Meet Your Client Success Team: Christine Smith

If your to-do list at work includes finding ways to give back to causes you care about, then Christine Smith is the person you’ll want to talk to about how to do that with Chimp.

Passionate about corporate social responsibility, Christine will work with you to get your employee giving program up and running, or help you launch a fundraising campaign that engages both employees and customers. But first, here’s your chance to get to know a little bit more about Christine and why she loves everything about corporate giving.

Meet Christine Smith

Christine has worked with Chimp for about six months.

What brought you to Chimp?

My work history centres around the charitable sector and more recently it’s focused on technology and charity. The charitable thread has been by design, and the tech thread just happened. Chimp was the perfect marriage of those two things.

What’s your favourite part of your job?

I love talking to companies and hearing about their charitable intentions. I find it really inspiring that so many companies – both large and small – have charitable intentions and I like helping them figure out how to execute on them strategically. It’s really interesting for me to see businesses that have charity in their DNA – because their founders believe in a cause or want to contribute to the greater good in some way – and to see how that trickles down. A lot of times charity is more of a marketing or PR initiative, which is a good business decision. The passion people have for a cause or supporting their employees is so interesting to me.

What project are you most proud of?

I recently undertook a competitive market analysis, and as a relatively new member at Chimp, it was interesting to see just how amazing our product is. The biggest takeaway for me was how Chimp differentiated on its human element – our customer service. To me this really proved our value and the value of our Client Success team. We do a really good job of adding that human element back into an online platform.

What’s the first thing you do when you get to your desk every morning?

I’ve usually already checked my email on the bus on my phone, so when I get into the office, I probably open 20 different browser tabs, and check my calendar to remember what meetings I have. I usually have a lot of meetings, so I need to figure out what I have to do during the day and plan out chunks of time in which I’ll be able to get the work done.

What’s your favourite way to spend the weekend?

Outside: running, playing beach volleyball, on a patio, at the beach, hiking in the mountains – basically enjoying all that BC has to offer. I’m from Ontario where it’s often too hot to be outside in the summer and too cold to be outside in the winter, so I love the year-round ability to be active outdoors in BC.

If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the world, what would it be?

I care a lot about kids and children’s charities, and I would love for every child to have the things they need to be happy, healthy contributing members of society.

Tell us something most people don’t know about you.

I can ride a unicycle. Why? Well, when I was 12, my family moved from Ottawa to Toronto on the last day of school. So my brother and I had a whole summer without friends, but somehow we had acquired a unicycle, and for lack of anything better to do, we spent the summer teaching ourselves how to ride it.