The beginning of a new fiscal/calendar year is a perfect time to revisit your company’s community involvement mission and strategy and to make specific plans for the coming year.  If you don’t have a written plan, it is way too easy to dilute your impact by being all over the map with your contributions, become overextended with your scarce resources, and cause confusion among employees and other stakeholders about the focus and true commitment of your company’s philanthropic actions.  Also, without a written plan as your map, it is hard to know when you have achieved what you set out to do.  While the feel good part of community involvement is great, there is the potential for much more significant impact for all concerned with just a bit of planning and strategy

The following are the two minimum steps we suggest all businesses take at this time of year.

1.  Revisit last year’s contributions – even if only briefly.

• What organizations or causes did our company support over the past year?
• What process did we use to select them?  How did that work?
• How did we support them (dollars, in-kind, people, commerce)?
• What was the total dollar value of all of our contributions (not just the tax deductable amount)?
• What percentage of either our gross revenue or net profit was our total contribution?
• What significant benefit did our support leverage for the community?  For our company?
• Were our community involvement efforts consciously tied to our business goals?
• What lessons did we learn this last year?  What do we want to be sure to do again?  What do we want to change?

2.  Set goals and targets for 2012.

The following series of questions are meant as food for thought as you or a committee of employees and/or other stakeholders make your 2012 plans.

• What resources (cash, in-kind, people) do we anticipate sharing in 2012? How much of each?
• Do we have options for engaging in commerce-based activities with nonprofits?
• What is the target percentage for our overall contribution? (1%, 2%, 3%, 5%, 10%, 100%,??)  Of sales? Profit?
• What is the targeted total dollar value?
• Are there financial trends for our company that we need to pay attention to when thinking about our community involvement?
• Given this projected level of resources, what strategy will we use to allocate our resources this year?
• What causes or organizations will we focus on working with or supporting this year?  Why?
• How will we select them?  Is there a process or is it first come, first served?
• Do any of these link with our other business goals for 2012?  If so, how?
• Are there times of year that are not good for heavy involvement due to existing commitments and work flow?
• How will we time our various types of involvement for this year?  One big project?  Something each quarter? Ongoing?  Or…?
• What are our specific goals?
• What action steps do we need to achieve our goals?
• Who (person, department, team or??) will have responsibility for which pieces?
• What are our tracking and reporting expectations?
• How and with whom will we share information about our effort?

Hopefully, you already have instituted in-depth systems for both these processes.  If not, this should help get you started.  If you need help, send us an email at info@core-thought.com.

He wrote the following:

“Human capital to complement cash and partnerships

I would say that both cash and partnership are vital to philanthropy, and they both work very well together when a balance is struck between the two. I’d just like to add on that human capital would be a key element in a collaboration – companies must also tap into their best talents and skills who are relevant to the societal problem or business issues that they’re trying to solve.

And by this, I don’t mean having the CEO of a company attend a public launch of a program as a show of support. It’s more of making its prized human resources available – for example, experienced business development staff can be given time off to work with charitable foundations on business plans to tackle fund raising problems, and professional engineers can be assigned to work with the government to ensure that building and development works will not be detrimental to the environment.

Any other thoughts on investing a company’s own human capital into service?”

This was my response:

Nate:  I totally appreciate your distinction between just “showing up” and offering something of value to community organizations!  The concept of investing a company’s human capital is one I wish more businesses were onto.

At the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in NY last June, there was a lot of discussion about pro bono service versus manual labor volunteerism among the business representatives in attendance.  It is not just about getting a group to wield a paintbrush for an afternoon – though sometimes that is exactly what is needed. Businesses can bring so many other human capital resources to the table, but sometimes they take those for granted and didn’t see the potential of their people’s skills for leveraging social change.

In the trainings my company, Business Nonprofit CONNECTIONS, offers nonprofits on how to partner with businesses, we always emphasize that effective use of company volunteers can be a great way to strengthen organizational systems and begin a deeper more long lasting relationship.  I am always amazed how many nonprofit leaders have told me that they really didn’t want the bother of the volunteers, they just want a check.  They can’t see that business volunteers can become their best advocates internally to access dollars down the road or offer technical skills they may not be able to afford.

Too many nonprofits also do not have the talent management mindset required to really make optimal use of the human capital available to them through their business supporters.  Manual labor is helpful of course, but many nonprofits are blind to their need for support to build their organizational capacity , something that business volunteers can be especially suited for.

The old school nonprofit “stuff envelopes” mentality of how to use volunteers is a turn off  for many – especially for many Boomers and Millennials. However, nonprofits and businesses “share blame” here in my opinion.  Many companies need to shift their mindset from “alms for the poor” to rolling up their sleeves and getting engaged enough to understand a nonprofit’s needs beyond the obvious.  Then, negotiating more relevant volunteer assignments for their human capital that can offer a different level of long term value for both organizations.