A business model sandbox is a safe place to combine and recombine capabilities to explore new ways of delivering value. A business model sandbox must be designed with the right balance of autonomy and the free flow of people and capabilities in both directions. CEOs should play a direct leadership role to mange the inevitable tension between the core and sandbox. Companies would be smart to groom a new generation of leaders capable of managing both the core business model and ongoing R&D for its successor.


    If you start by burdening business model ideas with today’s business logic and jumping too quickly to change management, you will end up with only incremental improvement to the way things currently work. It’s human nature to resist new models. It’s also human nature to know in our guts that we can do better. The models, systems and infrastructure we inherited from the Industrial Era have served society well but we need to re-imagine them for the 21st century. Everyone knows it, but we seem to be frozen in the headlights on how to make it so. We see examples every day of how entrenched leaders, constrained by today’s business models, do everything they can, both explicitly and implicitly, to lean against change and protect the status quo.


    We have created our own dilemma — we know we need transformational change but we don’t like it when it affects us! Tweaks aren’t enough. Incremental change to today’s models isn’t working and won’t keep disruption at bay. We need to make reinventing business models and social systems easier and safer to manage. 21st century leaders must be able to BOTH strengthen the core AND explore new models simultaneously. R&D for new business models doesn’t begin as change management, it starts as a strategic imperative.

  • 12 Jun 2015 3:04 PM | Louise Stokes

    Written by Edward Helmore, The Guardian


    Staff of company at forefront of communal management craze sweeping the US rebel at lack of hierarchy.


    Sick of the boss? Weary of instruction? As many as 300 US companies are embracing holacracy, a self-managing philosophy some say can make businesses more resilient, innovative and better attuned to customer needs.


    But this month Amazon-owned online shoe retailer Zappos.com, a leading proponent of no-boss, non-hierarchical governance, was rocked by a mass employee defection. Almost 210 of its 1,500 employees took redundancy rather than relinquish familiar titles or positions and adapt to a holacratic system of “circles” in which employees decide for themselves how to do their job, aka “energising a role”.


    The defections have not discouraged Zappos chief executive Tony Hsieh from adopting a system designed to replace human-imposed, top-down hierarchies with flattened-out holarchies. In a 4,700-word letter to employees, Hsieh said he believed that the holacratic system empowered employees “to act more like entrepreneurs”.


    But America’s business community remains unconvinced: is Zappos – a billion-dollar company – being reorganised into a kind of progressive kindergarten that will ultimately implode, or is it taking a bold step into the future of self-management under an extensive code of governance and practices? The company is known for its quirks. Obsessed with customer satisfaction – motto “Deliver WOW Through Service” – it calls its executives “monkeys”, and greets visitors to its Las Vegas headquarters with cowbells.


    Self-organising or self-managing organisations are not new. Examples include WL Gore, maker of GoreTex, which employs 10,000 people, and Morning Star, a tomato processor. But in 2007 a 28-year-old company CEO Brian Robertson, came up with and trademarked the concept of holacracy and wrote its 15,000-word “constitution”. His book, Holacracy: The Revolutionary Management System that Abolishes Hierarchy, is published this week.


    According to Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein, who has led several studies of self-organising organisations, the philosophy is not to erase hierarchies entirely but to allow companies to form hierarchies organically and to make domains over which people have more fluid authority.


    “We want Zappos to function more like a city and less like a top-down bureaucratic organisation,” Hsieh told the journal Quartz. He says that cities become more productive as they grow; companies less. “Look at companies that existed 50 years ago in the Fortune 500 – most don’t exist today. Companies tend to die, cities don’t.”


    But business commentators are divided over Hsieh’s experiment. Forbes calls it “gurus gone wild”; the Wall Street Journal, “confusion”. But surveys suggest the relationship between manager and employee is already changing, with companies giving workers more autonomy in an effort to limit unproductive management hierarchies.


    The modern company, offers Forbes magazine, is more of a conversation than a mandate.


    “We all want organisations to make us more capable of being productive, but many of us feel our organisations make us less capable and we could potentially do things better individually than we could as a team,” Bernstein explains.


    “That requires a restructuring process, not structure, so the problem we’re trying to solve is to create organisations that are supportive of restructuring processes.”


    A key tenet of holacracy is explicitness. If employees have a problem, they can announce a “tension”. In a manager-less, environment such as Zappos, all roles, responsibilities and policies are stored in a software system called GlassFrog.


    The idea is to adapt companies from an era in which many employees performed repetitive tasks to the modern era of companies run by relatively few people that can quickly acquire stratospheric valuations.


    Three decades ago, a billion-dollar organisation would have had hundreds of thousands of employees, says Bernstein; when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook for $19bn last year, it had around 60 employees.


    “This is part of a greater change in the way we conceive of organisations, and in the different way we organise for scale and move toward more knowledge or technology work with less need for larger numbers of human beings doing coordinated and repetitive tasks over time.”


    But does the organisation without structure simply cease to be an organisation? Bernstein says holacracy is good at conflict resolution but doesn’t solve issues of career progression, compensation, hiring and firing – traditional components of a bureaucracy. “If you reduce structure, you have to raise another part. Holacracy raises the process aspect of it.”


    And that means as many as five hours extra a week, according to Zappos employees. Hsieh says it will take three to five years to fully implement holacratic values. It is, he says, “a process of trial and error”.


    HOLACRATIC OATH

    • The philosophy of holacracy is enshrined in a 15,000-word “constitution”. Employees are assigned a circle and roles within it are assigned, elected, or formed into further sub-circles. A job is not a job but an “energiser of roles”.
    • Stripping bosses of their titles is the first step. Then comes the more difficult task of distributing leadership into each role. As the Wall Street Journal noted: when everyone’s in charge, there probably will be lots of meetings.
    • The end goal is radical transparency – there’s no hiding behind titles or bureaucracy. As Tony Hsieh says: “It’s not the fastest or the strongest that survive. It’s the ones most adaptive to change.”

    This article was amended on 1 June 2015. An earlier version referred to Brian Robertson as a programmer, and said that he had patented, rather than trademarked, the concept of holacracy.

  • 12 Jun 2015 2:48 PM | Louise Stokes

    Written by, John ScarrottDesign Business Association, Sourced directly from LinkedIn Pulse


    If you decide to attend a conference or send some of your team to an event, you probably think about the practical value of the time spent away from the office. But what percentage of what you learn at a conference impacts on your business? If your answer is “I don’t know” or “Not enough” what can you do about it?


    The likely reality is that you’re not alone. It’s fair to say that not enough of the useful information that delegates pick up at conferences and events makes an impact on their business. But this is by no means inevitable.


    By setting some clear goals before you go, applying an understanding of why it's tough to make new change stick and implementing one or two simple strategies post-event, you'll increase your chances of bringing more of what you learn back to your business. You’ll engage and energise your team and truly realise the impact that your investment of time and money deserves.


    Set clear goals. Often, the reason people don’t make what they learn at a conference count, is that they forget to set themselves a powerful and clear goal at the start. They don’t know when and whether the goal has been met. This also makes it difficult for them to explain clearly the reason why they’re attending the event to their team.


    To form a clear goal for attending a conference or event, there are a number of straightforward questions to ask yourself:

    • Why are you attending the conference?
    • What is the purpose of going to the sessions you're attending?
    • Why is this purpose important to your business?
    • What is the benefit to you?
    • What is the benefit to your department?
    • What is the benefit to your business?
    • How will you know that the goal has been met?

    If you’re not 100% sure of your answers, just make your best guess. Then write your answers down. Having something in print is important at this stage because later, you’ll be able to compare what you did learn with what you thought you’d learn. It gets your thinking out of your head and onto the page and it’s sharable information. You’ll also be able to explain to your team why you are going and why it might be useful to them.


    Setting a clear goal is the first part of getting your ideas into play. You set the wheels in motion before you set foot inside the event. When you’re clear on your goals, the next step is to get your team involved with why you’re going.


    Share with your team. Choose an opportunity to present your goals above in two minutes to your team. Send them the link to the event in advance so they can see where you’re going and what’s being discussed. Ask them for their input- what do they think of the theme? Ask if there are any sessions that they’d like you to go along to on their behalf.


    Suggest to them that you'd like to feed back on the content of the event when you return. This builds trust and increased buy-in from your team as to why you are going. It starts to plug the themes into the business early and it opens up a discussion around the event. It helps to balance out any lingering cynicism that the time away from the office might be a ‘jolly’ by asking the team: ‘This is what I’m going to and why. What can I bring back that could be useful to you?’


    Getting things set up before you go the event raises your chances of success. But even with this preparation, things can still conspire against you. With this in mind, it’s worth looking at what you’re up against.


    A brief tour of the ‘change challenge’. A solid workplace is built upon a system designed to support itself. Everyone within the business has responsibilities and roles and knows what they should be doing each day and that’s how the business functions. Paradoxically, that can also make the business relatively inflexible when it comes to change. Any problems, challenges or opportunities that arise are all ‘managed’ by the system. A key benefit of the system is its ability to support itself by maintaining stability. And this often involves maintaining a holding pattern for the current situation. This is not anyone's fault and generally not the sole responsibility of any one person within a business.


    An example of the magnetic pull of the ‘system’ can be how easy it is to get sucked back into the day job, when back in the office after a conference. It's the system saying ‘ this is what usually happens’ that drags us back in. The interactions we have on a day-to-day basis demand our attention and can overpower strategic thinking around the longer term.


    This is the overall systemic context against which any new information you bring into your business plays, so it’s worth grasping and accepting that this exists before you start. However, you don’t have to like or agree with it. You just have to recognise it and then play the game to win.


    In order to win, there are two further stages to go through. The first is about capturing your insights at the event. The second is what you do back at the office to get them into play.


    Capture your insights at the event. When you’re at the event make notes andtake pictures of the slides or what’s happening on stage. It can take a while for organisers to get slides to delegates so this gives you a head start. Remember to tweet what strikes you in the session there and then.


    Treat this process of noting and sharing as preparation for the session you're going to present to the team when you return. Make a note of every conversation you have and with whom. If it’s a multi-day event, look over your notes at the end of each day. Check that you can read them and understand them. Then add more notes to these as your thoughts occur to you. This process helps you to become ‘friendly’ with what you’re writing by engaging you with your own thoughts. This will create new thoughts and insights.


    When you get back to the office, start to prepare your feedback session. Go back over your notes again and add in more thoughts as you have them. The acts of reading, thinking and writing work well together, because your unconscious mind will do some work behind the scenes while you’re doing other things. But you have to trigger this part of your brain to produce the goods when you want it to. And that’s what reading and writing do, they act together as a unified prompt to your brain.


    Getting your ideas into play. So you're back in the office, you’ve done some processing of your notes and you have some ideas. Your next step is to arrange a 10-minute session to present and discuss what happened at the event. You could use a simple and well established coaching structure like GROW to present this. The GROW model was developed by Sir John Whitmore.


    GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Options and What we will do. This is how it could be applied to the task of setting up a discussion around the conference you attended:

    • Goal refers to the reasons why you attended the event.
    • Reality is what you actually discovered.
    • Options are your initial thoughts on the gap between the two and what that could mean in terms of opportunities for you, your team and your business. At this point you can open up the floor to discussion. Ask people what they think.
    • What would be the action that you take next.

    And that’s the three-step method for handling the information that you bring back from an event. It’s the start of a conversation rather than a cul-de-sac. It’s a question rather than an answer. And it’s an opportunity for you, your team and your business to explore how the information and ideas that you bring back from a conference could be used to transform your business or just make a small but important change. Imagine if handing in your badge at the end of the conference was the beginning of something exciting for you business.


  • 12 Jun 2015 2:40 PM | Louise Stokes

    Written by Heather R. Huhman, Entrepreneur


    The popular HBO television series Game of Thrones keeps the audience on its toes with the right mix of power dynamics and political schemes. Each of the characters take a different approach to leadership, all resulting in various levels of success.


    Though today’s workforce isn’t set in the mythical land of Westeros during medieval times, there are still lessons to be taken away from the successes and failures of these characters.


    Here are a few different leadership styles seen in the iconic show and some ways to create a better working environment with happier, more engaged employees:

    1. The surreptitious, self-serving leader.

    The manipulative Cersei Lannister isn’t someone who’d land a leadership position by popular vote. She knows how to get things done, but her approach is a little shady, secretly working with others behind the scenes. This approach isn’t far from one some leaders take today.


    Only half of employees believe their managers are open and up-front with them, according to APA’s 2014 Work And Well-Being study, which surveyed 1,562 full-time employed U.S. adults between January 28 and February 4, 2014.


    Unlike Cersei, leaders need to build a culture of trust through open communication without keeping secrets from employees. Employees can tell when managers aren’t being honest. In fact, 32 percent of employees in APA’s study reported their employer is not always honest and truthful with them, and 24 percent don’t trust their employer.

    2. The naive leader with all the best intentions.

    Daenerys Targaryen wants to make all the right decisions for her people, but her youth and naivety leave her susceptible to being mislead by others. Even so, she makes up for what she lacks in wisdom by putting her people first, as a good leader does.


    In fact, employee perception of their leader’s involvement in their growth, development, health and safety was shown to increase engagement, in APA’s study. The leader’s efforts in these areas accounted for about 27 percent of variance in predicting work engagement.


    As a leader, it’s important to be committed to the growth, development and well-being of employees. Even leaders who aren’t the most seasoned gain advantage by putting employees first.

    3. The leader who’s not so great with people.

    Stannis Baratheon is a determined leader, but he’s not exactly a people-person. He can come off a little rough and cold-hearted. His high expectations make him a little critical, but only because he values success, like most leaders.


    Of course, leaders always want their employees to do their best, but the wrong response or the wrong feedback can disengage employees quickly. Positive feedback is the key to reinforcing behaviors and performances leaders want to see repeated, according to 94 percent of respondents in SHRM’s 2013 Employee Recognition Programs Survey. Much fewer (6 percent) believe negative feedback can improve employee performance.


    Instead of constantly correcting employees, give positive feedback to support and encourage continued good practices. If a correction needs to be made, address it along with what employees are doing well so they can replace negative actions with more positive ones.

    4. The young leader who inspires engagement.

    Though inexperienced, Jon Snow knows how to inspire action. He leads by example, which inspires others to join him in his ventures, no matter how daunting they may be. His bold moves capture his followers’ attention. There’s no doubt they’re alert and engaged in what’s coming next.

    With nearly a quarter of working Americans in APA’s study reporting low or very low levels of engagement, it seems leaders could learn from Jon’s style.


    Like Jon Snow, a good leader doesn’t order people around, but jumps right into the front line of battle. Leaders should take initiative in performing the duties they expect employees to do. When employees see leaders rolling up their sleeves and unafraid to face the difficult tasks, they’ll act too and they’ll be more engaged.


  • 09 Jun 2015 10:03 AM | Louise Stokes

    Registrations to attend Wellington’s business events tradeshow ‘Show Me Wellington (SMW) 2015’ are officially open. SMW is a one day expo that will take place on Wednesday 9 September at the TSB Bank Arena and Conference Centre.


    Positively Wellington Venues, Chief Executive, Glenys Coughlan says that SMW is a ‘one-stop-shop’ for conference and event organisers, where they can meet over 100 exhibitors who will be showcasing event products and services that can help create that ‘wow’ factor for their next event in the capital and wider Wellington region.


    This year will also see the return of the popular ‘Talk About Cool’ seminar series. These seminars were a hit with buyers and exhibitors alike in 2014, and this year is set to be even better. The full programme will be announced in July and will feature event and industry professionals who are driven by setting new benchmarks for success.


    “We source great speakers from a range of industries and fields that some may consider ‘unrelated’ to business events but that encourage event planners to think differently and create new event experiences” says Glenys.


    SMW also offers a hosted famil programme in conjunction with Business Events Wellington and Tourism New Zealand. This is to encourage further growth in this sector by targeting Trans-Tasman conference and event organisers. They will experience many of Wellington’s best group activities like the Weta Cave and Zealandia, in addition to exclusive pre-scheduled appointments at SMW.


    For more information and to register visit www.pwv.co.nz/show-me-wellington


    Notes:

    • The Meetings Incentives Conference and Events industry is worth $140 million annually in expenditure to the Wellington economy.
    • The full ‘Talk About Cool’ programme will be released in July.
    • Show Me Wellington (SMW) is proudly owned and managed by Positively Wellington Venues with the aim to secure more international and national business events to Wellington.
    • Positively Wellington Venues is part of Wellington Regional Economic Development Agency (WREDA), which brings together the functions and activities of Grow

    Wellington, Positively Wellington Tourism, Destination Wellington, Positively Wellington Venues and Major Events.


    For more information please contact Positively Wellington Venues PR and Marketing Coordinator Arti Govind at arti.govind@pwv.co.nz or on 021 247 9756.

  • 09 Jun 2015 9:11 AM | Louise Stokes

    New Zealand’s latest live crowdfunding event for charity raised more than $46,000 in half an hour for four very worthy organisations.


    The Funding Network (TFN), described as the “Dragon’s Den for charities”, held its second event at AUT University in Auckland last night, where more than 100 generous Kiwis and the Macquarie Group Foundation pledged more than $46,400.


    The charities to benefit this time were:

    • Assistance Dogs New Zealand - helps enrich the lives of adults and children living with multiple disabilities by providing Assistance Dogs to promote independence, mobility, confidence and the ability to participate in their communities.
    • The Crescendo Trust of Aotearoa - supports young people who are not responding well to traditional education by giving them training and mentoring in music, media and communication. This fosters their creativity and builds life skills.
    • Fair Food - Auckland’s first food rescue charity which is both a social and environmental organisation. It rescues fit-to-consume food from retailers and producers that would otherwise go to landfill and redirects it to those most in need through various community groups.
    • Young Carers NZ - a network for Kiwi children and young people who look after ill, elderly or disabled love ones. About 8% of young people up to the age of 24 are young carers and the charity provides them with information, support and advice.

    Each group had six minutes to pitch their organisation and another six minutes to answer questions, after which the pledging from the crowd began. Donations came thick and fast, ranging from $50 to $1,000. All four charities quickly exceeded their $10,000 target.


    “These four terrific organisations are all doing amazing work in their respective areas and will be able to extend their programmes even further, thanks to the generosity of philanthropic Aucklanders,” says Hilary Sumpter, CEO of Auckland Communities Foundation which helps run The Funding Network, with support from Philanthropy New Zealand, The Gift Trust, the AUT University Business School and Macquarie Group.


    The Funding Network was launched in London in 2002 by philanthropist and art dealer Dr Frederick Mulder and has since spread around the world, with more than 150 TFN events held, 750 charities supported and at least NZD $13 million raised.


    The Macquarie Group Foundation and Macquarie Private Wealth NZ were again key supporters of the Auckland event last night, with the Macquarie Group Foundation matching one-third of the funds pledged on the night.


    “It is a privilege to support TFN NZ and help New Zealanders share in such a rewarding evening of giving generously to four very deserving, local charities,” says Laurence Fitzpatrick, Head of Macquarie Private Wealth NZ.


    The Funding Network plans to hold a third event in Wellington later this year and then take the concept to other regional cities around the country.


    ENDS


    Scoop NZ

  • 09 Jun 2015 9:07 AM | Louise Stokes

    The New Zealand Law Society section representing in-house lawyers has changed its name to In-house Lawyers’ Association of New Zealand (ILANZ).


    Previously known as Corporate Lawyers Association of New Zealand (CLANZ), the section’s new name recognises a change in the way lawyers working inside private and public sector organisations are referred to.


    “People do not tend to refer to in-house lawyers as corporate lawyers any more, and 62% of New Zealand’s in-house lawyers work in the government, academic or not-for-profit sectors,” ILANZ President Katie Elkin says.


    Dr Elkin says the name change was approved by members at the section’s AGM on 22 May and has now been ratified by the New Zealand Law Society Board.


    ENDS - Scoop NZ



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