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We’re kind of under-whelmed with ‘innovative’, ‘embedded’ corporate community engagement programmes that don’t come up to scratch. Gates, Branson and co have shown the value that corporate minds can add to solving society’s problems but we think corporations themselves can do even more. We want to see the bar raised on what ‘community engagement’ means to businesses – we’re calling it Corporate Philanthropy 2.0 though we’d love a better name if you have any recommendations.

In order to define what we’re talking about, we’ve written below the five questions that the best corporate community programmes have got great answers to…

1. Could anyone else do it?
Most companies are unique in some way shape or form but most corporate community engagement programmes that occur in businesses today could just as easily be set up in an accounting firm as they could a supermarket. Anyone can raise a few quid for charity (and so they should!) or paint a school (sure, go for it) but an innovative, embedded 2.0 programme should be as unique as your business, based on what you do best.

2. Is it good for business?
Kind of a trick question – no, you shouldn’t do this kind of work for purely selfish reasons but at the same time it should be great for business. Your staff and customers/clients should cite it as a reason they love your organisation, it should open up new relationships and build your brand. It should be something you keep investing in, even if the recession double-dips. If it’s not good for business, it’s not 2.0…

3. Is there a profit margin on it?
Another peculiar question but in the best programmes, value exceeds cost. Sample one: 10 lawyers (sorry to pick on you) spend 1 day painting a school. Let’s say the cost to the law firm for that time is £300/day/lawyer, totalling £3,000.
The value? Well, a professional painting team would probably need half the staff, do a better job and cost less than £2,000 for the day – society is running at a loss on this one. Society needs to be making a profit like it does when Pret offers left over meals for homeless shelters at the end of the day. The cost per sandwich to Pret may be only 30p each but the value to the community receiving it is a couple of quid per sandwich. Serious profit margin for society.

4. Would society pay for it?
Connected to the last question, this is a real crunch test for all charitable initiatives. If you are a consultancy doing a £25,000 pro-bono project and, whether you ask them to or not, the charity beneficiary wouldn’t pay £1,000 for it, then something is really wrong.

Accenture Development Partnerships (Accenture’s 2.0 programme) run at break-even: charities are prepared to pay for Accenture’s best known ‘charitable’ activity, to the point at which Accenture don’t even lose money on it. Amazing. You can subsidise costs, you can give it for free if you want, but if what you are doing isn’t worth a penny to the people you are doing it for then there’s a serious problem.

5. Is it an ‘it’?
If you can’t communicate what you do either in terms of an approach (each of our business units gives 1% of all staff time to developing capacity in local charities) or a programme (our hotel has an annual, subsidised cost training programme for employees of homeless shelters to help them develop skills), then you have a real problem. A list of things you do, is not an effective strategy.

Now, for the standard disclaimers… Giving cash to charity is great. Painting schools is great. Staff volunteering is great. Recycling is great. All those things are great, they just aren’t Corporate Philanthropy 2.0. Corporate Philanthropy 2.0 is the belief that in its core commercial offering, a corporation can find something that truly benefits society and can apply itself to that end as part of its business. Now that’s exciting.

Thanks to Jake Hayman of The Social Investment Consultancy for this post

Jake Hayman
Chief Executive Officer
The Social Investment Consultancy
www.tsiconsultancy.com
Jake@tsiconsultancy.com
+44 (0) 207 070 2484
+44 (0) 7771 590 893