Did you get your New Year’s Resolutions set for your company’s 2008 community involvement?  Did you set specific goals?  Did you develop a written action plan with goals, tasks, and responsibilities clearly defined?  We are almost two months into 2008 now, how are you doing?  Have you stayed focused?  Made progress?  If you did not do a plan yet, it is definitely not too late…start one today!

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.  In the first step you need to revisit last year’s contributions - even if only briefly.  In the second step, you need to set some goals and targets for the upcoming year. 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@bnconnections.com.

The following series of questions are meant as food for thought as you or a committee of employees and/or other stakeholders make your 2008 plans.

Reviewing 2007:

• 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?

Planning for 2008:

• What resources (cash, in-kind, people) do we anticipate sharing in 2008? 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 2008?  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?

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.

Joe Water provided a link on his blog, Selfish Giving, to a Jeff Trexler post on www.uncivilsociety.org, titled, “Charitable causes trivialized” at the Super Bowl”.  In Trexler’s post, he talks about Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield’s video critiquing the Super Bowl ads and “cause marketing gone wrong”.  Trexler says, “Garfield’s take on the Dell Red ad is well worth noting: it turns AIDS into a “chick magnet.” And be sure to watch long enough (around 4:30) for an essential critique of McDonald’s senseless conflation of its “I’m Lovin’ It” slogan with cancer. Garfield’s core point: our “ROI culture” seems to have erased an earlier generation’s understanding of the rhetoric of corporate charity and branding.”

I downloaded the podcast and watched the video myself.  Take a look, if you have not already seen it.  The text below the video states, “”Is it right to turn cause marketing for AIDS or cancer cures into such a hard sell for the Dell or McDonald’s products?”  Good food for thought.  

I believe businesses need to let consumers know how they are supporting important causes.  According to a 2006 poll on Millenials by Cone Inc., a marketing agency in Boston, 89 percent of Americans between 13 and 25 would switch from one brand to another associated with a “good cause,” if products and prices were comparable. Their 2006 Holiday Shopping Survey found “More than six-out-of-ten shoppers said that they are likely to consider a company’s reputation for supporting causes when purchasing gifts this holiday season.”

One way to harness the power of business to support causes is through cause marketing (though there are also many other options for support of nonprofits for companies to choose from.) Cause marketing is defined as “a commercial activity resulting from a partnership between a company and a nonprofit organization to market an image, product or service for mutual benefit”, according to Business for Social Responsibility’s publication from the late 1990s on Cause Related Marketing.  In a typical cause marketing relationship, a company donates “a portion of each purchase made by customers during a specific period of time to an organization representing a cause or issue.”  Some cause marketing campaigns do not “channel money to nonprofits; some engage principally in educational or awareness-building activities.”

So you can choose not to like cause marketing as an approach but you need to realize that such efforts usually have been found to be very mutually beneficial for the business and the nonprofit.  When a nonprofit signs on with a business for a cause marketing campaign, they know full well their name and reputation will be used to increase sales for the business as a way also to generate dollars for themselves.  It’s win/win.

I don’t think either the Dell or McDonalds commercials trivialize the causes these campaigns were designed to support.  And remember these were ads during super prime time not public service announcements run at 2:00 am.  Dell does not try to directly tug at your heart strings to make a donation to AIDS, they are selling computers, raising awareness of (RED) and in the end people in Africa do benefit.  McDonalds is going directly for the heart strings connection through its ad.  Fine way to go and…why shouldn’t viewers know what the company is doing to support cancer victims, such as the one featured in the ad?  Most folks think they only support sick kids.

Seems like lot of hullabaloo going on to me…maybe some tweaks to the “earlier generation’s understanding of the rhetoric of corporate charity and branding” would make it more effective in 2008 as a way to generate resources to take on the world’s problems.

Does your company give gifts to your clients during the holiday season as a way to say thank you for their business? This year, why not do something different? Some ideas could include:

• Make a donation to a nonprofit in your client’s name.  For example, see Mercy Corps Gift Kits which include a children’s food kit for $20, a women’s small business development kit for $40, and many more.  Their website says: “What’s the best present you can give a poor family in need?  Hope.  Change the way you see gift giving. Mercy Kits are a convenient way for you to give a gift while helping people in need. Perfect for birthdays, weddings and more. And it’s easy to send your personalized gift announcement: by mail, by e-mail or by printing your own card.” (http://www.mercycorps.org/mercykits/?source=1018)
• Instead of a traditional gift like a calendar, pen and pencil set, logo mug, sausage and cheese basket, buy a product produced and sold by a local nonprofit - like a soup kit made by Denver’s Women’s Bean Project - a nonprofit business dedicated to helping women break the cycle of unemployment and poverty through on-the-job training and life skills coaching,(http://www.womensbeanproject.com) or an American Red Cross disaster kit (http://www.redcross.org/store). 
• Send a greeting card that highlights your holiday give back to a local nonprofit…plus your message of thanks.  No gift necessary - just a card which you’d probably send anyway!

What have you done that could inspire other companies? Please share!