Giving for the greater good

True charity is the desire to be useful to others without thought of recompense.

  - Emanuel Swedenborg

I love my company! Last November, we instituted  a meeting points donation plan through our Dell YouthConnect program. We do not use meeting planning points from our events for personal gain, but instead capture them throughout the year and donate them to charities through the Dell YouthConnect network. 

Just for fun, I checked our account balance. Without much effort, and just with a few folks remembering to put our points number on contracts, here's our current point amount:
41,000 points on Starwood
56,000 points on Marriott
7,000 points on Hyatt
Unsure on Hilton, as all points go directly to the Boys & Girls Club of America

Our next step is to ensure that all of our suppliers are aware of our program so they can begin sharing the account numbers as they book events. How awesome will it be to say that our events gave more than a month's worth of hotel stays to organizations with recipients in need.

If your company is interested in setting up a charitable points program, I'm happy to share our best practices. Just comment here or tweet me @lizlathan.

Hotel Point Donation

True charity is the desire to be useful to others without thought of recompense.

  - Emmanuel Swedenborg
 
I am super excited to announce on behalf of my team the Dell Events Hotel Point Donation Program.

We realized last year that we had no official program or governance for Hotel Planner Points, so our official rule was to decline them. Then we had the idea to actually accept them, but develop guidelines around who we should donate them to!

So the official rule now is this:

Option 1: If we can get any discount to the master with the points.
Option 2: If the hotel has a charity of choice (For example: Marriott has Children's Miracle Network), then points should go there.
Option 3: If the hotel does not, the point should go to Dell's selected charity of choice, like Boys & Girls Club of America or Wounded Warriors.

We're so excited to launch this program and hope that others will follow suit!