The key to unlocking the true corporate opportunity…
Many of us in the third sector have our own views on what business leaders are generally like.
Often, it’s an archetype, a combination of personal experience and folklore, with generalisations subconsciously added from popular fiction and media portrayals, which nevertheless, for some business leaders is probably fairly accurate.
Some businesses are driven entirely by profits, and some leaders entirely by money. This is true. But in my personal experience this is a surprisingly small minority, and a declining one at that.
Most business owners and leaders are far more complex, and what drives them far more nuanced than the prevailing image, and they’re often far more socially conscious than we might be given to expect. And not just the philanthropic outliers: the Cadbury’s, Roddick’s, Timpson’s of this world. Those are merely the tip of the true corporate opportunity iceberg.
Those of us who work widely across both sectors have seen a much more widespread evolution in thinking across the board, and see the 2019 statement by the US Business Roundtable “redefining the purpose of corporations”, as neither a cutting-edge herald of what is to come, nor as an attempt to superficially “wokewash” the corporate sector, but as a bunch of multinationals finally catching on to a trend that had been rapidly leaving them behind.
Even so, that statement is an important signal. It demonstrates that the desire to migrate along the ethical acronym continuum, from CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) through ESG (Environment Social and Governance) to TBL (Triple Bottom Line) and beyond, has now moved from a few early adopters to mainstream currency, and is becoming the default orientation for business.
And that opens up big opportunities for any charity with a social or environmental mission.
In the past, a charity’s engagement with the business sector was broadly about three things. The money: whether charity of the week or the year, or chance to co-brand, raise awareness and pick up some supporters and donors.
The skills and resources: experienced executives as trustees, technical specialists for pro-bono projects, donations of software and equipment and the like. And often overlooked but potentially most influential, as a route to impact: as employers, service providers, polluters, and so on.
The problem with CSR though, was that it was always an add-on to a business; a nice-to-have with a modest budget and little aspiration. Which is why the smart charities worked out they had to get past the CSR boundary to access the bigger corporate opportunity.
Getting into operations, customer service, the marketing divisions of a business; offering compelling propositions; educating corporate buyers on the unmissable opportunities of deeper collaboration; selling the value and negotiating an equitable share of it; this was the way, they discovered, to unlock the true potential of genuine corporate partnerships.
And this is the opportunity that the mainstreaming of social purpose in business can open up more widely for the sector. As the CSR gloss gets increasingly replaced by more tangible frameworks like ESG, with investor-facing levels of visibility and measurability, those barriers between social impact and business strategy start to erode.
The opportunities to engage with, advise, and guide corporate ambitions, practices and activities, will increasingly emerge across the business landscape. But only for those charities that can straddle the cultural divide, who can relate their change to others’ corporate objectives, who are fluent in the language and concepts of commerce.
The charities who grasp these opportunities will be those who can think inside their new customers’ heads; who genuinely “get”, understand, and can empathise with business leaders. Those are the charities poised to unlock the true corporate opportunity.
But to do this, we need to unpick our preconceptions and dispense with the stereotypes and archetypes.
Because, if we want to take the opportunity, if we want to access the income, impact and influence we could gain from a new generation of corporate partnerships, we will need to meet business leaders where they are, and take the time to educate and lead them to where they need to be, using language they’re familiar with, concepts they can engage with, and outcomes they can connect with on an economic, emotional and personal level.
In short, we need to get past our prejudices and learn to see them as the individuals that they are.