Raising up nonprofits

 Members of Ledyard National Wall lend a hand to Willing Hands, a nonprofit defended to feeding those in need.

For its 30th anniversary, Ledyard National Wall decided to ask 10 local nonprofits to enter a video well-nigh their work into a races for the opportunity to win $10,000 and expand their visibility.

By Tiffany Lukk

When Ledyard National Wall in Hanover, N.H., was founded 31 years ago, it was during a time where many polity banks were stuff purchased by larger banks. Decisions were stuff made by out-of-state folks, leaving the local polity without support for or focus on lending, jobs and more. In response to that, a group of people came together to found Ledyard National Bank.

“The understructure of their vision was that we would be single-minded to the polity and continually—as long as we were around—give when to the polity as in many ways as we could,” says Kathy Underwood, CEO of the $750 million-asset polity bank. “It was the vision of our founders, and it remains a cadre of our values and our culture today.”

Over the past three decades, Ledyard has given when in many ways, including contests, giving employees paid time off to volunteer and donating to numerous local charities.

In honor of the polity bank’s 30th year-end last year, it created a races for 10 local nonprofits. The participating organizations each made a short video based on the prompt, ‘What does polity midpoint to you?’ Shared on Ledyard’s Facebook page, the videos served to highlight the work the nonprofits do and their significance to the community.

Community members could vote for their favorite video by reacting to it from Oct. 1–22.

“It gave them the opportunity to … use our power and our social media to get their message out there and let them tell their story of what they were doing in the polity and why they were important,” Underwood says.

To remoter uplift the nonprofits’ visibility, Ledyard National Wall promoted the videos in its branches, put ads in local newspapers and paid for spots for representatives of those organizations to be interviewed on the radio.

By the end of the contest, increasingly than 2,300 votes were tint and the wall had awarded $30,000 wideness the 10 nonprofits, with $10,000 going to the first-place winner.

According to Underwood, people who saw the videos showed their support in increasingly ways than just voting. She says, “[The nonprofits] were surprised at how many people in the polity responded with not just voting but writing a check.”

A history of support

This wasn’t the first video races that Ledyard National Wall has hosted. In the past, it’s used this tactic to support nonprofits that cater to low- and mid-income segments, for example. And while deciding which nonprofits to invite to participate in this video contest, wall leaders assessed which sectors would goody most.

“The thing well-nigh the 10 organizations is that each one of them is defended to supporting the low- to mid-income segments of our population,” says Jeff Marks, Ledyard’s senior vice president and senior marketing officer. “For this particular contest, we really wanted to focus on those organizations that were supporting people in the polity who needed it the most from an economic standpoint.”

Participants included Dismas of Vermont, an organization defended to integrating formerly incarcerated people into society; Upper Valley Haven, which provides temporary shelter and educational programming to homeless families; and West Central Behavioral Health, which offers wide counseling and treatment to the community.

The money will be spent at each of the organizations’ discretion. West Central Behavioral Health, for example, provides many of its services for free. Every year, it provides well-nigh $600,000 worth of charitable superintendency that cannot be reimbursed.

“We offer mental health and substance use and slipperiness support services to people regardless of what they’re worldly-wise to pay,” says Dave Celone, West Central’s director of minutiae and polity relations. “The monies that we receive from Ledyard … will go to help people who can’t otherwise pay for mental health or substance use or slipperiness support services.”

Looking to the next anniversary

Celone says the races reflects the bank’s transferral to service within the community. “They just love the community, and they want to support nonprofits however they can and that feeling really comes through,” he says. “We love to work with them.”

“I would suspect that for our 35th anniversary,” says Marks, “we’re going to have a lot of spanking-new conversations, and we could do something very similar, or we might do something entirely new. We know that we are single-minded to doing these types of things for the community.”

Tiffany Lukk is socialize editor of Independent Banker.