Transforming Charity: How Companies Are Trading Simple Gifts for Real Results

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The importance of giving is an immutable reality. Beyond any sense of moral obligation, building strong communities and good public perception of your organization just makes sense. However, the way that companies choose to give money to charities is currently undergoing some transformational changes on a large scale. Businesses are beginning to embrace the fact that it is simply not enough to give. The goal of giving, some sort of result or metric of success, needs to be brought to the forefront and elevated in importance. Traditionally, corporate social responsibility (CSR) was defined by the willingness to donate. Today, more industry leaders understand that great CSR is less concerned with self-congratulatory patterns and should focus exclusively on making a difference. This shift in thinking is already impacting how companies donate.

Attach Strings and Be Willing to Pull Them

Blindly donating money to a cause may be motivated by the purest intentions, but it leaves very little room for oversight or accountability. Rather than conceptualizing donations as throwing money at a social problem, companies are beginning to prefer philanthropy as a partnership. When supporting a charity, identify one major objective that can be realistically achieved in a pre-determined amount of time. Allocate all resources to reaching this goal on a diminishing basis, with the understanding the charity should need less the closer it moves towards success. This partnership model should motivate everyone to stay invested, financially and otherwise, to work efficiently and effectively. The standard question in business is how to get the most value out of the smallest investment. The same framework can be applied to social improvement. The more intelligently and conservatively we solve one problem, the more resources we have available to allocate to another.

Invest in Change, Not Charity

Social enterprises and even other businesses can sometimes be much more successful at getting results than traditional charities. Depending on the issue at hand, be able to accurately weigh the strengths and weaknesses of all the organizations, nonprofit and otherwise, tackling the problem. Give charitable dollars to the people who are doing the best work, regardless of what sector they operate in. Charities do not have any kind of monopoly on social change. In this day and age, there is little respect for doing things the way they have always been done for no good reason. Both modern business and contemporary society champion the power of innovation. Be willing to think outside of the box to make the world a better place.

Why We Fall in Love with Philanthropy: Three Tips To Encourage Charitable Behavior

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Regardless of your workplace, certain buzzwords seem to be completely unavoidable. Empty phrases and ambiguous idioms like “think outside the box,” “pick your brain,” and “synergy” permeate office conversation everywhere. However, there is one business buzzword that is not only incredibly meaningful, but also increasingly important – corporate social responsibility.
Corporate social responsibility or CSR is a form of policy that involves self-regulation in terms of a company’s impact in the world beyond the black-and-white mechanism of demand-supply economics. This mindset, that a for-profit organization exists to do more than just make money, should be at the heart of every firm, regardless of its field. The good news is that this exact concept is, in fact, more mainstream than ever before.

Advanced Cognitive Enhancement (ACE) Clinics has embraced the value of giving back to the community from the start. The very services we provide are overtly geared to improving the lives of our patients. It is only logical that this commitment to making positive impacts on our clients extend to the way we behave as an organization. There are a number of reasons that you too, as an individual or as an entrepreneur, should want to do the same. Business donate for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is that it just makes sense. It enjoys sustainable success, a company should do what it can to ensure its community is also successful. People, specifically, have a larger variety of excellent reasons to donate time or money to good causes. Here are three critical things to remember when encouraging your patrons, friends, or family members to give back.

Give from the Heart

Humans are an emotional species. That is not to say we cannot also be thoroughly intellectual and logical in many scenarios. However, time and again you will find that the heart, not the head, inspires the most dramatic and immediate action. Every nonprofit has a responsibility to prove its expert stewardship of donated money and management of volunteers’ time, but there needs to be more than just numbers to the story. An emotional appeal is often the most impactful. To encourage selfless behavior, like donations, you need to provide ample context. It is not enough to simply outline how giving to your cause will benefit the cause – you need to give people a reason to feel amazing about doings so.

Giving Is Intimate

Because the largest benefit of behaving charitably is so emotional, it is also a deeply personal act. The donor should be at the center of every conversation about encouraging a philanthropic endeavor. Explicitly, the obvious focus should be on the ways in which someone’s time or money will benefit a given cause. However, the reason the person in a position to help should care and why he or she should feel good about doing so needs to also be clearly evident. Giving back can be empowering, in that it illustrates how we have the capacity to change the world for the better. It can also be beneficial in terms of networking or establishing someone as a community stakeholder who leads by example. Especially for a company’s leadership, philanthropy is an excellent way incorporate personal values into your workplace.

Give Immediately

One of the more unique attributes of charitable behavior is that, in many ways, its benefit is sudden. Emotional states are fleeting, so if you have clients or staff members willing to give, they need the opportunity to do so immediately. Any conversation regarding the value of giving to a specific cause or charity needs to conclude with a tangible call to action and avenue to actually do something. In this modern era of constant external stimuli, it can be easy to lose someone’s attention or emotional investment, so when you have the chance to convert someone’s support into tangible activity, you need to capitalize on it.

Regardless of your where you work or how you spend your personal time, there is something you can do to make the world a better place. Encouraging the people around you to do the same is a great privilege. Remember these three tips for how to guide people to take charitable action and your community will surely be better off for it.