Authentic Philanthropy: How Clark Material Handling Attracts Talent and Builds BrandAuthentic Philanthropy: How Clark Material Handling Attracts Talent and Builds Brand

Authentic Philanthropy: How Clark Material Handling Attracts Talent and Builds Brand Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: Good. Delighted to be here. I’m excited for today’s conversation. I think I’ve been lucky enough to be able to say this reasonably frequently lately, that I’m excited that we’re going to cover a relatively new topic on the show, 300 and some odd episodes in, I don’t think we’ve ever quite talked about this. 

Jeff White: No and I think especially for a lot of regional manufacturers and those with a, perhaps a long family history in a particular community they might be deeply involved in their communities, volunteering and fundraising and contributing in that way, but it’s not often considered to be the thing that you’re going to market with to, to truly influence your your prospects. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. So I’m really I’m excited for today’s guest. I think it’s gonna be an interesting conversation. 

Jeff White: Yeah, absolutely. So joining us today is Cynthia Barnes. Cynthia is the Global Marketing Content Specialist and Community Relations Manager at Clark Material Handling.

Welcome to The Kula Ring, Cynthia. 

Cynthia Barnes: Hello, I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Carman Pirie: Wonderful to have you joining us. Start by maybe telling our listeners a bit about you and how you ended up at Clark.

Cynthia Barnes: Sure. And I think this will really enlighten the rest of the conversation because most of my career background has not actually been in marketing and has definitely not been in the manufacturing realm. I actually came from the nonprofit world. I did nonprofit development, which is mostly fundraising, and the marketing that’s tied to specific fundraising, bringing in the dollars to, to keep nonprofits going. And I joined Clark because they are looking for a community relations person who knows the community needs and can help direct our very thriving philanthropy fund and volunteer program.

And so that’s how I came to Clark. And then slowly over time it became as much about marketing the forklifts as it did for me actually getting our team in the community volunteering. So, I’ve had an interesting journey with forklifts and material handling, and I’m very excited to talk today about how I’ve been able to combine how we give back to our community with some of the direction that we take with our marketing decisions.

Jeff White: Very cool. Can you give us a bit of background on Clark as well? And, you certainly I think you say the word forklift and everybody’s aha. But that may not necessarily be everything to the business. 

Cynthia Barnes: Oh, I completely understand. I was there when I started at Clark, I interviewed and had to ask, what specifically is material handling? What is the, what is this industry? And it’s been a wild and enlightening journey. Clark Material Handling Company has been around for over a hundred years. Clark’s claim to fame is that we were the inventor of the forklift in 1917. So we have a very long and strong history in America and throughout the globe.

We expanded and outside of the material handling realm for a while and then decided to very much specialize in our forklifts. We are a global company. We have affiliates all over the world. We are now a South Korean company, but we are very much an American brand and we like to leverage that influence in the decisions that we make, in terms of building these relationships in the communities, both in America and in around the world.

Carman Pirie: It’s a, there’s a lot to cover here. It’s just interesting to me that the people in some ways who invented the category, some would think, oh, you don’t need to find an innovative way to compete at all. You’ve invented the forklift. So it’s, I just find it fascinating that you folks are really leaning into community relations as a key differentiator in the marketing.

I guess, where to start with that? I, first things first, is that just has it always been a thrust of the firm or was it that the philanthropic side of the firm kind of operated a bit separate from the brand and marketing side, and then they’ve come together over time. 

Cynthia Barnes: Yes. Clark’s marketing strategy has honestly not been to use our philanthropy efforts to sell forklifts. We give back to the community because it’s the right thing to do, and we really brand ourselves as the American brand, and as quite frankly over-engineered. American truck that when you need somebody’s help on the phone, you call and you’re gonna talk to somebody who probably works a couple of desks away from me is gonna be helping you out. Like we are accessible, we’re an American brand. We have the history. That’s really how we have been marketing ourselves.

The philanthropy has very much been separate where we decided a number of years ago that it’s very important to give back in our community and, we really wanna be able to emphasize that we are in the business for making, designing, selling forklifts. But we’re also in the business of giving back to the community. And that really the reason that came about is when our company got purchased by Chairman Bake back in 2003. This is a gentleman who, grew up in Korea in the time of the Korean War, and as a young child, he ended up getting orphaned. It’s a very amazing long story, and I’m going to probably butcher the details, so I’m gonna keep it very light and broad. But as a child, he got orphaned, he got separated from his family and in a village where he didn’t know anybody and was reliant upon strangers to survive. And he ended up being taken in by the US Army, by some servicemen who would pay him to do some odd jobs and give him some money so that he could eat and stay alive. And eventually that led to him starting a hat business, which then became a very large international hat business.And that grew into multi, multinational businesses of various sorts, including hats, media, forklifts, vans, like you name it and he and his family are involved. And so he became very successful. But one thing that as he grew in his business success, he always knew that the only reason that he was alive, much less successful, is because of the kindness of strangers. And it was, it’s always been very important to him as an individual and to his family to give back to communities and help other people out. So there are orphanages that our larger parent company owns all around the world that are specifically designed to give back to help others in the way that others helped the owner of our company.

And so at Clark, in America specifically, we’re not going to run an orphanage. We don’t, that is not our area of expertise. There are plenty of organizations who do that better than we could possibly do it. But what we can do is find the needs in the community and give back and support in the ways that we can whether it be education, basic needs, healthcare, you name it.

We want to get involved where the needs are and where we can help people out. And that’s been very separate from our marketing strategies. But what I’ve found as I’ve gotten more and more involved in the marketing side is when we do things like social media, when we talk to our dealers, they are very interested in the human side of our business.

We can talk specs, we can talk the details of our forklifts. We can show pictures of our forklifts that look just about any other forklift from a picture. The colors will change, but they all have forks. They all do the same stuff. But what really differentiates us is our people and is our heart. And as we are changing our strategy to humanize the brand because that’s where the industry is telling us there’s that opening, this is what we’re interested in seeing and hearing from you. It really has brought those two areas together for us. 

Carman Pirie: I think that’s a, that’s something that I bet an awful lot of particularly family owned manufacturing enterprises can probably relate to, but others as well. The number of, just long standing manufacturing brands that I’ve spoken with that would articulate much the same way as you just did, as the, around the why they give back to the community and they’re not doing it, to your point, with a true business objective in mind.

And I think it, it is often the marketer in the enterprise that seeing the opportunity to connect these dots a little more, and I appreciate there’s always a concern that you don’t want to ever come across as you’re doing the charitable work exclusively for profitable gain. But so I find it fascinating that you’re doing this work, that you’re, you’re seeing that, look, there’s a desire for a more human brand here in this space. And every time we talk about the work that we do in the community, we seem like we’re filling that void in the market. Man, I bet there’s an awful lot of manufacturers that can identify with that and will take some inspiration from maybe how you’re thinking about bringing these things together, or how you have.

Jeff White: I think, just your point about the marketer being the one who often sees that as the thing. I think in a lot of cases, in a lot of organizations the responsibility for this kind of thing is often downloaded on the marketer and they’re not coming at it from the same perspective as Cynthia, where, you know, with your background in fundraising and all of that and seeing how that is a differentiator. I think a lot of marketers may just be seeing it as, something else that they have to do, or something else that’s been given to them as a project. And I think it’s really interesting to see that as a core value of differentiation too. 

Cynthia Barnes: Yeah. And you, it is interesting because I really started wanting to share, and this primarily was done initially through LinkedIn specifically, and my intent to market what we’re doing actually was, the goal was not to market the forklifts, the goal is to say here’s how we’re giving back to the community. So you should be doing the same thing in your company too. See what we’re doing. You can do it too. These organizations need your help. Here’s some ideas of how we’re giving back and how we’re contributing.

The idea of actually trying to sell forklifts, we’d always say we’re not selling any forklifts until I had a nonprofit purchase one of our forklifts, and I said, okay, we now can’t say that anymore because they saw our efforts and then they purchased one of, one of our forklifts. Thankfully, but that’s still not the point.

The point was initially with the marketing to say this is what we’re doing, so other companies step up your game. We don’t wanna be the one setting the bar. We want, we, if we set it, we want you to raise it, and then we come in and say, okay, we need to do better ourselves. But over time, the way I’ve thought about it, it is it’s really just this tangible extension of what our core values are as a company, the safety, this reliability, this service, this accessibility to humans who want to help you out. We have talent that we attract to come work for us because they are purpose driven. They see how we’re giving back to the community, and they want to be a part of an organization that cares because quite frankly, if you care about giving back to the community, you also care about the work that you’re doing. You care about the engineering that you’re putting into these forklifts. The service, the customer service that you’re providing to people, you care on all levels. And so we are truly attracting a workforce that cares. And a lot of that is because of our forklifts and because of our history and our legacy, and a lot of that is because we are a company that gives back.

Carman Pirie: So many people that I’ve heard do this, use community relations as a business strategy is typically done on the employee side, and it’s done for community visibility, frankly, to be seen as a employer of choice. And I don’t think that there’s anything untoward about that. But Cynthia, that’s the first time I’ve heard somebody translate, no, if they are attracted to us because we care. They’re going to care enough to do a better job because they’re the type of people that actually care about caring. I’ve never seen those dots connected before. 

Cynthia Barnes: Yeah. And so that’s not marketing our forklifts, that’s really marketing the company to attract talent. But absolutely it is the number of employees, when I talk to them through a new hire orientation process, the number of people that have told me that, you know. They applied to the job, but then they started looking up the company and now they really want to work here because they saw our page that’s Clark Raising Hope, which is the philanthropy program, and they saw that and they said, this is where I want to be now, it’s astounding. 

Jeff White: It’s really interesting because, there’s an awful lot of manufacturers, around the US and around the world that are struggling to attract talent. And I don’t think I’ve heard any considered this as the mechanism to attract talent. Like you may have single-handedly figured out how to solve the worker attraction crisis amongst manufacturers. 

Cynthia Barnes: Yes. But it has to be authentic. That’s the thing. It absolutely has to be authentic.

You can’t come in and say corporate citizenship. Corporate citizenship is the lingo, but, you have to live and breathe it as a company, it has to be truly a core value. It has to be top down driven. It can’t be the HR person or the marketing person running around trying to get the company to do stuff. It has to be top down one of the core values that, that you live and breathe and you don’t just say in order to work. 

Carman Pirie: Cynthia, I appreciate that you mentioned that Clark’s a longstanding American brand. And I certainly understand the thrust behind that. But how does this commitment to the community come to life more globally or does it?

I appreciate that the ownership has varied business interests globally where that would come to life. But for Clark as a brand itself do you extend this kind of community relations approach to other global markets? And if so, how does it change? 

Cynthia Barnes: So we do leave it up to the global affiliates to really focus and find the areas to give back.

Clark Europe is very strong about giving back in their areas. They do similar programs as to what we do. What I find is there are certain times that we do have just international crises that require a concerted effort that we will come together and it will be, it will come down from the Bake family to ask us to get together and.

Send funds in, send supplies to, to help an effort. The last time this happened was during the Ukraine, Russia conflict, and we absolutely all say, what do you need? What can we send you? And how can we get involved in help? But ultimately with the affiliates, it’s, we understand just as every manufacturing market across the world is different. Every need for forklift in America varies from what the needs are in Mexico, what the needs are in Germany, what the needs are in, in, any country, in Australia. It changes, but so do the needs of. What the communities need as well too. So what we find is the best thing to do is to empower affiliates to either develop funds, develop volunteer programs amongst their employees, but to have that support and to provide the way forward for each affiliate to give back and feel empowered to give back. That’s the most important thing 

Jeff White: In the lead up to the show, I was looking at the Clark website and I looked at the Raising Hope area, not realizing that was the arm, the philanthropic arm of it. And there’s 30 odd organizations you folks have helped, I’m guessing, in the last little while, and I’m sure that number is growing over time. How do you structure the Raising Hope initiative internally? Because I believe everybody contributes to that in some way, shape, or form. Yes? 

Cynthia Barnes: So this actually has changed recently. We’ve made some adjustments to the program. So it is, it’s always in flux. Just see what the needs are and what the employees want to do, what the dealers want to see from us. And we use these things to, to guide what the Clark Raising Hope program is. Some of the core elements are, we do give each of our employees in, at least in, in North America, we give each of our employees, we call it VPTO, volunteered paid time off, and we provide currently eight hours each year for our employees to go volunteer in the community. Now you’ll find a lot of companies do something similar to that. What we also do is actively find opportunities for our employees to volunteer. So we don’t just leave it upon each and every employee to go volunteer serving soup at the soup kitchen. What we do is we say, hey, once a month we are going over to the men’s homeless shelter. Every, I think it’s every second Thursday of the month, and we put together a team to go serve, who wants to come this month? I recently went down to our Dallas location and we worked with a nonprofit down there who came on site and we had, I believe, 17 employees get together in our training center and put together these little dog interactive toys that are made with cloth that you put treats in and our employees step, set aside a couple of hours of their day to come together and create these little, these little pads for these dogs that support a nonprofit and that counted as volunteer time. And we did it on site because. I knew if we leave it up to employees alone to go find volunteer time, they’re less likely to engage. They want to give back, but they’re not going to actively seek ways to not be at work, which is surprising, but they won’t. So what we do is we create these opportunities for them to volunteer and as often as possible in team building environments as well, so that they do get to interact. Sometimes with their own team. So recently some of our engineering guys went and did their annual volunteer project at a local children’s home where they use their engineering skills to build structures and put together metal furniture and things like that. We also do cross-functional so that you’re working with people who maybe you don’t speak to that often.

And this develops very strong comradery so that our different departments don’t get siloed because now we have these better inter opportunities for interaction that aren’t specifically about problems that are going on. And so it works out really well to have this volunteer structure that is not only you get this volunteer time, but you do actually have coordination of volunteer efforts.

Carman Pirie: I think that’s an important addition. And it seems so simple in hindsight, but that’s incredibly powerful. So many brands stop at the, oh, we’ve identified eight hours of volunteer time of year. You can take it if you want. Never shall it be mentioned again. And it just allows us to say something nice and community minded when we’re putting out an employee employment ad.

But it’s, it is clearly not. When it’s part of the core values, it’s action differently. Exactly. And you’re embodying it differently. I think that’s a, it’s a minor twist on, it’s not that much more support of the initiative to make it, tripling impactful, I would suggest.

Cynthia Barnes: And that makes all the difference, quite frankly, to be able to do that. Yeah, so that’s our volunteer side. We do actually also have a monetary side of our philanthropy too, because it’s really hard to just go out and volunteer and not have any money that you can give to support nonprofits as well.

We always say we are a volunteer driven program, but ultimately dollars do matter as well. So we have this fund, we call it the Clark Raising Hope Fund, and we take contributions. Most of our dealers participate, so they’ve agreed to, when they sell certain models of forklifts to then make a donation to this fund, Clark will match their donation as well to a hundred percent.

And then. For a long time. That was it. That was how we funded it, how we give back to the community. Employees started getting out and volunteering at places, saying, how do I give? How do I donate diapers to this women’s shelter? What, how can I get involved on a deeper level?

And so we decided to do a payroll deduction option for any employees that choose to volunteer. And so those employees are called the Champions Club, and we get together a couple times a year, have lunch and talk about where the money goes. Employees will email me with suggestions of nonprofits that they wanna get involved in.

And we look together to see what kind of volunteer opportunities that we can work out what kind of monetary needs these organizations might have. And so it really is led by just a couple of people, but driven by a large number of our employees who, who give money, who then have a stake and a say into what our values are at Clark or where we want to give money, and where we want to support.

Jeff White: Now I see the, as I mentioned, the Raising Hope area on the website. But I’m wondering, how does this come to life when you are competing on a deal or, when in terms of people are comparing your forklifts against others, or things like that. How are they learning about this? How is it baked into the marketing and sales apparatus? 

Cynthia Barnes: For the most part it is very passive. We don’t like to really use this as a strong selling point. To me it’s more about establishing our brand identity. And it’s seeing highlight reels of videos or pictures of volunteer projects that we post on our social media or on our website.

It’s keeping our dealers informed so that when our dealers are selling our trucks, they can talk about what differentiates Clark from some of our competitors. And that can be one of the ways. I could name a few different specific instances that have been brought to my attention that, oh, this company chose to purchase Clark from one of our dealers because they share our values. And that’s a really good feeling to know it’s not just about the price, it’s not just about the specs, it’s their purchasing because they see themselves in us and want to support a company that has those shared values. So it’s not in your face. It’s not something that you, oh, you should buy from the company that does good. That’s not what it’s about. I’m not trying to guilt you into purchasing Clark because, oh, we’re gonna feed some, some families this Christmas because you’ve bought a truck from us. That is not it at all. It is. It is about just saying, Hey, this is important to us. This is a part of who we are. This is a part of what makes our company great. And we’d love it if…

Carman Pirie: Cindy, I don’t know if this is an odd question or not, but I’ll ask it anyway as I want to do. I guess I, I’m thinking that you may be uniquely positioned to answer this because you’ve worked in the nonprofit side before coming to Clark and, I think a lot of people in the for-profit world look at the nonprofit world and think of it as almost as being somewhat static. Like they feel like they understand it. And my guess is things change there every bit as much as they change in the for-profit world. I’m curious what advice you might have to a brand that is looking to deepen their connection with a nonprofit world.

Is there anything that’s changing in their world in the last five years or the last year, whatever, or where it’s going that we need to be mindful of how we interact with nonprofits and maybe think about them in a different way. 

Cynthia Barnes: Sure. A few things that I could just give a few directions, first of all, you could reach out to, there just about every community has an organization like a foundation that helps give out community money that helps give out endowed funds that you could reach out to, and that’s gonna be a more neutral party as opposed to just reaching out to any old nonprofit. And talking to them and saying, what are the local needs in this community? We have one here locally where I’m at in Kentucky that has been a very strong guiding point that can get together a few times a year to really talk about the trends and the changing needs. And so if you can find one of those local community foundations, that would be an excellent place to start. The biggest trends generally that I can see in America going on are ones that probably anybody could guess, it is housing prices skyrocketing and that impacting housing and the homeless population.

There’s a lot more people who have housing that’s not secure, and so anything that is near that area, whether it be simply having, food support talking to specific homeless shelters, it could be programs trying to prevent homelessness to get people before they lose their apartments or homes, any nonprofit in that sector, I would strongly suggest reaching out to and engaging with food insecurity is always going to be a great place to start as well too, that is not going to go away anytime soon. And so I would always say, at the very least, reach out to your local food pantry and see how you can help, whether it be food drives or whether it be monetary or most of them usually have a very robust volunteer program as well too, to get engaged with. And then finally, the last one that I’ll mention is more of a long term solution versus responding to changing needs. And that is early childhood education. Because if you improve childhood reading levels and if you get more people who reach the third grade reading level on time, that is going to drastically impact their risk of being on these various nonprofit needs, they’re not gonna be nearly as likely to be homeless or, have job insecurity, food insecurity, domestic violence issues like you name it. They’re gonna be at a reduced risk of just about any of those things. If they can reach those reading levels on time. Anytime I can support any type of early childhood education endeavor, I’m going to see what we can do to help that. 

Carman Pirie: I really appreciate that advice. Cynthia. I think there’s something that you said earlier on too that I think it’s key. It’s the idea that you come with money, not just with the volunteers. I think it can be, I’ve seen a few folks try to do these initiatives a bit more on the cheap or think that it, they’re going to get a huge bang for the buck, reputationally. And the not-for-profits dearly love to have the volunteer help, no question.

But money goes a long way too. And I think I think that was a, that was really strong advice, and I do think that it’s well taken this notion of, who are the organizations that help distribute funds a across a community, et cetera, as they can help you maybe work past some internal biases or something of that sort and ensure that it’s going to the right use.

It’s been a fascinating conversation, Cynthia. Thank you. It’s really interesting the work that you’re doing. 

Cynthia Barnes: Absolutely. And like I said it’s something that’s come about organically, we never sat out and intended this to be a marketing strategy, and I wouldn’t even necessarily say it’s a marketing strategy, but I would say it is very impactful on our marketing efforts to focus on community relations and make sure that how we give back to the community is always staying top priority for the company. 

Jeff White: That’s really wonderful. Thanks so much for your insight.