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In 2007 Booz Allen Hamilton set out to help small nonprofits in the Washington, D.C. area gain access to expert advice and guidance on management and fundraising that was otherwise unattainable for them due to cost. In the four years since, the Booz Allen Hamilton Nonprofit Development Conference Series has grown exponentially and now successfully serves more than 400 unique nonprofit organizations with top tier guest speakers from around the metropolitan area who provide the sorely needed advice and guidance.
2010 Conference: Corporate Community Involvement: At a Value Crossroads?
By Rebecca Watriss, Guest Blogger
Today at the Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference, four corporate leaders reflected on the growth of community involvement from ‘checkbook philanthropy’ to relevant strategic community involvement, and on the increasing expectations involved in the evolving corporate social contract. The pressure of increased expectations comes from external sources as well as internal sources, as companies struggle to determine what needs to be done differently, and who needs to do it. This has resulted in a “big debate”: is it the community involvement professionals that need to ‘step it up,’ or the company itself, starting at an executive level?
Greg Mangum, Community Relations Manager at Capital One, and Veronica Scheubel, managing director of Scheubel Development, argued on the side of better frameworks for Community Involvement professionals, while Barbara Simic, manager of Community Investment & Volunteerism at ConocoPhillips Canada, and Patricia Hurley, senior vice president of Cone, Inc, argued that Corporate Involvement will be limited in its success until it is built into company strategy. The debate was moderated by Billy Brittingham, director of executive education at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship.
Greg argued the need for better performance management standards in the CI function, based on three main principles:
1) Establish metrics around programs to capture a sense of success
2) Look for measurable outcomes, and consistently evaluate how those outcomes are reported
3) Evaluate the metrics related to CI programs, but also evaluate programs from a business mindset of evolution and continuous improvement
Veronica offered her top 6 premises to get success and recognition in a CI function:
- Be very clear about the purpose
- Be really close to the company’s core competencies (like FedEx’s presence in Haiti, using their logistics people to help)
- Have a sharp focus on leadership in community involvement (like IBM)
- Recognize the need to strategically and visibly address root causes of public concern
- Craft excellent partnerships and collaborative entrepreneurship
- Prove and show real success and real business impact (i.e. Increase in revenue)
Barbara argued that CI programs should not be considered philanthropy, but rather, strategic contributions. She articulated the need for company leadership to shift the focus of CI programs from being personal decisions to being company decisions, and to include CI programs in the overarching company goals and corporate policy. And at the same time, she expressed the importance of elevating the CI position to a decision-making role that is backed by leadership.
Pat proposed that organizations must consistently resource the function of CI in terms of staffing and budgeting.
1) Integrate CI into the strategy and culture – make it part of the company
2) Put organizational policies and procedures in place, and then execute on them.
3) Take CI out of a silo – engage motivating drivers
- Understanding – what is CI trying to achieve, what situation is being addressed?
- Engagement – once there’s understanding, ask people to engage in the process, engage with other people internally and externally
- Ownership – only by instilling personal responsibility in employees can the CI initiatives flourish
4) Measure your results – “what gets measured matters”
Round-table debate results
Interestingly, the audience observed that the ‘arguments’ for each side really amounted to the same thing. There is a clear need for more structure implementing CI programs and in measuring the results, and the best outcome would be the creation of a virtuous cycle that would both drive and enable the evolution of CI programs within an organization.
Participants shared a few other key insights as they reported back on their table discussions.
1) No matter how it ‘should’ be, the reality is that CI will have to lobby within the organization, even if leadership is on board. There is a need to find, and leverage, the ‘hot-button’ issues and passions of people within an organization.
2) In regards to employee involvement, there is, and will continue to be, tension between the causes that the company wants to pursue on a strategic level, and the causes that the employees want to get involved in. The priorities of each group can be polar opposites, so CI professionals might be charged with finding a balance. A few participants shared how their organizations had balanced those considerations. In one instance, a company found a successful balance via an initial focus on employee activities, followed by a layering in of more strategically motivated programs over time. In another situation, a company balanced the tension by actively supporting and enabling employee-initiated programs, while simultaneously building strategic community involvement.
3) There will always be complexity in balancing the expectations of multiple stakeholders (executives vs. employees vs. community / HR vs. marketing vs. operations), but those in a CI function can play a convening role. They are in a unique position as a relatively neutral party with connections to the community and to the company, and can collaborate and see similarities between groups that might not ordinarily work together.
