E132: Lean Six Sigma for Corporate Giving with Anthea Rowe

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In this episode, I share an interview with Anthea Rowe, corporate communications and PR expert. She discusses her career trajectory and the application of Lean Six Sigma principles to non-technical fields like communications and philanthropy. She details a major project she led at 3M, where she utilized the DMAIC process and a Pugh Matrix to revamp the company’s charitable giving portfolio, successfully reducing 42 legacy partners to a smaller but more impactful group aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She emphasizes the importance of moving from vague metrics, such as total dollars donated, toward measurable outcomes and clear operational definitions that track actual behavior change or societal impact. She is currently focused on coaching middle managers to bridge the communication gap between executive strategy and frontline execution. We discuss how Lean Six Sigma practitioners can support the nonprofit sector by donating their specialized skills to help these organizations operate more effectively and demonstrate greater value.

00:17 Meet Anthea Rowe: Communications Expert
01:08 Canadian Roots and Cultural Insights
02:43 Journey into Communications
06:09 Early Career and Corporate Communications
08:04 Transition to Nonprofit Sector
09:28 Sustainable Business and Research
11:19 Tech Industry and Corporate Growth
13:26 Effective Communication Strategies
16:35 Measuring Communication Impact
20:15 Challenges in Communication and PR
21:01 Practical Examples and Case Studies
29:31 Board Member Insights
29:55 Guerilla Data Collection
30:42 Sustainability Efforts
32:57 Leveraging HR Data
34:47 3M Crisis Communication Strategy
37:35 Revamping Charitable Giving
38:14 Implementing the Logic Model
41:12 Criteria for Charitable Partners
41:38 Objective Evaluation Process
45:32 Challenges in Charitable Giving
52:12 Current Role at Exemplify and Contact Info

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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript
Note: may contain typos and errors, generated with AI

Anthea

My name is Anthea Rowe. Thanks so much for having me. My background is corporate communications and PR. And so I’ve held in-house leadership roles in communications, internal, external, generating media coverage, helping presidents talk to government representatives and municipal leaders, and engaging employees and the community in the company’s work. I’ve worked in sustainability and corporate social responsibility in my capacity as a communications leader and also Now I am a communication coach who helps individuals communicate their impact at work. I used to help companies and brands articulate what they do and why it matters, and now I work with individuals inside organizations to talk about what they do and why it matters.

Brion

You’re based out of Ontario in Canada.

Anthea

I am, yeah. I’m coming to you from London, Ontario, Canada. We sometimes call ourselves the other London, because it’s not London, UK. I’m 2 hours from Detroit, 2 hours from Buffalo, and two hours from Toronto.

Brion

Okay. Yeah. And did you grow up in Canada?

Anthea

Yeah, born and raised. I mean, I love it. Proud Canadian. Canadian pride is a very quiet thing. I love our American neighbors, regardless of what’s happening at the political level right now. Canada is interesting, right? Because it’s a large landmass, but we’ve got just about 40, I think it’s about 44 million people. We’re always about a 10th the size of the United States. I have a lot of Canadian clients, but I actually do a lot of work in the United States too with companies there just because there’s more work, there’s more organizations and that kind of thing. And from a sustainability perspective, it was interesting in Canada seeing some of the ways that Canada was almost more similar to Europe in some of its forward thinking approach to ESG and sustainability. But then of course, culturally, we’re really similar to the States in a lot of ways too. Canada’s kind of a funny little phenomenon here doing some of our own stuff.

Brion

Yeah, that’s great. No, we love Canadians too. Hopefully the politics don’t mess that up.

Anthea

Well, if you ever want to move to Canada, come on up.

Brion

Yeah, I’ve got a friend that did that. His wife is from Toronto and seems to be enjoying it. He’s been there a long time and got to visit him a couple of times. It’s great.

Anthea

Oh, that’s great. If you ever come visit him again in Toronto, let me know. It’s just a two hour train ride. I’d love to see it.

Brion

Okay, great. Tell us about your background growing up. Did you always want to be in communications or did you stumble into that?

Anthea

Oh my gosh, this is getting like existential and back into my childhood. I love it. Looking back, it makes sense. I thought I might be a journalist. I wanted to be an anchor on TV. I loved also performing and on stage. I think I was always fascinated with language. I have two English degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s. Everyone said, oh, are you going to be a teacher? And I thought, fascinating. No, I don’t really want to teach. And as I started, I read What Colors Your Parachute by Richard Bowles. I think it was first published in like the 70s and it’s on its 18th or 20th edition now. And that advice said, go do informational interviews. If you don’t know what you’re interested in, go do that. So I started talking to people like friends of my parents. ended up talking to someone who’s the head of communications for a hospital. And she started telling me about her day and how she was doing everything from designing the website to preparing speaking notes for the vice president, the president, and supporting the fundraising team, talking to the researchers and scientists. And I was like, that sounds so cool. And I was like, okay, corporate communications, that’s where I want to go. And then I started talking to everybody in corporate communications, and I really found I love bridging technical experts and people who are non-technical and being that mediator, that bridge between them and helping people who are doing important work explain what they’re doing and why it matters so that other people can learn about it and get excited. So I think it was probably inevitable I get into communications that has that. mediator kind of function. So yeah, I think it’s been the right career path for me. Even if I probably would’ve come at it, no matter what path I took, I was gonna go to Carleton University. That’s a famous journalism school in Canada. I was gonna be a journalist, then I didn’t. I was gonna go into sciences, but I didn’t. But I ended up doing science communication. So it’s a long-winded way of saying I was probably meant to do communications. I just had to figure it out.

Brion

Yeah, I think that’s hard to do at a young age to figure out what your interests are. And somehow I think we end up in the place we need to be, but it’s not a very smooth transition. The interviews sound great. I mean, that’s something I wish I had done when I was younger, to talk to people and see what do you actually do? Because once you get into industry, you realize all these roles and jobs. I didn’t know that was a job or that you could. study that as a career.

Anthea

Yeah, no kidding. I mean, I say it’s not too late. And that’s basically what your podcast is, right? It’s a whole series of informational interviews. I say to a lot of my clients, but just because you’re not a 18 year old kind of babe in the woods, you still can reach out and say to somebody that you found on LinkedIn, hey, your job looks really interesting. Do you mind taking 15 minutes? I’m curious to know how you got to where you are and what your day looks like. I swear to you, I have never had a single person say no, because we all love talking about ourselves, right? Someone says, your job sounds interesting. Do you mind telling me about yourself? People always say yes. You can get yourself out there and do some of your own informational interviews. It’s never too late. Because yeah, you’re right. I believe that there’s meaningful work that we’re meant to do in the world, and it’s different for everyone and that we can figure it out. And you’re right, getting to it isn’t always a linear path, and that’s okay.

Brion

So after school, where did you start first and what were some of the different jobs you’ve taken?

Anthea

So after graduating with my master’s in English, I talked my way into a job in marketing for a small… software company that did specialized software for lumber and building material stores. They needed to have inventory in lengths of wood. So they had a different inventory tracking system. So working for that company, learned a lot about the sales process, which was fascinating, and database management. One of my first projects was revising their database management system. It was something called Goldmine, which I don’t even think exists anymore, but it would’ve been like a Salesforce or something now. And I had a goldmine for dummies book that the VP of marketing gave me. And she was like, our database doesn’t work well. We can’t generate leads. We’re having trouble reaching our current customers. We need you to figure it out. And I literally pushed the book across the table to her and was like, I’m not the person for you. I’m not trained in this. I don’t know. And she was, she pushed it back and she’s like, you’ll be fine. So, I mean, that was a great experience. There’s nothing like being 22 or 23 and being like, okay, I guess I’ll figure it out. That helped me learn. Like I got to work with the sales team and understand they want to hear about benefits, not features, right? Like how does it help me? Not. what can the product do, right? And that was a good insight. And even just the sales imperative of having to generate revenue, learning about the marketing process. So while I had that job, I part-time did a postgraduate diploma in corporate communications and PR. So turned my English degree into something practical, learned how to write media releases and host press conferences and organize events that brought together donors, stakeholders, that kind of stuff. And from there, just after a couple years in that software company, took a job at Medical Research Institute. And at the time it was Canada’s only independent medical research center. So it wasn’t attached to a hospital or university. So fundraising was critical. Scientists who were investigating the origins of disease, how breast cancer migrates through the body and metastasizes, detecting prostate cancer early, heart attack, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, ALS, such incredible research, stem cells in the early days. My job was in communications, helping raise awareness about the advances being made by researchers and scientists in the institute. And so hosted premiers, those are like… Governors, like, so provincial premiers. We did have the Prime Minister come at one point, who’s like our president, not during my tenure, but making real announcements about major funding gifts or major advances. I took some of the insights around sales and marketing from the for-profit business and brought them to the not-for-profit sector and was like, okay, there’s a whole fundraising cycle, the discipline of finding, prospecting and stewarding donors. How can I, with my marketing communication skills, support that? And by telling a story. So went there, then went to a business school that had a research center on sustainable business. And so talking about figuring out what you’re meant to do, we quickly realized I love working in business environments that have a social or environmental purpose, like Lean Six Sigma for Good. The Sustainable Business Center was a really cool model. We had a leadership committee of companies that would pay a nominal amount, like $10,000 a year, to sit on this advisory committee. They would say, our companies could be more environmentally and socially responsible if we had answers to these important questions. They would ask questions like, do consumers really buy green? Will they really pay more? right for green products or choose green products over non-ethical and non-environmental. How can we collaborate with Indigenous or First Nations stakeholders in Canada, some of our natural resource companies in timber, water, oil and gas. have come up against indigenous communities saying, don’t drill for oil, don’t cut down our trees. They would pay to ask those questions and then the research center would find the best researcher in the world to investigate. The research center would publish the results for free with the idea that the organization could help make more companies sustainable. by giving that research, making it available. My role then, as the communications person, we would have systematic reviews, like an aggregation of all the best research literature on a topic. We would publish the report and I would… try to get as much media attention, channel partnerships. I got guest columns in the Guardian newspaper for our research director on sustainable business. Got in the Global Mail and the CBC News and stuff in Canada. Those are some of our national media outlets. Getting this research out into the public domain and then also into the hands of business leaders. So that was really cool. Then sustainable business was the focus. I got recruited, which was exciting. It was like the early days of LinkedIn. Got asked to join a private but fast growing tech company. So then from public sector back into private, that was growing from, it had hard to find IT and AV parts. And. that industry was suddenly taking off because things were becoming obsolete more quickly, right? So this company that started out selling computer dust covers and keyboard covers, like do you remember those things? Yep, Like the 90s and yeah, they had started doing that kind of stuff and floppy disk holders and stuff to now it was like, oh, we need adapters and dongles that make our legacy. tech work with our new projectors, printers, peripherals, whatever. And things were changing rapidly, right? So that company growing fast and didn’t have any corporate communication infrastructure. So nobody in the company knew each other anymore. Employees didn’t know how to find information. Like they didn’t have any real formal relationships with the local government. So I even just submitted content to the mayor’s state of the city address on the cool innovations the company’s doing. And the mayor talked about our company for the next like 7 years, long after I left, you know, started building those relationships internally and externally.

Brion

I think it is really interesting just to see how you have these common things, but also picked up these other skills and roles that you brought over to other aspects and were able to better navigate. So I think that is pretty interesting. I did have a question about What do you feel like has worked well? Is it building relationships with people of influence or the right contacts at the mayor’s office? Or is it just being able to put together a compelling message? Is it the ability to have tours or host? the premieres coming in and things like that? Or is it a combination of all those different things that you just try out? Kind of curious, what are some of the key things that work?

Anthea

Fundamentally, the common thread every time I was successful was when I first said, who am I trying to reach and what do they care about? Rather than saying, I have a message and I’m going to blast it and try to find as many channels to blast it on. really saying, whose behavior am I trying to influence? What do I want them to do differently? What do they currently know about my organization? And what do they care about? That’s actually the fundamental framework for my professional association. So IABC is International Association of Business Communicators. There are other ones like PR Society of America, but similar. If you are going to write an application for an award, I’ve got a couple back there on my shelf. They start out with the business need or the audience need, understanding of the problem or situation, and then what did you do? So when I think about it, the times I’ve been successful with the Guardian, for example, they were starting to publish. new content on sustainable business and wanted practical advice grounded in evidence. And so when I was working at that research center, that’s what we offered, right? So I didn’t kind of just say, I have a hammer and I’m, you know, running around everywhere looking for a nail kind of. It was what do they need and do, does what we have fit? Yeah, so I’d say that was the real thread. And then once you figured out what your audience cares about, like the mayor in my local municipality where that business was operated, The mayor had an economic development agenda and they were trying to attract talented workers to my city because we’re a mid-market city and we had brain drain. Students would come, we have a great university and college here. They would come and then they would leave. They didn’t think of putting down roots and so… the mayor and the city was trying to attract employers and employees to stay and work. I realized, okay, they care about that. Let’s show them some of the innovative things that an employer here in our city is doing.

Brion

It aligns nicely with what you do in process improvement, right, is trying to understand who the customer is, figure out what they need, and then figure out if they don’t really need that, why are we wasting time on this, and what do they really want, and how do we shift and adjust to match that, understand their expectations, and set that as the goal we’re trying to strive for versus doing our best. But they really want this specifically, having those conversations and understanding that first before you get into changing or adjusting things. So I think there’s some common threads there. So that was really interesting.

Anthea

Absolutely. Benchmarking, right? Knowing your initial, like either what the problem is, whether it’s widget production or defects. In my world, it’s what’s their current knowledge or understanding of our organization or product, and then how can I improve it, change it, make them more favorable?

Brion

Is data something that’s used a lot in terms of looking at effectiveness of the programs or communications? How do you assess the performance of the work you were doing?

Anthea

It’s a challenge and communications and PR people wring their hands over it. The standards used to be, I’m going to say 20 years ago, around ad buying comparisons. If my goal as the head of branding or communications was to raise awareness about our company with more people in Canada. Then you would look at. Okay, well, if I had paid for advertising in newspapers, I would have paid in order to reach 10 million impressions like 10 million sets of eyeballs. Then I would have paid $750,000 in ad space in addition to whatever it would’ve cost to create the ads. So then we used to track paid versus earned. I earned those 10 million impressions by having fascinating survey results. At 3M, they did something at the state of science index, and we would have insights on how. people in countries around the world felt. So I had Canadian results about science and science in their lives. The early impressions that we got from that we would calculate as like dollar value. That’s a really old school approach because if you think back to Lean Six Sigma, it didn’t really get a business critical why. And it was measuring program level results, but it wasn’t demonstrating how that tied to business outcomes. So now it’s sometimes less direct, but we’ll look at whether the communication initiative that we ran at least supported a business outcome. So in the example of building relationships with a local municipality, we did that knowing we wanted to build our employer brand. So telling the mayor’s office about all the great work we’re doing and how we’re hiring, that’s great. But then what it also did was When we were going to expand our facility two years later, and that requires lots of permits and approvals, we had goodwill at the highest municipal leadership level to support that. That’s less direct, but you can say it facilitated having a relationship with the mayor and key counselors who could introduce us to people in the planning departments or approvals department. accelerated approvals, permits, that kind of thing. So yeah, it’s now translating. There are things you can measure and sometimes you can’t. A good example, actually a client of mine who I worked with recently, her organization was tech companies going up for C series venture funding. I don’t know all of those terms, but they were like millions and millions or hundreds of millions, probably dollars, right? The investor relations team put together their proposal for investors and they were hoping to get this money injection. She heard some rumblings in their employee base. They had a few thousand employees and she heard rumblings about some discontent and. It was like, oh, she was the head of communications. She found out what it was, what people weren’t happy about. Pulled together a quick town hall, got the president to talk to employees and address their concerns, resolved it. It went away. The investor day happened. They secured their funding. It came off without a hitch. In her case, communications quickly identified and resolved a potential employee activism issue that cleared the path for the organization to secure its funding. It doesn’t mean that she actually got them the funding, but if she hadn’t intervened. So I think that’s the challenge. If any of your listeners are in like support functions, if they’re maybe not a direct Lean Six Sigma practitioner, like if they’re not just a black belt or something, when you’re in a support function, it can be really hard to tie what you’re doing to actual business outcomes. And so it’s starting to think about how, rather than reporting project level results that can sometimes in my world are like, we got this many impressions, or this many people viewed an ad, or this many people came to the website, or this many people downloaded an information brochure. If instead you can start saying, well, this many people went to our website and we saw 30% of them later turn into donations, that starts to become more business relevant. It was a long answer. Sorry.

Brion

No, no, it made me remember that one of the organizations I worked at, we were going through sustainability certification with the local county. And so went through this checklist, got the certification, and then they brought a lot of the companies together at the board of supervisors or something, and they presented awards to the different companies, took a picture and put it in the newspaper and I remember going through the exercise of what is the value of that article to the company. And there is value to it. It’s just a way to sell. There’s more to it than just we’re going to save on our electricity usage or our waste. There’s other things that can show the value of those things, but I was just trying to look for these different ways of reporting and quantifying things that are hard to do.

Anthea

Yeah, things like employee engagement surveys. are ways to do that too. If you can convince the head of HR to include a question around employee awareness of or engagement in the organization’s sustainability initiatives or philanthropic activities, you can start to get a pulse on, oh, wow, like, does it matter with employees? Or when I was at 3M, I worked with the head of branding to build into our customer surveys and customer research that happened every two years. and made sure that the questions that we asked those sample customers were testing whether they were hearing and internalizing any of our promotional messages. right around being sustainable and being related to science and improving life. So yeah, you’re right. Like it’s sometimes not even something you can directly control, but you’re like, hey, you who are already measuring something over here, can I build assessment of my program or at least awareness of my program into your tool?

Brion

And that communication is so critical inside a company too. I know that’s one of the problems we encounter. Leadership sets goals and strategies, and then you talk to frontline workers who do the work. and there’s a disconnect. Something’s not being communicated down. Or vice versa, that struggles and pain and frustration that they’re having doesn’t make it back up the chain. It gets filtered out by leadership that says, I don’t want that to get to the next level. It makes me look bad. Or whatever the fear is in the organization, but the ability to measure communication down and back up again through catchball or whatever you call it, some way of tracking that is so critical to an organization’s success, especially in their improvement programs. I don’t see a lot of ways of doing that real formally to capture that other than through surveys. I guess we’ve seen and recommended leaders go and actually talk to their team members, cut through all the levels, go right to the source and say, what do you know about these initiatives we have? And find out, did it get through? Did it cut through all those layers? And did it come out the way you want it to, almost like the telephone game? Did it get converted and changed into something that’s not exactly what you hoped would get to that level? It’s very important inside of companies too on their communications.

Anthea

Yeah, and… Acknowledging that communication and acknowledge the end user or the audience is rarely the end goal. Usually we’re communicating because we want to drive some kind of behavior change. To your point around Lean Six Sigma initiatives, I see this a lot in safety. It’s a good model, like workplace safety and health and safety, is like what behaviors are people demonstrating today and what behaviors would they be demonstrating if they had internalized what we want them to know or what would they be doing differently. So in a safety culture, what that might look like is that 100% of people who enter the warehouse are wearing steel toe and high vis and hard hat before they cross the threshold or open the door. It could be a reduction in the number of slips and falls, even just by regular office workers in the parking lot. One of the people I learned the most from was the head of health and safety When I was at 3M, he kept a database of every workplace injury that had ever happened. He quantified everything by the type of injury, left hand, right hand, left foot, right foot, where it happened, who the employee was, and not for shaming, but then he could quickly see like slips and falls go up in the fall and it’s predominantly women wearing high heel shoes. These other kinds of accidents tend to happen. So then he, and I give him a lot of credit, then he would come to me and say, Anthea, here’s something that I know tends to happen and I want to reduce it to make people safer. And we would work on an awareness campaign and then we could literally see. Okay, was there any change in people’s behavior? One of them was like how many things you’re carrying when you walk upstairs. People were carrying their laptops, coffee, cell phones and stuff, right? And then we were seeing slips and falls. Are we seeing behavior in how much people are carrying or how many falls they’re having on stairs? Is that showing up in the data? Communication is really a tool and there’s so many platforms and channels and ways to communicate. And then I think the key is. testing, yes, that your communication made it through and people heard it and understood it, but even more so, what was the behavior that we wanted to see people demonstrate and are they demonstrating it? Engagement surveys are one thing and they can show feelings, attitudes, and knowledge. Are they behaving in a way that we need them to for the organization to be productive or for them to be safer or whatever the ultimate goal is?

Brion

When I’m working with clients and people, the basic concepts of improvement are clear, but for that example, to prove out that worked, we did all these actions. However you arrived at these lists of things you thought needed to change, you’ve made these changes. How do you know that’s working? And a lot of times it feels like the conversation is going towards, you need to go sample and check, right? You have to go and observe at different times of day and collect some data to say, how is this different than what it was before? And if you used to go out and see these kind of behaviors happening more frequently, and now they’re not happening as often, there’s some data you’re collecting to show that versus I don’t see it as much or just kind of anecdotal. And so just even having people structurally think about how am I going to measure this when we’re all done? and be able to do that. It may have to be, I have to go physically out there and watch and observe and watch people come in and actually track who’s wearing high heels. If that’s a way to show that communication or that it’s change has worked.

Anthea

Absolutely. Observation data. I’ve never met a CEO who was like, give me more vague. abstract promises, right? They’re usually like, what’s the from to or what’s the problem? Give me the number and how has it moved up or down, whichever way we wanted to go, right? Everyone will say then, oh, we don’t have time or resources to do a full scale assessment, survey, whatever. You can do it on a budget with no money. And I know you’ve got stuff even on like how big does my sample size need to be, and there’s things you can find. Usually 400 is a decent sample size for almost anything to be really credible. I’ve done a few things super on the cheap. When I was at that medical research institute, we paid in previous years to be in the supplements that go in newspapers, where it’s like profile on medical research or profile on breast cancer month or whatever. We would pay a small amount every year, a few thousand bucks to be in it, but we were like, does anyone read this? That’s only like $5,000 or something, but we work hard to raise money. Should we be spending it? We called up our board members. My boss and I, the director of communications, I was the manager at the time. How many board members did we have? Eight, 10? And said, hey, do you read the golden mail? And you know, all but maybe one of them said, yeah, I read it every day. Okay, great. Do you ever read the insert that’s in it? Sometimes I notice them, oh, did you happen to notice one? recently. Anyways, long story short, out of the sample size of 10, two people had seen that there was an insert, like one notice that our organization was in it and read about it. And these are your board members, right? And so that is like, okay, representative sample. So then we can’t make assumptions about how many people we can extrapolate and say, okay, well, you know, In theory, this was distributed to millions of people, but even just based on our own board member sample, we know that even of the ones who got it, very few read it, and then even smaller few internalize anything about our company. I’ve done that with managers or team supervisors where even if we had a dress code change, I wanted to find out like more quickly rather than waiting for an employee survey, just how are people feeling and how is it working to roll it out? I targeted six managers who I knew were influential and said, can you take a pulse with two or three people on your team of how it’s being received? So then I had this collective of people acting on my behalf. It came back to me with info. So you can get data, but in a real kind of guerrilla sense, right? Or in a scrappy way that’s still better than sitting in my office saying, hopefully it’s better.

Brion

Yeah, I think some bit of info is better than nothing. How scientific it is, we can argue and look at, but something to point us in that direction. I remember I was trying to get charging stations set up at the same site as part of our sustainability efforts. And so the question is, will people use it? Right. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go walk around the whole parking lot and write down every vehicle that’s out there and see how many of them might be moving to an electric vehicle in the next couple of years by the type of vehicle they have now. So if their vehicle has some kind of hybrid or has a green leaf or something on the back of it, it’s probably someone who might consider an EV in the next couple of years. So if I can see that there’s a high percentage of people with I’ll call them green type vehicles in the parking lot and then see how many actually are electric vehicles. Of course, that would be directly a candidate who might use this charging station. So picked a random day, but it’s a data point that gave us something to either say we need to dig deeper or this is probably not worth our time. So any little things like that can really help decide how much further to go or even disband an idea right there.

Anthea

If your whole parking lot had been filled with like F250s, like that were diesel and.

Brion

Right. And we’re not going to put them in the potential EV buyers.

Anthea

They’re probably not about to buy a Prius or a Tesla yet.

Brion

But I do think people get hung up on that a little bit. Like they don’t know the sample sizes and all that stuff. And it’s just get something, write down what you did, when you did it. and some initial data, and then let’s see what it says. Even to your point of how are people feeling, let’s find out where they’re at right now before we get started and at least gauge that a little bit. Maybe it’s not a problem or maybe it’s worse than we think, but some initial information will be a good start.

Anthea

Yeah, and there are so many data sources around that we could just tap in corporate communications. I think immediately about things like HR, they have a lot of data on employees, some of them, they are tracking on representation and people who identify as part of marginalized groups. They have data on engagement, they have data on tenure, they have data on like promotion paths, right? So even all that stuff alone, and that’s just within HR, they have data on absenteeism and workplace health and safety people. They have all their own data. Like, so there’s even for a Lean Six Sigma practitioner, there’s even some sources that you can start from initially before you even create your own. You know, I found that there’s different ways you can benchmark or compare too, right? You can research. Now we have so much access to information, like what’s an industry benchmark for organizations my size in my industry. You can do a comparison of ourselves, the same team unit division, manufacturing factory. Over time, like comparing ourselves to us two years ago, you can compare one division to another. So I did some engagement work when we were doing distribution for this fast growing private tech company. Warehouse based in Columbus, Ohio, had a bunch of workers who felt disconnected from head office. We saw immediately on engagement scores who were the least engaged employees and those stood out and it was like, okay, went there, did focus groups with them, figured out what their biggest challenges were. And so that was like a geographical, you know, this group compared to that group. So yeah, there’s a lot of data out there that we can either collect in a scrappy way or that already exists that we can just plumb. Communications is my bag.

Brion

So how did you get the 3M role and then tell us about what you were responsible for and some of the things you were working on?

Anthea

I at one point was running my own communication consulting practice and so building communication strategies for companies, often with executive teams trying to align employees to the strategy. 3M needed or asked me to help them build their crisis communication strategy. They had a fabulous communication person in place who knew exactly what to do if anything happened. That being said, you can’t count on one person always being available, right? And maybe the crisis would be that something happened to her. She and I built a crisis strategy and then her role changed. They invited me to lead the communication function. It was a portfolio of… Employee focused communication internally and executive messaging externally, managing the reputation, whether that was media coverage, local community relations, charitable giving and community partnerships. They really encompass both internal because they build employee pride and volunteerism and help to attract and recruit. the best people, and then that external where you just get the reputation of being a good, responsible citizen. So that was my portfolio, that full portfolio, and it included all of our charitable giving partners at the time. So typical to a lot of organizations, the charitable giving portfolio at the time was a collection of legacy commitments and relationships. We had more than 40, I think it was 42 different organizational partners that we had made, our company had made promises to over the years and commitments for giving donations. So typically those were all like writing checks basically from varying ranges from, you know, $1,000, $5,000 checks in some small local orgs to multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to others that were bigger partnerships. 42 relationships was actually too many to manage effectively. I had a small team. I only had one person dedicated full time to charitable given community partnerships and employee engagement. And she was just barely. administering the portfolio in terms of getting the checks cut, receiving all of their annual stewardship reports, answering questions, and fielding requests from all the millions of other people and organizations that wanted more money from us. My boss and I looked at how effective is this portfolio of charitable giving and community partnerships? What impact is it having? And not only is it resource intensive to administer, but is it having an impact for our organization and the community? I think I was just about to start my green belt in Lean Six Sigma. And because we were a manufacturing organization, so Lean Six Sigma was fundamental. And I said, I’d love to do a Lean Six Sigma project on revamping the charitable giving portfolio. So it was a really fascinating experience. What I identified was our organization was writing checks, but not really assessing whether our financial contribution combined with the charity’s activities was making measurable impact on human lives or the environment. And it tapped into the logic model, which I think was established in the seventies around nonprofits. And it’s like a linear flow from inputs and activities to outputs. and outcomes and societal impact. Inputs are anything you can add into a process, like hiring people, paying salaries, purchasing equipment, facilities, that kind of thing. Activities make up the bulk of what most of us do in our day. So it’s everything from entering data in spreadsheets to writing media releases for me to HR people and boarding new employees. results and outputs are things that you produce as part of your role. So if I produced marketing brochures or produced webinars or.

Brion

Fundraiser event.

Anthea

Fundraiser events that brought people together. But really what the organization wanted was. Do employees love working for us because of who we support and is our charitable contribution making an impact? So looked at the launch model and was like, okay, we need to move away from like, we would say things in the past like, we’ve donated X millions of dollars over the years to X nonprofit. like having given money is no indication of what changed, right? You gave money. So I said, okay, we need to move from giving money to creating impact. And then we also need to be creating impact with fewer organizations. So the impact should be aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. So I got our charitable giving committee together and said, okay, here are the UN Sustainable Development Goals that align best to our work. They agreed, and they were around education, the environment, and equality. And so, okay, we’ve got our UN sustainable development goals, great. And we’ll agree that we want to have measurable impact for both the organization and. society, the world. So I worked through a DMAIC process and forgive me because I have been out of the Lean Six Sigma space for a while. I did a DMAIC assessment and really looked at a few factors like employee awareness of and engagement in our charitable giving activities, the cost of administering the portfolio, And then the actual impact we were having on those UN sustainable development goals. And finally, the benefit to our brand of any of those partnerships. So that was, would I measure that in terms of customer awareness of our activities? And so I got the charitable giving team on board that like, yes, we need to simplify because we had legacy commitments that past presidents had agreed to. They’re like, sure, we’ll donate to this hospital. At the time, any of them feels fine, but how is it moving anything forward in a meaningful way? So they said that makes sense. And so I worked on my Lean Six Sigma project and what really came down, it was fewer partners, more impact. And then the critical factor was, well, how do you identify the right partners in an objective way that’s not just Anthea making decisions or even Anthea with her charitable giving committee, even if a group of people all agree, we should still have had some objective standards that we were using to make those decisions, right? Because cutting off funding to any organizations, you don’t want to make that decision lightly. And so I built out a Pugh Matrix in consultation with my brand manager and the head of our chair of the Giving Committee. I proposed four criteria on which we would evaluate our existing 42 charitable partners, and they were brand. So did it align with our organizations? So what the nonprofit was doing, was it aligned to our promise of science improving lives and brand alignment? The second criteria was employee engagement. Did the charitable organization offer opportunities for our employees to be actively involved? not just hear about it and care and think it was great, but actively do something. Because we knew from past employee survey research that people want to actually be involved. Some, not all, some are like, I’ve got kids at home and I’m busy, like, don’t ask me to volunteer. And then others are like, I really want to roll up my sleeves and do something. So, okay, employee engagement was the second criteria. The third criterion was potential for impact against one of those SDG goals. And so does the organization aligned to one of the UN SDGs that we care about? And are they measuring their impact? Not just vaguely saying it. And then the fourth, ease of partnership. Did they have infrastructure in place? Like, were they likely going to be relatively easy to work with, either because of the positive relationship and commitment of the senior leaders in their org, or they had the right governance in place, right? Because you could have a really well-meaning org that had a great vision, but if you were like, oh man, they don’t have infrastructure, they don’t know how to report, that’s going to be a nightmare. It could be perfect alignment in the other three criteria, but if the… ease of partnership wasn’t there. Like if the partnership was going to be super difficult, no way. So I built a Pugh matrix, weighted each of those four criteria, and then took the 42 current partners and spent the time evaluating each. I built out for each what would get them a nine, what would get them a three, what would get them a one or a zero in each category. And then I did the assessment myself, came up with my results, and then I had two members of my team do it, and then two members of the chair of the giving committee did it. With that objective matrix, we all came up with the same answers of these are the organizations that best align with us and make the most sense of having the most impact. And then these are the ones that unfortunately, we love them and they’re doing important work, but it’s just not right for our organization to. partner with them because it’s not achieving the best goals. That was fascinating because it can seem like a subjective exercise and it had been in the past with presidents sitting down at dinner with somebody, the head of a nonprofit and being like, oh, what you’re doing sounds really important. Yeah, we’ll give you some money. So we’ve moved from that model to a more rigorous, one that lots of other people could actually say, yes, these organizations made sense.

Brion

The ability to do a matrix like that of ranking important things against that criteria. I did that with Green Grants program where nonprofits would submit to our organization and then we decide how to allocate out and who got the money and they would request certain levels of money and why they wanted that. It was very subjective. I was like, We got to have something more objective. I proposed this matrix and said, let’s each go off and score this or score it as a team. We got to be able to go back and say why that organization didn’t get the award and why the ones did. Otherwise, it’s going to be very hard to justify. It creates a lot more questions and a lot more favoritism and things like that. You just don’t want to have to deal with. So very good tool.

Anthea

Yeah, love a good Q matrix. So what I did find, though, in my black belt, I give her a lot of credit. She said to me, now, Anthea, what are the chances that an executive’s going to come along in the next two years even and just say, oh, well, you know, so-and-so at the local theater said that they really need funding for X, so we should really support them and then start to do creep, right? That scope creep of we’ve got everything clear and narrow and serving business needs and societal needs and then getting, what she recommended was having people sign a commitment, like a pledge saying, I commit to respecting these, because I built guidelines around governance for our entire charitable giving process. And so they said, I commit to observing this and respecting what the group has chosen. And if we do want to make changes, we will do it through the governance of the charitable giving committee rather than ad hoc unilateral decisions. So I thought that was fascinating, right? It’s like you can do the best Lean Six Sigma project and then what might blow it all up is just a rogue exec deciding to do something differently. Some of your listeners are in the tech space. I know there’s examples of 1 exec who’s like, well, I’ve got Slack for my team and everyone else is using a different platform. I just laugh that we do all this rigorous work, data, benchmarks, measurement, and then ultimately it’s humans at the end of the day that are probably going to blow it up. So we have to try to put guardrails around the humans. Yes. Yeah.

Brion

And part of that, communicating up to leadership, like this is what we came up with and getting their buy-in on the criteria. So when these things come up, they can say, we have this process that will introduce your team to and your organization to, and we’ll see how it goes, but not saying, oh yeah, I’m in charge, I’ll make it happen, or over committing to something where now that’s hard for them to go back or even take the pressure of feeling like I got to say yes to this organization that needs it. So I think it almost would help them out too, to say we have a structure and We’ll get you started on that process and see how it goes.

Anthea

Yeah, and exactly to your point about feeling inquiries and requests for funding is, it makes it so much easier too when you say we have these very strict guidelines around who we partner with and why. And then it’s not a ad hoc decision. It’s not someone like Anthea saying, sure, or no, or whatever, right? So it’s defensible and it makes it easy to say no in the future. We also looked at making longer-term commitments. You can’t do that kind of in-depth review every year. At most, three to five in the charitable giving space or the community partnership space is like find those relationships. We landed on three national partnerships and then five that were more localized to where we had manufacturing and sales and marketing. locations across Canada. You want to be able to build those relationships over time. You want them to know they have secure funding, right? So it was also committing deeper with fewer. I wonder if that might be relevant even in other Lean Six Sigma projects not in the charitable giving space.

Brion

Know, that’s the prioritization. Yeah. And saying we can’t do it all. And what can we do effectively? Being able to take something that’s kind of abstract, like corporate giving and try to make it more objective. I think that’s a great example.

Anthea

Yeah. And you know, when you say even making it more objective, because they had been reporting numbers before I arrived around dollars donated and lives impacted. But the lives impacted, what does that mean? Right? And it was just The organization, so there was a teaching organization that awarded teaching fellowships. They would say, well, here’s the number of awards they’ve given with our money or, United Way, here’s the number of people we served. And so we were just kind of like roll these all up as if they were all somehow equal to each other and meaningful. Even that, like the impact I said, well, what does Lives Impacted look like for the teaching organization? We evolved it so that it was X number of diverse professors in the this higher education space, we’re getting funding and research communication support as a result of our investment. I know that’s not as like catchy, but it was the specific number of people who their lives are somehow better or more meaningfully. We used to do a kickoff for United Way. season where employees from across the city would come and have lunch together. And it was a fun kickoff. However, during COVID, we had to pivot. All these people who have corporate jobs are going and having lunch together, but there were literally people going hungry in our city. So what if our company’s support helped feed people who are under housed or in need of a meal, right? We can say that we helped feed. X number of hundreds of people in the community on the day rather than, well, we brought a bunch of people together who already have their own jobs and probably left their lunch at home. And you know what I mean? Like, so starting to just even question some of the things that we did and make it more meaningful. So instead of having lives impacted, saying X number of people won’t go hungry, at least for the next day, thanks to employees, you know, from across the city. Yeah, it’s being that obnoxious person who sometimes says, but why? We’re like, why does it matter?

Brion

What do you mean by that statement? Having those, we call it operational definitions. What does that mean exactly? And if we don’t understand that, then we’re not going to be able to truly see if we’re making an impact. If it’s vague, like you said, on the lives impacted, it’s going to be hard to show whether that’s working and where we’re having impact and where we’re not. So that’s an important element and it is tough to get through that part of it, but it’s critical.

Anthea

That’s a good point. It is very tough and it was scary, I’ll admit, because it’s so much easier and tempting to just say, roll up the numbers at the end of the year and say, we donated this much money. I was in a multinational corporation. That’s all they were asking for at the time. But what I found was when I was more specific about the actual impact, like how someone’s life was better, fewer people were going hungry, your students were getting access to STEM education who wouldn’t have had it before. also turns into better media stories, right? So rather than some vague abstract number, like lives impacted, we could say, hey, a thousand students are going to get laptops who wouldn’t have had them otherwise in order to do this sustainable programming. So the harder stuff always ends up having better value, right? But it’s hard to sell to ourselves and to the people sometimes.

Brion

Why don’t we wrap up with, tell us what you’re doing now and how you’ve kind of shifted and what you’re doing at Exemplify and how people can connect with you.

Anthea

So now I am teaching communication skills that make middle managers promotable to director level roles. I discovered that was a gap in all my communication. roles over the years. I would spend time working with the CEO or the president making like the most perfect messaging, right? Best deck, town hall and newsletter. Then, you know, you publish it or he or she delivers their remarks. And I would be walking around afterwards and I would have managers come up to me and say, Hey, Anthea, that was great. Can you give me something I can use with my team? And I’d say, yeah, I’ll give you the slides. And they say, no, no, how do I make it? Like, what does my team need to know? And I was like, I can’t tell you that. You need to take what you heard the CEO say and translate it into what you and your team need to be doing differently, like what decisions you need to be making, what you need to do more of, less of. You have to interpret that and then communicate it to your team. And I realized that’s a skill not everyone has or develops naturally because we all start out as subject matter experts, right? In my case, I was writing media releases, pitching news stories and hosting media conferences. It took me a while and I made a lot of mistakes figuring out how to translate those subject matter skills into making decisions that will drive the business forward and align to the goals the company’s trying to achieve. And so I realized there’s a real need there and a lot of frustration on the part of executives who say like, oh my gosh, I want our employees getting faster results like with less oversight when we have to change our strategy so frequently now because The world’s changing AI disruption, right? You have to change corporate strategies quickly, but then you need all the employees like quickly know how to make decisions and spend their time better. At the same time, I saw pain and suffering in people’s careers where people who were hardworking and cared about doing a good job felt like they were being overlooked and undervalued. I think they’re two sides of the same coin. So my work, I help people who I say they’re humble leaders. They’re typically people who like to do good and interesting work, and they care about the company. They really dislike self-promotion, and they strongly dislike power dynamics and politicking. Unfortunately, that’s how things get done in the workplace. Executives can’t reward you if they don’t know what you’re doing. I bridge that gap between execs who want more employees aligned to the strategy and middle managers who want more decision making authority and responsibility. So yeah, if people want to connect with me, I’d love to chat and connect anytime. My website is exemplify.com. It’s exemplify minus the second E. So EXMPLIFY.com. But probably easier is finding me on LinkedIn. I think I’m the only Anthea Rowe on LinkedIn.

Brion

Okay.

Anthea

Happy to connect there.

Brion

A-N-T-H-E-A.

Anthea

Yeah. A N T H E A Row, R O W E.

Brion

Well, thank you so much for coming on. It was really fascinating to hear and learn and get to know you and appreciate it. I think it’s a really interesting program and hopefully other companies who have some corporate giving program might take a look at how they’re doing that and come up with more structure or data-driven ways of evaluating that program. Yeah.

Anthea

Yeah, it can be great for the nonprofit partners, the community partners. It can help inject some really sophisticated productivity and efficiency practices that we get from Lean Six Signa into their organizations. And then, of course, the more deeply that for-profit companies work with charitable organizations, the greater impact. those charities can have. So yeah, I really believe it’s a force for good. I haven’t really done it yet, but I think there’s a big opportunity for Lean Six Sigma to help improve that communications gap and misalignment of employees to strategy. So anyone who is interested in that space, definitely reach out.

Brion

I think the other thing that got me excited was connecting the nonprofits to the engagement and the employees, because that’s where I see an opportunity taking people with process improvement backgrounds, getting them engaged in those organizations where they can bring that skill set to those groups and say, the way you’re doing this feeding of the homeless, like there’s a better way we can distribute this food out. You could bring these skills to that organization, teach them so they could be more effective at what they’re doing. If they’re not aware of the organization or they’re not connected in very well, you lose that engagement and the opportunity to share that skill set. So I think there’s opportunities.

Anthea

Yes, exactly. And I know we could talk about this forever. You’re so right. And I mean, that’s a real big step in maturity of organizations and their charitable giving is not just writing checks, but donating skills in kind. And I know SAP, for example, I did some work with them years ago on their Canadian sustainability work. And they, for example, would donate software to, say, a youth shelter and allocate people to install the software. And then they would also work with a youth shelter on, okay, well, who do you serve? What are you tracking? What do you need to report? Do you even know what services everyone needs or is using? After the install of the software, they would build out tracking. Now the Youth Shelter knows not just how many, but like what times of day, what services they’re using, what questions they ask the most often. And then they can actually report back to their funders. That Youth Shelter can say, here’s our biggest area of need, or here’s where we’ve offered the most value or helped the most people, right? And that was huge rather than SAB could have just written a check or they could have just given software, but they offered the skills. So yeah, you’re right, there’s so much potential and Lean Six Sigma folks can create huge value like anywhere they go inside a for-profit organization in the way that company partners with community and employees or in not-for-profits, helping those not-for-profits operate more efficiently and effectively. It’s so cool. Tons of possibilities.

Brion

And I think the challenge of going to a nonprofit and trying to figure out how to help them is also really good learning for people too, that they can bring back like, oh, we don’t have this infrastructure. I got to start from scratch. How do I do that with this group? And how do I teach them some basic knowledge? So I Yeah, I just try to challenge people that there’s a great opportunity there if you open up your eyes to the possibilities and just try and reach out and get more engaged. So it’s a good development of their skills too.

Anthea

Lean Six Sigma for Good. I love it.

Brion

Thank you so much for being on. Great to talk to you.

Anthea

Yeah, thank you too. Hope to chat with you again.

Brion

Thank you so much.

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