Integrating cause marketing into your company’s strategic core makes for the right start toward building a triple bottom line business.
How do you decide what cause or causes to support? You have essentially two alternatives for this internal process: top-down or management-driven, and bottom-up or employee-driven. What are their pros and cons for you as a company? What’s the optimal way to decide on the direction of your strategic cause marketing?
Management-driven cause marketing
Because cause marketing must be strategic, it makes sense for those who shape strategy to set the direction your company’s community involvement will take. In the top-down option, your company’s head or heads — owner, CEO, board, management team — decide what cause or organization the company will support in alignment with your overall business and its goals.
Larger companies have a separate position or department to deal with selecting specific organizations or projects within the defined focus area. Others will relegate that role to their PR or marketing department. In small businesses the cause will be one that is close to the decision-maker’s heart, for one reason or another.
Strategic alignment with a cause relevant to your business benefits your company, as it creates a consistent affiliation with the cause in the minds of your stakeholders, including your employees. A company-wide cause allows employees to feel a part of something bigger than themselves, and focuses everyone’s effort in a single direction. Focus and consistency are good: flip-flopper is a bad word for a reason.
The top-down decision-making process comes with drawbacks. By default and most importantly, it excludes employees from having a say in your company’s community involvement. The decision on the company cause may appear like just another management decision with everything that typically comes with it: resentment, lack of engagement, and reluctant or unenthusiastic execution. It may also limit the pool of available talent for your company to people who support your cause.
Employee-driven community involvement
To compensate for the principal disadvantage of management-driven decision-making on causes, many companies delegate cause marketing decisions to their employees. Some companies create cross-functional teams or committees that decide what cause or organization the company will finance. Others simply allow their employees to support whatever they want and then chip in: examples include matching employees’ donations, offering paid time-off for volunteering, or making cash grants to match employees’ volunteer hours.
Giving your employees the power to decide what causes to support offers you a top-notch opportunity to make your employees feel they, their say, and their work matters. Rather than imposing the decision on them, it positions you and the company as the support platform for their decisions. It reverses the power dynamic within your company while confining it in an area that has little immediate effect on your core business.
Bottom-up decisions diffuse the focus of your overall strategic cause marketing. Often decisions are made on an annual basis: the charitable committee selects a nonprofit or several nonprofits for the year, and repeats the process every 12 months. If every employee supports whatever they want, you may fail to create strategic alignment with a cause for your company as a whole.
Blending top-down and bottom-up approaches to community involvement
Is it possible to combine the best of management- and employee-driven cause marketing for a better solution?
You can align your company with a strategically relevant cause and open the process of deciding which particular organization(s) to support to a cross-functional team of employees.
You can support a cause as a company, perhaps implementing the above two-tier process, and support your employees in supporting what’s close to their heart as well.
Empowering employees to be engaged in the community can be a cause in itself. At the top you make the strategic decisions to 1) be involved in the community as a company, and to 2) align your company with your employees’ charitable or community interests. Your employees will drive your company’s community involvement. I believe this to be the optimal option from the social sustainability standpoint. It allows you to be both employee- and community-centric, and it offers your company focus and consistency.
What do you think? How does your company approach making decisions on causes to support?
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Image credits: marfis75 and MarcelGermain
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I work with JohnsonDiversey who recently announced a tripling of the emissions reduction goals (from 8% – 25% by 2013). Part of the reason the company was able to achieve this is that the employees became inspired to design their own changes to help reduce GHG emissions. There’s more on that here – including some footage of CEO Curt Johnson at COP15 talking about the changes in strategy and POV the company is making. I think that a combined effort from management and employees is the best way.