The Welfare League has a history of more than 150 years of providing assistance to disadvantaged groups. In addition to direct service, the League is involved in projects that promote opportunity and social justice. Over the past century and a half, it has been at the forefront of new initiatives to provide services to individuals in need of an array of social and financial support.
The primary project under consideration in this
chapter is funded primarily through The Welfare League, but has significant
sponsorship from corporate partners.
The Welfare League itself is funded through a range of government
subsidies, corporate donations and private philanthropy. Four corporations, a federal government
body, the Premier’s Department and one charitable foundation fund the project. In-kind support was received from more
than three dozen other organisations including private and public
institutions. The project employs
two Directors and a project co-ordinator.
The project began in 1999 and had an initial funding base for three
years. Although the focus in
organisation was the major initiative underway at the time, the chapter
contains references to other support arrangements with business.
One of the features of The Welfare League is that it
is compartmentalised. In addition
to this project, there are four main areas of concern. Offices throughout metropolitan Sydney,
operating under a number of different names, are linked to The Welfare
League. However, this
decentralisation of services means that not all employees will be aware of the
activities of other segments of the organisation.
In contrast to the first three organisations selected for this research, The Welfare League was a large nonprofit community services institution. However, the particular issue in this chapter dealt with a single project managed by two directors inside the organisation and thus was not connected directly to other nonprofit/business links that the large entity had. The relationship studied here was project-based and the two staff members involved in the project were interviewed, both Directors of projects in The Welfare League. Richard was the primary leader for the project being sponsored by a large corporation and Amanda had responsibility for a broader corporate support program for the organisation.
Language matching is
the process through which staff in the nonprofit mirror speech patterns, jargon
or communication styles of their business contacts. The process may be deliberate or unintentional, and when
conscious it was usually motivated by the need to create opportunities for
collaboration and sponsorship on business terms. Although it occurred much less frequently than was the case
for organisations like the Care & Share Association or Nightlight, there
were a few examples in the discourse of The Welfare League. One area of the discourse where it did
appear in this organisation was in how the informants ‘sold’ their project to
potential corporate sponsors. In
one passage, Amanda described her vision of ‘good business’ thus:
I mean, I talk about good business. And, I think good business has stopped being just delivery of the service, of the best service, the best product and it’s going to making the most profit…and that’s what good business has gone. And I think it’s a mistake because delivering the best service ultimately does bring you the profits. I don’t believe it doesn’t bring you the profits. It may not be as much, y’know you might have a little bit less, but in the long term I think that actually builds up to be as good as the other one…or even more.
This was an
interesting passage for two reasons.
Firstly, it simply illustrated Amanda’s knowledge of the need to ‘talk
good business’ to representatives whose organisations have very different
objectives than the one she was attempting to promote. She intentionally used an approach of
language matching to gain consideration by possible corporate sponsors. However, the second half of this
excerpt demonstrated another underlying motivation for language matching. Amanda introduced the idea of ‘good
business’ and then went on to say how she defined ‘good business’ in a slightly
different way than the immediate results, profit-oriented outlook that
sometimes she associated with for-profit institutions. This is borderline ‘language
recruitment,’ a linguistic thread that will be discussed further in the next
section.
Informants also used
the business catchall language of ‘strategy’ to convince corporate entities to
engage in the project. Here is an
example of that from Richard:
Y’know there’s no real strategy within the [corporate] to do that. So we’re going to go back to them and say well here’s a, here’s an opportunity to have a strategy…
Again, here was data
illustrating how language matching can facilitate relationship-building. Note that this evidence does not
preclude the use of the word ‘strategy’ in nonprofit language; it simply
demonstrated that interviewees understood the value of using communication
styles that were familiar and comfortable for their business counterparts in a
collaborative environment.
Acknowledging the need
to mirror business requirements, Amanda said:
If you talk on their terms then you’re not asking for a handout, but it’s a mutual business deal, then you have to to…
Overall, informants used language matching in The Welfare League purposefully to accomplish their organisational and project goals. There was no evidence of unconscious language matching in this organisation. In fact, the discourse shows that there was no need for unconscious language matching, because both ‘nonprofit’ language and ‘corporate’ language sat comfortably side-by-side in The Welfare League. The ‘matching’ that occurred was internal matching—the language of strategy, mutual benefit and business practice had already been inculcated into the fabric of the project itself. This was interesting because