Tips for Giving Wisely - as a business

Tips on Giving Wisely – as a business

As a modern business, you want to bring your ideals into the same frame as your commercial decisions. You want to use the business to benefit the community, and you want the community to recognise what you're doing and to identify you with the causes you support. That's what corporate responsibility is all about.

These days businesses are moving away from simply handing over money without comment, instead favouring a much closer mutual involvement. There are several points along a continuum above and beyond just philanthropy.

You don't have to dive in at the deep end, though - you can work your way through all the stages, gaining experience and working out your own priorities. If you're out to maximise the gains for both of you, however, it helps to keep the ideal in mind.

In a paper titled "Marketing's Role in Cross-Sector Collaboration", Harvard Business School Professor James Austin says relationships are philanthropic, transitional or integrative.

• The Philanthropic Stage
This is the older model, where community groups ask for money and the business gives (or doesn't) corporate donations of money or goods. The level of engagement and resources is relatively low, infrequent, simple, and non-strategic.

• The Transitional Stage
By now the parties are looking for a significant two-way value exchange. The partnership becomes more important to each player's missions and strategies. This stage covers activities like cause-related marketing, event sponsorships, special projects, and employee volunteering services.

• The Integrative Stage
This involves fewer but closer collaborations, strategic alliances that involve common mission goals, synchronised strategies, and common values. Staff in the two organisations begin to interact more, and many more kinds of joint activities are undertaken. Core competencies are not simply deployed but combined to create unique and high value combinations. The degree of organisational integration begins to look like a joint venture.

Picking a cause

As a person, you want to support a cause that

• Fills a need
Like anybody giving money or resources, you want to know that the organisation you're giving to is doing something worthwhile - something the community needs (and may even want), something that nobody else is already covering, something where one organisation can make a real difference to people's lives.

• Does its job
As with individual giving, you need to check that the group you're helping is honest, efficient, and effective.

As a business, you want to support a cause that is all these things and that also

• Fits in with your business
You want to make a link between your business and the community organisation you're giving to. There are many kinds of links; you can both be working in the same field (health, sports, education ) or the same region (country towns, factory suburbs, city hospitals) or with the same age group or interest group or client profile - or, if none of these things are true, you can care about the same things. The closer the match, the easier it is to work together.

• Motivates your people
Once you move beyond giving money out to such broader concepts as workplace giving or paid volunteering you need to have your workplace behind you, and that involves both speaking to your staff and listening to what they say. Many businesses throw their support behind organisations nominated by staff - schools, disability organisations, or residents' groups that staff are already involved in. If you're playing a major role in directing your benefits, you'll have to give some time over to allowing the community group you're supporting to make its case to your staff so that they get to share in a bit of that warm inner glow.

If, after going through this section, you're still having trouble finding a community group you can commit to, have a look through all the great groups listed on Our Community's Directory of Organisations. You can search for groups in your local area, or your interest area, or a combination of both.

Don't worry if you're not a nationwide colossus - everybody can play, you've got a lot to offer, and your close proximity to the grass roots gives you an extra advantage.

Backing a cause

Once you've settled on a community group to throw your support behind, you can start working out what form your support will take. Take a look at the Australian Institute for Corporate Responsibility resources (www.aicr.com.au) to explore this in detail.

In general, the best and most enduring community-business partnerships come about when each partner contributes to a mixture of the following forms of collaboration: -

• Volunteering

• In-kind donations

• Pro bono services

• Sponsorship

• Skills and knowledge sharing

• Mentoring

• Sharing infrastructure

• Community involvement programs

• Monetary donations for specific projects

• Scholarships and awards

There are many different types and levels of community-business partnerships, and many different levels of complexity, but most partnerships originally begin as low-level, toe-in-the-water arrangements that blossom and grow as the partners discover new ways they can achieve their goals together. Once you're under way, you'll want to know how to get the most out of your arrangements - and given that your customers think it's a good idea, there's a lot to get out.

To find out what you can offer a community-business partnership, and what you want from it, don't fall into the trap of over-estimating how much you can help a potential community partner. This will only result in placing a burden on your business - detracting from its core operations - while harming the work of your community partner and the overall partnership. Be realistic, but brainstorm - look over your operation for opportunities for synergy. Look for input from your staff. Weigh up your options.

At the end of the day - and at the beginning of the century - you need to be sure that both you and your community partner

• share goals, aspirations or philosophies

• agree that this project is worth doing

• agree on the objectives of the partnership

• agree that there are benefits to be expected for both parties and for the community

• are willing to work together to drive the partnership forward

• are willing to put in the time, effort and resources to meet deadlines, achieve goals, and make the partnership successful

• are flexible enough to accommodate change in the partnership when it becomes necessary

• know and respect what the other does

• trust the other's capabilities, commitment and professionalism

• treat the other as equals in the partnership

• know each party's roles and responsibilities in the prospective partnership

• have worked out processes, liaison arrangements, and reporting procedures

And then go out and work together to change the world.

Our Community, which coordinates Australian Giving Week, has teamed up with Shannon's Way and Deloitte to form the Australian Institute for Corporate Responsibility (AICR), providing cutting-edge corporate responsibility resources for large, medium and small business and community organisations. For more information visit the AICR website at www.ourcommunity.com.au/aicr.