Call it what you want: corporate social responsibility, your mission, your giving back program, just the right thing to do or Mixte Adventures (like us), the point is that businesses have an obligation to take care of the communities that support their success.
When your corporate social responsibility program is done well with a thoughtful internal and external communications approach, the benefit to a company’s brand, employee morale and engagement, and the public’s affinity for that company can go far.
We support the Fowler Global Social Innovation Challenge created and led by academic visionaries at University of San Diego who aim to change the way business leaders see their role in the economic and social well-being of our world. While the international business pitch competition involves student groups creating business ideas that solve the world’s social problems, the end goal is to frame the way these future business leaders see their power. Generate revenue to make money? Or generate revenue while also stewarding healthy communities?
We know that authentic corporate social responsibility programs can be a force for good when companies take care to balance their bottom lines with meaningful community programs that transcend all parts of the business.
We love when we get the chance to work alongside successful companies to shape how they engage in community well-being. These companies have experienced the benefits that we mentioned above, but those successes don’t happen overnight. It’s an evolution with assessment and adjustments built into the long-term commitment of building mission into the business model.
Here are five key takeaways with relevant examples that we offer to you as you develop your corporate social responsibility program.
Consider What Your Employees Want
As part of our onboarding with a national tutoring company, we uncovered subtle clues that the team members understood and had strong feelings about inequalities in access to education.
This motivated us to engineer a corporate social responsibility pilot program as part of its regional launch strategy that included a giving back program to connect with communities and free tutoring lessons for homeless teens. The latter piece we kept under wraps until the teens were ready to tell their success stories.
The impact of this program? The biggest impact is that the tutoring center staff reported increased happiness at their job. They felt their work mattered. From a media relations perspective, the tutoring center’s giving back program earned coverage, which would have been nearly impossible without the creative twist.
It all came from understanding what motivates their employees.
Be Authentic to Who You Are
When you’re the CEO and you have a certain style — we say own it. When we worked with the owner of The Wine Pub and The Coffee Hub in Point Loma, we simply expanded on her existing community engagement program. As a dog lover, Sandy established Woofer Wednesday, which donates 10% of your bill if you dine with your dog on her patio. And, as a breast cancer survivor, she organizes her yearly Bike for Boobs to raise money for cancer research.
What a stellar start for an authentic CSR program. We experimented by adding new events to round out her calendar. From clothing drives for those in need to movie nights on her patio, Sandy’s monthly list of events allowed us to earn regular media coverage for her small shop and give her meaningful ways to engage on social media.
The impact? Sandy’s customers would tell her, “We’re always seeing you on the news.”
Test What Works
A/B testing can be done IRL, too. It takes time to perfect your corporate social responsibility program, and it might take failures, too. When we first started working with Barons Market nearly 7 years ago, I remember its marketing director telling me, “We give away all of these gift certificates to community groups because we care, but we can’t measure our impact.”
We went to work designing a community engagement program that extended the store’s brand in a meaningful way. We tried all-natural cookie decorating events. Failed. We tried specialty soda ice cream floats. Failed. We tried pushing programs around its summer grilled sausage dog stands. Failed.
But then we tried the beer pairing.
It first went down in a small, slightly sweaty stockroom – good food at good prices (its tag line) paired with good beer. That moment became Barons Backroom Beer Pairings that now occur at almost all of its locations and that raise money for charities – locally based food banks.
The Impact? Barons raised more than $26,000 in a year for nonprofits, and we see tickets sell out.
Create Comprehensive Campaigns
Isolated events or disconnected marketing campaigns won’t fuel a companywide belief in your corporate social responsibility program. Honestly, this is where most companies get it wrong. It’s not just a marketing initiative.
How do you do this? Through internal communications programs that have employee engagement opportunities. Remember the tutoring company? It created opportunities for its employees to volunteer at the homeless shelter. And Barons Market? It moved advertising dollars into its public relations campaigns, while also creating a mutually beneficial program with Feeding America of San Diego, that included in-store checkout fundraising requests, TV advertisements by way of a collaboration with the nonprofit, volunteer programs with its team, staff education and social media buzz.
Protect What You Love
Nearly three years ago at a companywide offsite meeting, we engaged our employees to dream the biggest impact our agency could have on the world. The big idea? Develop a micro-lending program to fund minority-owned businesses in the communities in which we work. Cool, huh? As the CEO, I have been working with that intention in mind to incubate another agency that is a paid jobs training program to help refugees break into the communications career. We are solving two problems with one business: helping our industry welcome diversity into its talent pool and helping refugees use their professional experience to integrate into the local workforce.
The impact? We’ll know the number of lives we’ve changed, the number of communications departments that will benefit from diversity on their team, and, maybe, one day we can say that we raised the percentage of people of color represented by our industry (currently at 12%).
We hope this helps you develop your corporate social responsibility program. Need additional capacity? Give us a call. We’re here to serve (meaningful) programs.
