The Community Chest of Hong Kong is a corporation established under ordinance in 1968. It is an independent, non-profit making organization neither funded nor operated by the Government. The Community Chest is governed by a Board of business and community leaders who contribute their time voluntarily.
Under the Board, there are the Executive, Campaign, Public Relations and Admissions, Budgets & Allocations Committees whose work is supported by over 300 volunteers serving in various sub-committees. Daily administration and implementation of all fund-raising activities of the Chest are undertaken by a team of some 40 staff members, headed by the Chief Executive.
The administrative cost of The Community Chest is subsidized by a generous annual grant from The Hong Kong Jockey Club and returns from our prudent investment. Therefore, the Chest is very proud to be one of the few fund-raising bodies in the world who assure our donors 100% allocation of funds gathered to our beneficiaries without any deduction for administrative expenses.
The Chest has developed a highly flexible and transparent allocation system. Funds collected are directed in the most effective and efficient manner to areas of most need and to services which are not subsidized by the Government. Every year, over 2.1 million needy benefit from your generosity.
Walks for Millions, Community for the Chest TV Show, Corporate and Employee Contribution Programme are the routine fund-raising events that contributed significantly to the Hong Kong Community Chest. In each new financial year, we aim to raise more money for the less fortunate members of our society. In an era of internet, it is worth exploring the potential of online donation. In 2013, we selected Splendor Group as a partner to promote our existing online donation, by building a virtual.com platform, www.virtualspcc.com
Splendor Group is a listed corporate in Mainland China and HK. It was established in 1996 and has more than 3,000 employees. They have chain supermarket & chain hotel with 5 Stars in Mainland China and HK, and a travel agency in Mainland China. Their supermarket is called “Sunny Market” and there are 2 stores in Shatin & Tsuen Wan in Hong Kong market.
Virtual organizing: 3 vectors & 3 stages
Vectors and characteristics
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Stage 1
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Stage 2
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Stage 3
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Customer interaction
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Work-unit expertise
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Process interdependence
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Sustained innovation and growth (MVA)
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Vectors and characteristics: Customer interaction
It is defined as dealing with the new challenges and opportunities for company-to-customer interactions. In our project, it is a fresh idea to link the Splendor Group with the Community Chest (Charitable organization). Through www.virtualspcc.com, all people can easily experience the service of Splendor Group and give donation to Community Chest.
Stage 1: Work-unit expertise
Although www.virtualspcc.com looks like a website only, the set up and maintenance are indeed complicated. Expertises from different teams have to involve achieving the consistent performance improvement. For instance, the Splendor Group has to provide technical support knowledge to the Community Chest for database linkage to their online shopping platform.
Stage 2: Process Interdependence
There are many processes in www.virtualspcc.com project. Both the organizations have its own accountability on each process. It is to facilitate the management based on strengths of each organization.
Stage 3: Sustained innovation and growth (MVA)
As the website for online donation will become popular after the success of www.virtualspcc.com, more charitable organizations will use copycat approach. Thus, consistent innovation is important to stand out the values. For both organizations, it would be better to regularly review the process, adding new elements to the website. For instance, expanding the channels of using Charity Dollar, to keep the growth.
The Hong Kong Community Chest welcome Splendor Group as one of our company partners in the donation programs and we are very much appreciated their innovation effort in working together for something creative. There are 3 representatives from Splendor Group, Jake, Monkey and Ricky who are based in China. We mainly used Skype and email as our major communication channel with whatsapp as instant update for the project progress.
Chris Stevens defines creativity as the ability to generate and use insight. Initially, we set up Skype for a brainstorming meeting. There are some basic rules of brainstorming:
- No criticism whatsoever
- Free-wheeling is welcome. The whackier the idea, the better
- The more ideas, the better
- Building on others’ ideas is encouraged
However, it was not a productive experience even we shared the basic rules before our meeting. We analyzed that it was due to 3 major reasons:
1. “Blocking”
This is the number one deficiency in brainstorming: only one person can speak at a time. At the brainstorming meetings, representatives from Splendor Group elaborated their ideas in very details. In most of the time, we cannot share our ideas because we have to wait for them to describe theirs, and we ended up in making comment or editing their ideas. This was a problem because our short-term memory cannot effectively develop new ideas while keeping old ones in active storage. Even when we got a chance to describe an idea, we only able to contribute one or two comments and Splendor Group representatives just quickly broke in and comment. This may be cultural difference but in fact making comments to ideas was a very natural response in our collaboration, which hindered the level of creativity.
2. Evaluation Apprehension
We observed that one of the representatives, Jake, was not very engaged in the latter part of the brainstorming meeting. He just followed the direction of his 2 other colleagues. This may relates to the fact that group member(s) avoid expressing what they consider to be wild ideas based on how the other members judged them. It may due to the fact that we commented Jake’s idea in a very directive approach.
3. Personality Face Off
Our Brainstorming sessions ended up with clashing human personalities. The other 2 representatives are overpowering people trying to dominate the session. And sometimes, we may be a bit stubborn in getting overprotective about our ideas and not accepting others’.
Thus, the first 1 hour meeting was indeed very non-productive. We decided to apply Reflective Practices to promote our collaboration experience with Splendor Group. At our reflective meeting, we identified the root causes of ineffective brainstorming were due to criticism and lack of active listening behaviour.
We were aware the difference of values and beliefs between Hog Kong and Mainland China.
Ideally, we needed to respect other people’s model of the world. But in reality, it was not easy to handle the mindset issue.
As the outcome of our brainstorming meeting was not positive, we used chunking up questioning technique to align with Splendor Group our mission is to working out a creative way for online donation and both companies benefit from this project. We had negative feeling at the first meeting. By asking questions like, “Why are we here?” and sharing the dissociation technique to let go of our negative emotions, we then used reflective practice to change and improve what was not working well and challenged practices that were taken for granted. We were able to demonstrate Reflection on action to learn new ways of working and Brainwriting was the agreed format for our second skype meeting.
Brainwriting is a technique that can easily lead to more than double the ideas generated in a typical brainstorming session.
In Brainwriting each participant thinks and records ideas individually, without any verbal interaction at the early beginning. This tiny change results in a huge difference in the idea generation effectiveness.
We called for a second skype meeting and before that, we sent out several interesting pictures to stimulate our thinking.
Chris played the role of moderator and took the following steps in enhancing creativity through the brainwriting activity.
1. First of all, Jake, Ricky, Monkey, Joe and Chris got a sheet of paper with the same objective written at the top, “How to generate new insight for online donation?”
2. Joe and Chris had 3 minutes to write down 3 ideas on the sheet of paper.
3. When time is up. Each of us passed the sheet of paper to another person on our left. As Joe and Chris were in the same room and Splendor Group representatives were in another location. We worked in pairs while Jake, Ricky and Monkey worked in group.
4. Each participant read the ideas that were previously written and a new three-minute round started. Each participant must again come up with three new ideas. Participants were free to use the ideas already on the sheet as triggers — or to ignore them altogether.
5. We repeated for 3 rounds in total and the group agreed to stop because we already felt exhausted.
6. The ideas were shared, discussed and consolidated under Chris’s facilitation.
As ideas were generated simultaneously, we did not have a chance to block each other. We still got to build on each other’s ideas. The beauty was that ideas were recorded the moment we got them: no ideas were lost while you waited for a chance to speak. Everybody had an equal opportunity to share, regardless of individual character.
Under this brainwriting task, all of us were very engaged including Jake. There was no fear of being openly judged by others. Everyone was given a clear task: to write down 3 ideas each round within 3 minutes. The quota added an element of healthy pressure that can help unlock your creativity! Finally, we confirmed 2 creative ideas for our virtual project:
Earn Charity Dollars by
“Click to Donate”
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Video for Charity –
Video taking competition
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Earn Charity Dollars by “Click to Donate”
There will be floating banners or eye catching icon on websites of both Hong Kong Community Chest and the Splendor Group. By clicking the banner or icon, internet users will be diverted to www.virtualspcc.com
Online donor is requested to fill in very basic personal information, firstly, for tax exemption purpose; and secondly, to create an online donation user account to earn Charity Dollar.
For every RMB/HK$100 donation, donor can earn 10 charity dollars, up to 500 charity dollars for donation equal to or more than RMB/HK$5,000, as shown in below table. ONE Charity Dollars is equal to ONE RMB/HK dollar. The charity dollars earned can be used to buy goods from Sunny Market on-line shop with free delivery service.
Donation to Community Chest
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Charity Dollars Earned
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RMB/HK$100
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10
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RMB/HK$200
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20
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RMB/HK$300
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30
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RMB/HK$400
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40
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RMB/HK$500
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50
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RMB/HK$600
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60
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RMB/HK$700
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70
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RMB/HK$800
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80
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RMB/HK$900
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90
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RMB/HK$1,000
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100
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RMB/HK$≥5,000
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500
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Video for Charity – Video taking competition
In recent years, the use of Internet media becomes popular. To illustrate, you may awake nearly all of the people are using smart phone with Internet function. In commercial world, a lot of merchants will post advertisement through Internet, mobile apps etc to broaden the target customer size. There is a great room to increase the awareness of online donation. We would organize a video taking competition named “Video for Charity” to achieve the result.
Obviously, the target audiences for donation are people who have online habit.
For the creative idea in this competition, the participants can take a short video about encouraging other people to donate and upload the video to www.virtualspcc.com. All network users can donate money and vote for the winner and get the Charity Dollars. Moreover, www.virtualspcc.com can serve as a platform for either video competition's participants or network users to check their Charity Dollar status. It enables them to check the validity to redeem their favorable products. Furthermore, the web www.virtualspcc.com provides a hyperlink to both the Community Chest and Splendor Group. As mentioned before, some floating banners or eye-catching icon will be shown on websites of both Hong Kong Community Chest and the Splendor Group. By clicking the banner or icon, all Internet users will be diverted to www.virtualspcc.com
The rules and regulations of the competition
- Participant will take a short video no longer than 2 minutes using different tools
- All the videos should be only uploaded to virtualspcc.com/videocompetition2013/uploadnow. No change is allowed after submission
- The video for charity submitted must be the participants original video without infringing on any copyrights or any other rights of any third parties
- Participants will reserve all ownerships rights to video submitted
- Winners are chosen by all online donors
- All entries will be judged equally based on four areas
1/ Impactful messages to promote online donation
2/ Originality of content
3/ Production and post-production
4/ Image and sound quality effect
- Participants for all ages are welcome. While those under 18 years old, signature of guardian or parents is necessary
- The Community Chest and the Splendor Group reserves the right for final judgment
For this virtual project, there are several benefits for Splendor Group and Hong Kong Community Chest:
Benefits for Splendor Group
1) First of all, the brand awareness of Splendor Group. It is a big corporate in Mainland China but not many HK people are aware their presence.
2) The Charity Dollars earned by Donors can use to buy goods from online shopping of Sunny Market. In fact, these goods can be regarded as donation from Splendor Group to online donors to the Hong Kong Community Chest. Through this support, the Corporate Social Responsibility image is raised. For the video taking competition, the Splendor Group can take advantage to expand the market into Hong Kong. The launch of the campaign can provide the advertising effect. The public can access the information of the Splendor Group easily through www.virtualspcc.com.
3) Online shopping is a growing trend in Hong Kong Supermarkets like Park n Shop and Wellcome. By using the Charity Dollars, the online shopping behaviour can be built for those donors.
Benefits for the Hong Kong Community Chest
1) First of all, we have set the objective to achieve the donation amounts with HKD3millions from the online platform. The campaign duration will last for about 7 months, i.e., from Jun 2013 to Dec 2013.
2) Secondly, as the figure from online donation is extremely low, about 2% compared with other channels. There is a big room for improvement on online donation. With the first experience of using online donation, it is believed that the donors will continue to use the same way for donation in the future. The situation is like the success of most bank encouraging the clients to use online banking.
3) Thirdly, the launch of the campaign can provide the advertising effect. The public can access the information of the Community Chest easily through www.virtualspcc.com. Besides, it ensures more funding through online channel for fund raising. The channel will not be bound to traditional donation methods, e.g., pay the cash to the Charity at bank. It provides an easy and time saving way for the donors by just using online donation.
Win-Win Negotiation
It is the first time our organization (The Community Chest) to organize the virtual project, namely www.virtualspcc.com with the Splendor Group of the morning class. Many items have to be discussed and decision must be made at each stage. Sometimes, it seems that we have to fight our corner aggressively for winning the resources we require. Even, both organizations need to struggle to obtain what each wants from the people who can help us. It would be even better if we had a chance to brush up our win-win negotiation techniques.
Both the Community Chest and the Splendor Group have to protect their own interest and benefits. Thus, conflicts are inevitable and effective negotiation should apply to resolve the situations the project result. The purpose applying win-win negotiation is to reach a solution that is acceptable to both organizations, and leaves both parties feeling we both win after the project. It implies that both of us feel more satisfied than they were at earlier stage.
In organizing the project, we encountered two major conflicts. The first one is the accountability issue for managing the www.virtualspcc.com. The second one is the prize distribution issue for winner in the video taking competition.
At the regular meeting, we set the objectives of the negotiation as below.
• Define the elements of the "win-win" approach to negotiation.
• Understand the alternatives to use anchor points to our advantages.
• Investigate the characteristics of win-win negotiators.
• Create some options to maximize all opportunities to achieve a win-win outcome.
Firstly, there are three styles of negotiation
-Hard negotiation (Compete)
-Soft negotiation (Accommodate, compromise)
-Interest-based negotiation (Collaborate)
At initial stage, we used the hard negotiation (Compete) approach. As we did not want the project going into the wrong track but achieve the pre-set goal, we insist our standpoint and seldom make concession. Certain pressure has been applied into the morning team. From Fig. 1, the situation is best described as the top left corner (Competition - my way). We were at high assertiveness level but applied low concern on relationship. Not much cooperation and compromise will be resulted. To give example, our Community Chest does not agree to fully take responsibility for the www.virtualspcc.com, even though all donations will be credited to our organization.
At later stage, we used the interest based negotiation (collaborate) approach. After several discussions with Chris, we conclude that each team has responsibility to protect the own interest and thus appropriate collaborations should apply for long-term relationship building. In Fig. 1, it is best described as the top right corner (Collaboration - our way). We tried to seek to integrate the interests of both companies. There are high concerns for both relationships and goals. To give examples, both teams have aligned to support the www.virtualspcc.com together. The Community Chest was responsible for the design and maintenance while Splendor Group supported the website from the financial perspective.
Figure. 1
Conflict Resolution
In our project, it is inevitable to face different conflicts while the major are task conflict and process conflict. In the following paragraphs, the details will be thoroughly discussed.
The task conflict implies the unclear content and goal of the work. To illustrate, the project purpose is that each team should represent a company from a different industry to creatively combine resources through building a VirtualXXX.com. The morning team and our team have chosen the Splendor Group and the Community Chest respectively. However, the latter did throw the idea of creating an “Exhibition” about caring children with AIDS. Obviously no connection of using VirtualXXX.com is found for both companies.
It is believed that the morning team has overlooked the goal of using two separate companies. It is not simply to create a physical event as an exhibition, but to practically use VirtualXXX.com to bring benefit to both companies in virtual expansion. To avoid deviation from the goal, we tried to highlight in the email after discussion with Chris.
The second conflict is the process conflict. In one of the skype meetings, inefficiency was observed to get the work done between two teams. Our team has proposed the creative event “Video for charity” for comment from morning team. However, there is no appropriate comment or suggestion. During our discussion through Skype in later stage, they ask for the detail of the event, e.g., how does it operate, the tangible returns to both organizations, etc. As the answer is already here, time is wasted on unnecessary areas.
The situation has been improved after our reflective meetings
Firstly, we are willing to forgive. We are aware that it is impossible to resolve conflict if no one is willing to forgive. Solving lies in releasing the urge to punish that can never compensate for losses and only adds to injury through further depletion.
Moreover, through different discussions by Skype with the morning team, we listen patiently on both needs and emotions. More concerns are put on each other and it is easily to discuss in a harmony environment.
To conclude, this virtual collaboration is full of challenges but both teams were able to make good use of knowledge that we learnt from the class to solve the problems. We look forward to the success of the two campaigns through the www.virtualspcc.com platform.
1. The Hidden Challenge of Cross-Border Negotiations, James K. Sebenius, Harvard Business Review Mar 2002
2. Organizing for Innovation: When Is Virtual Virtuous?, Henry W. Chesbrough and David J. Teece, The Innovative Enterprise Aug 2002
3. Building Innovation Factory, Andrew Hargadon and Robert I. Sutton, Harvard Business Review May-June 2000
4. Real Strategies for Virtual Organizing / N.Venkatraman. John C. Henderson
5. Leadership, Peter G. Northouse, SAGE
6. Management / Stephen P.Robbins, Mary Coulter. - 7th ed. p. cm.
7. http://litemind.com/brainwriting/
8. http://www.commchest.org/en/home/
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