Shall we dance?
Tom Levitt’s perspective on effective management of business partnerships
KEY POINTS
- The corporate need for effective CSR is a huge opportunity
- ISO 26000 sets out the right areas of engagement
- Charities should be proactive in partner selection
What do the following eight charities have in common: Newlife, FareShare, Shelter, Oxfam, Breakthrough Breast Cancer, The Prostate Cancer Charity, the Woodland Trust and WWF?
Answer: they are all supported by Marks & Spencer. The first three receive returned and surplus goods as new, the last six benefit from cash raised from customer recycling of electronic goods through the stores. In the Oxfam Clothes Exchange scheme people donate used M&S clothes to their high street charity shops in return for a £5 M&S voucher. The scheme has already netted the charity £3m since 2008.
It is easy to see how those charities benefit from the arrangement; it is more important than ever for them to diversify their funding base. But apart from customer loyalty and good publicity, how does the company benefit? It reduces the company’s dumping to landfill in line with M&S’ comprehensive Plan A green portfolio and it makes the staff feel good.
These are not to be sniffed at as pressures on landfill mount and costs rise prohibitively. A recent EU report confirms what we all thought: that a company with a reputation for good corporate responsibility attracts a high calibre of recruits and employee retention is less of an issue than it is elsewhere. So why don’t they all do it?
Corporate social responsibility
There are perhaps more charity partnerships with business than you might think: Macmillan with Boots and RBS Group, Coca Cola with WWF, even Greenpeace with McDonalds – all well established organisations, all big names. Some, like M&S and Unilever, are quite promiscuous with their affections whilst others stick to one charity partner at a time. Yet the days when such activities were merely philanthropic gestures are over.
You can bet that when a big name company gets into bed with a big name charity there is something in it for both of them – and why not? Win-win is surely the name of the game.
There are deeper issues here than money and reputation, though these cannot be ignored. There was already a growing trend of high public expectations of big business before the banking crisis. That episode undermined public confidence in the establishment (on top of the MPs’ expenses debacle) but it also turned good corporate citizenship into an even stronger public aspiration.
In November last year the British Standards Institute published ISO 26000. A timely reminder of what is expected of the socially responsible corporation, this new British and international standard had been years in development. Building on a CSR movement that has long been growing, it said ‘Look! These are the right things to do and the public have a reasonable expectation that you should do them’.
Six ‘right things to do’
The ‘right things to do’ fall into six categories: human rights, labour practices, the environment, fair operating practices, consumer issues and community involvement. In the case of the environment, the private sector has realised that there is a business case for investment to save energy, carbon emissions, dwindling oil resources and costs. Many are now realising that the word ‘sustainable’ has a wider meaning than simply green or carbon neutral. These companies have taken a ‘triple-bottom-line’ approach of economic, social and environmental sustainability.
The six categories of social responsibility are all fields in which charities work. Five are also regulated by law in the UK to a greater or lesser degree but one is not: that of community involvement. This happens to be the field in which more charities work than any of the others. And engagement, by definition, is not something companies can do alone.
Charity partnership opportunities
It is my case, therefore, that all companies, large and small, and public sector bodies too should engage in community involvement through the medium of charity partnerships. Both companies and charities do best what they know best. Finding a complementary field in which to bring that know-how together should not be difficult.
Essentially there are three ways in which a company can support a charity:
- Fundraising – cash, goods or services donated by the company, or cash raised by employees’ initiatives, or both.
- Volunteering – as groups or individuals, organised centrally or adhoc, in work time or outside it, low skill (giving time and effort) or high skill (where an employee’s talents are matched to a charity’s needs).
- Other humanitarian ways – from a fair trade procurement policy to an ongoing strategic commitment to a community or a cause.
A company whose supply chain starts in the developing world may choose a development charity to partner and, in the spirit of ISO 26000, use contract compliance to ensure that ethical practices pervade that supply chain. A local company might focus its activity on the estate where most of its workforce lives, perhaps with the residents’ association as its charity partner. The Post Office reserves apprenticeships for young people leaving careat Barnardos, building relationships with them before they join, reaping their loyalty and helping them hit the ground running as employees.
The fact that concepts like social return on investment (SROI) and creating shared value now exist shows that these ideas have both substance and traction.
Fundraising
Children in Need and Comic Relief are ideal occasions around which employee fundraising can help build a team ethos. But where these events are the entirety of fundraising practice, they rarely produce outcomes that are tangible or ongoing – or sustainable, in the new parlance. Even a ‘charity of the year’ approach is unproductive if, perhaps by engaging all employees in a vote, a recipient that is not a good match to the company mission is selected. The time of other charities who have prepared detailed but unsuccessful pitches for the role is wasted.
READ International, the student charity which takes surplus school books to Tanzania, receives a third of its annual income as gifts in kind from UK companies. Veolia, the waste company, collects books for them and recycles what they don’t need. Big Yellow Storage provides space to store and catalogue the books before DHL ships them out; and each summer British Airways subsidises flights for the students who will distribute them to African schools.
Volunteering
A bank recently focused its advertising campaign on the 15,000 days of community service its staff contribute to their communities each year, which worked out to be less than half a day each. BT staff on the other hand, give 48,000 days and Boots 84,000. Whitehall civil servants and employees of many major companies are allowed up to three days of paid leave each year to do voluntary work. In Swindon 15 local companies and 60 charities share an employee volunteering pool of opportunities. HR managers in several companies regard sending managers off on a VSO volunteering experience for a few months in the developing world as a useful career development tool.
Thirty major companies in London use the services of Pilotlight, a charity which matches charities and social enterprises in need of specific business advice and mentoring with volunteer managers from industry. It has given new life to around 90 client groups in this way so far and allowed managers to have new experiences and develop new skills.
Strategic commitments
In Birmingham, Cadburys have a long-term commitment to Business Action on Homelessness. Volunteering, donating, employee fundraising and other activities enable the company to plan activity with charities and others in the housing sector in a strategic manner.
In South Africa, Nestlé works with local voluntary organisations in the townships to provide preschool care, soup kitchens and health advice within the communities where their employees live. Within a short time of starting this there was an increase in the life expectancy of new recruits, who had been dying of AIDS and tuberculosis.
Time for action
Charities should not sit around waiting to be asked to dance. Who are their local companies seeing right now? Are they wanting a flirtation, an affair or a relationship? Whose combination of interests, experience and GSOH might make the most fruitful dalliance? How inconvenient might this potential partner prove to be, or how reliable? How much will they spend on the ring?
Companies need to take CSR seriously and decide which department will be responsible for it. If it goes to a stand-alone unit or the media team, they shouldn’t be surprised if the good-looking charity in the corner turns them down; linking with the HR department or procurement people is more likely to attract a second glance. Is there an obvious suitor in the form of a defined local community? Have they met the chaperones, the councillors, residents’ association, the local volunteer bureau? What about a national charity or cause that might use any surplus product to good effect?
Sector 4
Welcome to sector 4. It is the space in between the other three sectors, the space where relationships and partnerships happen. It is where bridges are built and meaningful partnerships are forged; a cross between Dateline and Relate.
The world outside your organisation is here too – hopefully. Those companies and charities that engage with it positively, taking appropriate partnership opportunities when they arise, will be those who will thrive in the long term and whose consciences will allow them to sleep most soundly at night.
Author: Tom Levitt
Tom Levitt is a freelance writer and consultant, trading as Sector 4 Focus, working on business/ charity partnerships.
He was previously the Labour MP for High Peak from 1997 to 2010.
He chaired the third sector’s all party group, the Community Development Foundation and the advisory body on third sector commissioning.
Tom has been an RNID trustee and a ministerial aide at DfID and currently chairs a working party on a Compact on inter-charity relations.
Denise Lillya, 16/06/2011
Shall We Dance? The argument for partnerships is compelling for the many reasons outlined by Tom Levitt in his article, (Shall We Dance – May 2011), but with reservations, not least of which is that fewer charities will benefit from a company’s contribution (their giving is obviously finite), and those that do benefit are likely to be the bigger, more prestigious type. Corporates excel at marketing and have the infrastructure and resources to make a ‘dalliance’ with them very appealing. Charities too have their allure, they have the support of the public - making them somewhat mysterious and particularly attractive to companies for the customer base they might reach, and any liaison with them will have the added bonus for those companies wanting to make known their ‘responsible’ side. However, if the government truly wishes to alter the balance of this society, to make it a BIGger and better one, the way to make real headway in redressing these exclusive matches, where only the sexiest protagonists find a partner, is to make a serious effort to encourage companies to give a much higher percentage of their pre-tax profits in cash, (regardless of their in-kind contribution), so that their philanthropy, (which I see as giving from a distance), can be used for charitable purposes, managed and delivered by those who know the sector best and who are directly involved – charities. Companies benefit in many ways from their partnerships with voluntary organisations, from good publicity to social return on investment, to the actual saving of money. Charities too, can benefit a great deal from a mutual attraction, a flirtation, a dalliance. Yes, let’s dance, but let’s not pretend we are soul-mates; let’s not quite get into bed together.
Ian Agnew, 16/05/2011
I agree with a lot of what Tom Levitt has said in this article and I am very keen to see more partnerships between the private and charity sectors. The examples Tom uses are very enouraging, but I'd also like to make a plea for the thousands of small charities that don't have the brand awareness of the big players like Oxfam, WWF etc. but which do amazing work (as Tom has mentioned in the article). We're working to help private sector companies engage much more widely around a cause, reaching right out to the local, grass-roots organsations in the community - where private companies can deliver a greater impact for their input, but without perhaps the same big-bang recognition of partnering with a brand charity. There are other ways the the two sectors can also partner; and our business is an example of this. DOL is a joint venture social enterprise owned equally by two charities and a private company www.digitaloutreach.org.uk