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Get your people to contribute to CSR

Shifting your organization’s mindset is not an easy task, but there is one thing going in your favor: you don’t have to change employee behavior, you just have to appeal to them in the right way—remember, the majority are already interested in giving.

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The biggest challenge is not trying to change hundreds or thousands of employees’ actions, it’s simply aligning your company’s leadership to believe in this approach.

Here are 8 tips to help you do exactly that:

1: Build the business case

There are at least seven research-backed reasons that companies should engage in more social good activities, and five science-backed reasons why giving is good for people. Choose the imperative that is most likely to appeal to your company’s management, build a business case, and earn a budget. Reviewing Deloitte’s research on social impact corporate archetypes can further help you establish a case.

2: Get executive support

One of the most important elements of any social responsibility program is executive support, and this is as true for giving as it is for volunteering. Not only should executives promote these programs, but they should actively participate in them whenever possible. Lastly, they should personally and publicly recognize top contributors. Salesforce’s Mark Benioff provides an excellent example of this, and is even known for stopping employees in the hall to show their latest status of volunteer hours. And once enough hours are volunteered, Salesforce gives the employees $1,000 to donate to the cause of their choice.

3. Engage mid-level managers

Regardless of your company’s policies, mid-level managers are a key stakeholder that needs to be engaged. They’ll feel the true impact of people engaging in social good activities, and usually not in a good way as this audience is most likely to feel the pains of a loss of hours. To overcome this, managers should be encouraged to promote giving activities, celebrated when they do it, and be consistently educated on the long-term benefits of engaging their team and individual employees in social good activities. Most importantly, company leaders should seek to engage this population in social good activities so that they can see the benefits first-hand.

4: Be authentic

The bigger the company, the more likely it is to have skeptical employees. It’s important that companies be open and honest about the strategic intent of their social responsibility programs. MySkills4Afrika, a program by Microsoft, places Microsoft volunteers across Africa to support startups, schools, governments, nonprofits, and even Microsoft partners with skill and capacity building efforts. Microsoft is honest that this program has a triple-bottom line: benefiting social causes, employee desires, and also its own business.

5: Provide your employees with the right tools

People will leverage their volunteering and giving activities for different reasons, and they won’t use tools that are hard to find or complex. At a minimum, the technology powering your giving and volunteerism programs should be simple to use and flexible so that every employee can give money and time the way they want, and to the causes they want.

6: Think transformationally, not transactionally

Processing a match and cutting a check? That’s transactional. Showing people the true impact of their work and getting them to reflect on what they’ve learned? That’s transformational. As Chris Jarvis of Realized Worth shares, “You know that quote ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.’ It’s the same with transactional and transformational giving. Ask employees to give and you’ll see a handful of one-off transactions, but empower employees to learn about, connect with and give to the causes that interest them, and you’ll have yourself a team of employees championing your company’s community involvement and cause initiatives.” By designing programs that truly empower employees, you will inspire people to reach their full potential, creating more meaningful experiences that also benefit the company.

7: Go all-in on communication

All too often, companies introduce programs only to find that employees aren’t aware they exist. A well-planned communication strategy that involves executives and enthusiastic employees from all levels will massively increase awareness of your company’s programs. The right tool will also ensure that you capture the necessary stories and triple-bottom-line impact data to maintain top-down marketing and PR efforts, while also giving you plenty of content for social media.

8: Close the feedback loop

One of the biggest changes to fully embrace a HCD approach to corporate giving is the feedback loop. For their own benefits, companies typically will brag about the hours and dollars they gave, rather than hero the employees that actually made those donations. To fully embrace these programs, companies must show that the giving efforts actually made an impact by showing personal stories, and highlight the giver as the hero, not the company. According to Tim Mohin, CSR leader at AMD, “While it may be more difficult, CSR Leaders are far better off measuring results than activities. When it comes to volunteerism and philanthropy, the results we need to measure are employee engagement and the benefits the company provides to communities.”

With all the buzz around the benefits of corporate responsibility, it’s easy to understand why companies have implemented programs without enough due process—just like nonprofits are notorious for not operating like businesses, businesses are notorious for not factoring in the human-elements of their products and people. However, new research, data, and case studies now prove the business value of human centered initiatives the benefits their own businesses, their people, and the world at large.

This article was taken from here.

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