February 2, 2016 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Professional sports teams do a lot of charitable work in the public eye, raising awareness for causes and giving people a chance to meet their athletic heroes.
Until recently, the Philadelphia Eagles football team shared this “traditional strategic community relations approach” to its philanthropic work, says Julie Hirshey, community relations director, by giving away money and products “to be as helpful as we could with assets that we had.” And on Mondays, the football players often made appearances at charitable events.
That’s a common tack for teams to take, says Lisa Delpy Neirotti, associate professor of sport management at George Washington University.
But in 2013 a management shift at the Eagles provided the team with the opportunity to reevaluate its assets and decide how best to share them with nonprofits and the broader community.
Realizing that “partnership and teamwork are core to what we do,” Ms. Hirshey says, team leaders decided to create better partnerships with nonprofits. Rather than simply give money and player time, the Eagles would help strengthen charities by sharing employees’ skills and expertise.
The team created a program it calls Eagles Care. Each year it selects five nonprofits and works with them to increase their capacity to fulfill their mission. Between 30 and 40 nonprofits have applied each year, and although all are considered, the team tends to gravitate toward those that focus on youth health and education, the environment, or cancer.
The nonprofits, which tend to have small staffs but seem poised to grow, conduct needs assessments to determine what kind of assistance would most benefit them, and the team figures out how to meet those needs.
“There’s literally nothing off the table,” Ms. Hirshey says.
For example, the Center for Grieving Children wanted to make more use of its large, one-room facility. So Eagles staff members built a wall to divide the room in two — allowing the nonprofit to work with two groups of kids at the same time. Football players who had lost mothers at early ages visited the facility a few weeks later to paint the wall, with help from the charity’s young clients.
The team also hosts monthly lunch workshops for representatives from the charities to come together and learn new skills from relevant Eagles staff members or outside experts like Wharton business professors. Topics have included social-media outreach, marketing, pitching stories to the media, creating videos, leadership training, and working with sports teams. Using front-office staff instead of football players to help nonprofits is innovative, Ms. Neirotti says.
The employee training offered during the lunchtime workshops was especially useful for the Center for Grieving Children because the nonprofit’s staff members are relatively new, says Darcy Walker Krause, its executive director. Sean E. Vereen, president of Steppingstone Scholars, an education nonprofit and current Eagles Care partner, agrees: “The professional development has been amazing.”
Additionally, the team gives participating nonprofits $10,000 and tries to match that amount with grants from the NFL Foundation. It also hosts an annual summit during which many local nonprofits share their best practices.
The ultimate goal of Eagles Care is to create an alumni network of strong nonprofits that can learn from the team and from each other. There are signs that’s already happening. After meeting through the program, leaders of the Center for Grieving Children met with leaders at Habitat for Humanity to learn about starting a young professionals board, Ms. Walker Krause says. During the first year of the program, three executive directors of participating nonprofits formed a book club outside of Eagles Care. And thanks to an event Eagles Care held at the Franklin Institute science museum, Steppingstone Scholars is working to create a long-term relationship with the museum, Mr. Vereen says.
So far, he’s impressed with Eagles Care. “The opportunity to get access to the skills and the network the Eagles have, in addition to resources and access to players and facilities, was a really interesting one,” he says. “We found them putting their arms around us, trying to better the organization, not just cutting the check.”
Although Eagles Care is on the “cutting edge” of sports philanthropy, according to Ms. Neirotti, she hopes that other teams will follow suit as they hire more people who have professional nonprofit and philanthropy experience.
“Many teams are feeling this way — that they’re really not making a true impact,” she says. For those considering how to make their giving more effective, she suggests that the Eagles are “moving in the right direction.”
