Aligning Corporate Giving, Corporate Responsibility and Business Strategy
Recently, I conducted two workshops with San Diego Grantmakers’ Corporate Philanthropy Group. The participants, including employees from Illumina, Qualcomm, Deloitte & Touche, Intuit, and Sempra Energy, identified their challenge: how to better communicate the value and impact of their companies’ corporate giving and corporate citizenship efforts to various audiences, both internal and external. I strongly believe that effective communication begins with good strategy. So we started there.
As someone with 15 years working in philanthropy, I am particularly passionate about how companies can better align and communicate the value of their philanthropic and giving efforts. As Michael Porter pointed out in his seminal article, The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy, there is much to be gained in the convergence of interests between business and society when companies truly engage their stakeholders and create strategies that result in both social and economic benefits.
My partner in presenting the two Grantmaker workshops, Tyler Wagner, founder and principal of Brightn.co, and I have noticed that when a company can clearly align its corporate philanthropy and corporate responsibility efforts with its business strategy and with stakeholder priorities, it is much easier to connect the dots for various audiences on the value these efforts provide. Based on our combined 25 years of experience in philanthropy and communications, we created a framework called C.A.R.E that helps companies ensure their giving strategies are placed in the right Context, are Authentic, Relevant and communicated effectively to Engage audiences.
Let’s take an example. CVS has a stated purpose of helping people on a better path to health and a goal of transforming the delivery of healthcare. As part of its business strategy, the company decided 5 years ago to stop selling cigarettes and tobacco products in all CVS Pharmacy locations. At the same time, the CVS Health Foundation decided to invest $50 million over 5 years to help people lead tobacco-free lives. This initiative is a great example of how a corporate philanthropic effort aligns strongly with overall business strategy and stakeholder concerns, resulting in a win-win for all. And, from a communications perspective, CVS’ laser focus makes it easy for various audiences and partners to understand their intentions, goals and achievements in this realm.
Beyond looking at strategic alignment in the San Diego Grantmakers workshops, we spent some time with the participants, whose titles ranged from VP of Community Relations to Corporate Citizenship Specialist, looking at tools and principles that can help companies enhance messaging for the various audiences they want to reach. Principles we discussed included:
Listening to your audiences to understand what is top of mind for them and what they currently know about your corporate citizenship efforts.
Identifying how your work helps your target audience solve a problem, meet a need or address a concern or priority of theirs.
Getting clear about your goal with specific audiences before you develop your messaging and outreach tactics.
In the second workshop, we dove deeply into cases presented by 3 participants from Sempra Energy, Intuit and Illumina who posed some interesting communication challenges. Using a “peer consulting” model, we were able to address questions about how to better reach and communicate on CSR topics with remote-based employees and manufacturing teams, as well as how to engage C-suite leaders to participate in volunteer programs. We also discussed how to deal with confusion that may emerge from organizational structure when it is not clear who owns the messaging about CSR and whose job it is to advocate for philanthropic efforts.
Overall, workshop participants agreed that more effective framing of corporate giving and corporate philanthropy can:
Garner greater executive support and buy-in
Empower other internal champions
Increase engagement and improve morale
Amplify impact and visibility
Strengthen brand and reputation
Deepen trust and build relationships with stakeholders
We at SustainabilityNext would be delighted to help you develop a new corporate giving program that aligns with your business strategy, or tweak or reframe an existing strategy for more effective communication to stakeholders.