The BEST Moves
Pick one cause. Repeat it.
The research on corporate giving is unusually blunt: a steady, unglamorous habit beats the occasional spectacular gesture, and it is not close.
3 min read The move is free From The BEST Guide to CSR
How to run it
You can do all of this yourself, on Monday, without calling anybody.
Pick one cause with a real connection to your business or your people.
Not the newest one, not the one in the news this month. The one somebody in the building can explain in a sentence without reading off a slide.
Commit to a schedule instead of an amount.
Twice a year, every year, beats one enormous year followed by silence. The schedule is the part that compounds. The dollar figure is the part people forget.
Do it again next year with the same charity, and name them.
The second year is when the charity can plan around you and when your own people start expecting it. That expectation is the whole asset.
Publish the running total, internally at least.
A specific number your own people can say out loud is what recruits: the count, the charity, the years running. “We support various charitable causes” is a sentence that does nothing.
Watch out: If leadership will not show up to the event, pick a different cause. The research is equally blunt about that one.
Why it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
Repetition is what converts a cost into an identity. The first year is a line item. By the third it is “the thing we do,” which is the version a candidate hears about in an interview, the version a charity can plan its own year around, and the version your own people repeat without being handed a talking point. A different cause every year spends exactly the same money and compounds none of it, because nobody involved can finish the sentence “they are the company that…” That is the whole difference, and the market-value research below is what it looks like when you measure it.
“Even firms with low but consistent levels of social performance have higher market values than firms with occasional spikes of high social performance. Firms that wax and wane from extensive to limited CSR commitments do poorly.”
Research cited in The BEST Guide to CSR & Charitable Team Building
What a well-designed program moves
- Employee engagement
- +7.5%
- Employee productivity
- +13%
- Employee turnover
- −50%
Measured at organizations with a well-designed corporate responsibility program.
America’s Charities, in The BEST Guide to CSR (p. 9)
The seven rules, and the one everybody skips
Be committed, authentic, consistent, genuine, deliberate, strategic, practical. Consistent is the one that gets dropped first, and it is the one the market-value research above is actually about.
The BEST Guide to CSR & Charitable Team Building
Where this move came from
Or take the whole book.
The BEST Guide to CSR & Charitable Team Building
Why CSR events outrank everything else on the post-event survey, and the eleven things to check before you pick a partner.
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Programs that do this for you
If you would rather not run it yourself, these are built around the same job.
