Researching the Business Case

April 01, 1994

Many companies now explain their community involvement activities in terms of the ‘business case’. Along with this has come the need to demonstrate success in business terms, such as an improved corporate reputation, a better trained and motivated workforce, lower staff turnover, even increased sales.

Despite this, there remains only limited hard evidence to demonstrate these business benefits. Likewise advice on best practice methods to organise CCI activities for competitive advantage is not broadly available. In response a group of leading companies, consultants, academics and writers in the field have formed the CCI Research Forum, convened by David Grayson, Managing Director of the BitC Business Strategy Group.

In an Occasional Paper just published by Community Affairs Briefing(1), he lists such research as is currently available in the UK and highlights the most pressing needs for further research, based on ten likely future trends in CCI:

increasing focus on business as well as community objectives;

further integration with other business functions like human resource development, marketing and purchasing;

employees becoming a more critical part of the strategy, in terms of employee volunteering;

corporations increasingly willing to translate their experience of community issues into public policy ideas and then to lobby opinion informers and policy makers.

some signs (too few yet) of moving from isolated initiatives into a holistic approach – recognising that tackling housing refurbishment, jobs training or anti-drugs programmes in isolation will have only minimal impact.

education and training, increasingly linked to social cohesion, – being the single biggest issue for CCI in the ’90s

communication to all stakeholders, internal and external, becoming more powerful and important

continued movement away from simple cheque writing exercises to having more long-term shared destiny relationships with community partners of choice, in parallel with long-term partnerships with suppliers

greater internationalisation

increased professionalism and evaluation

With these as likely trends, David Grayson offers a comprehensive list of questions to which community affairs managers need to get answers if the business case is to be substantiated. Among the main ones are:

How do we ensure that the community does not get forgotten in all our efforts to establish relevance to the business, so that all activities which claim to be for the community are genuinely so?

What is the best practice in communicating CCI to a company’s various internal and external stakeholders?

Can we develop a CCI equivalent of The Economist’s Most Admired Companies, assessing issues like communication, employee volunteering, integration with business objectives, leadership, nurturing not-for-profit partners’ capacity, and so forth?

How does a company choose the target audiences for its CCI – government, general public, employees, local communities, etc – weighing their relative importance? How do you measure the benefits to a company from different CCI programmes in terms of the reaction of different target audiences?

Does having a CCI function ‘ghetto-ise’ CCI or help it to be spread through the company? What are the critical success factors in terms of how the CCI function is structured vis-?-vis the rest of the company?

What are the tools to measure the benefits against specific business objectives such as recruitment, development or retention of staff? What about CCI support for product brands?

If there are inconsistencies between a company’s CCI and its mainstream business practices (e.g. supporting small business support organisations but being a consistent late-payer; or environmental CCI by a persistent polluter) does it make the CCI worthless in terms of business benefit?

Is multi-sector networking at a local community level more effective than substantial cash/in-kind commitment to national appeals? How can the added value of different scales of CCI activity measured?

Companies will need to answer these and other questions with hard data, carefully researched and evaluated, if the business case is to be made with conviction.

Corporate Community Involvement: Learning from the British Research – based on a paper presented to the 1993 Business Leaders Conference, organised by Boston College Center for Corporate Community Relations in Chicago on October 8 1993.

Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 15 – April, 1994

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