Marathon Oil Company ran an ad several times lately in the Denver Post with the headline, “Marathon is much more than our employer.  They’re our inspiration.”  The ads don’t sell anything directly - instead they are designed to inform readers about Marathon’s values and give back efforts.  The ad pictures a mother/daughter pair who both work for the company and the words are written as if the mother was saying them.  The mother is a breast cancer survivor and the daughter is pregnant.  The ad mentions she is doing all she can to keep her daughter from getting breast cancer and “that’s why I am proud to work for a company that gives so much to so many great causes, such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure.”  The ad goes on to mention other efforts including Impact Player Partners (an organization supporting wounded/disabled war veterans from the Iraq and Afganistan wars) and a school supply project in Equatorial Guinea.   It ends with “And this is only the beginning of all the things that Marathon does.  Needless to say, we love working here.  Giving back.  That’s Marathon.”  The bottom of the ad shows their color logo and the website address - Marathon.com/values. 

I went to their website and was pleasantly surprised to see a link on their home page to their Social Responsibility page.  I really liked their tag line “Commerce.  Conscience.  Compassion.” They have a menu of options to choose from here.

Good for Marathon!  Made me very interested to learn more about this company that I know relatively little about.  It is amazing to me how many companies have not yet been proactive to post a section on their sites to let consumers and other stakeholders know about their social responsibility and/or community involvement.  I did an informal survey a couple years ago with the top 40 fastest growing small businesses in Colorado from the Book of Lists published by the Denver Business Journal.  I went to each of their websites and only two of them mentioned anything about their community involvement.  What a missed opportunity!!  And I know for a fact that two of them that mentioned nothing on their site are VERY active with local nonprofits.  In fact, one I had interviewed as a best practice example for my forthcoming book!

Do you have even one page on YOUR company’s website that talks about your community involvement and/or broader commitment to business social responsibility?  If you aren’t doing anything…then having no page makes total sense.  However, consumers DO care about what the companies they do business with are doing.  So think about putting up at least a simple page.  It does not need to be as detailed as Marathon Oil’s.  You can grow into that later.  If you don’t it is a huge missed opportunity to let folks know about your values and how you are walking your talk.