1st Edition

Corporate Community Involvement The Definitive Guide to Maximizing Your Business' Societal Engagement

By Nick Lakin, Veronica Scheubel Copyright 2014

    "We need to do Community Involvement better – we know we're spending millions each year on charitable causes; how can we find out what is really effective and what people will appreciate us for? Who should we partner with? How can we make a real difference in society and help our business?"

    Companies around the world are trying to answer these questions. Many are asking the same questions even as, collectively, they continue to spend billions on their communities. How do they know which activities are really worthwhile? Building on the authors' own extensive global experience at Nokia and E.ON, as well as the experience of many other experts in the field, this book offers the first-ever "how to" roadmap for managers on the comprehensive implementation of strategic Community Involvement inside their companies. It is designed to be practical, for those who want to act upon what they have read. It will fill a long-neglected niche as a day-to-day reference guide for practitioners. Corporate Community Involvement demonstrates what to do and how to do it. The advice is backed up by inspiring interviews with best-in-class practitioners from businesses such as Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Ericsson, and Deutsche Bank and leading international Corporate Responsibility and Community Involvement experts.

     The book highlights proven best-practice approaches, effective methods, and concise tools to help managers "get there faster" and "get it right first time." The core of the book is a step-by-step guide to developing and implementing a comprehensive and successful approach to Corporate Community Involvement. It shows how to: conduct a current state analysis and devise a strategy, organize staffing and budgets, integrate Corporate Community Involvement throughout the business and create high-profile programs, partner across sectors, measure and evaluate results, communicate successful activities, and overcome challenges. Corporate Community Involvement has an international perspective: the models and principles advocated are adaptable anywhere in the world. Also, it is designed to have as much relevance to a small or medium-sized enterprise as to a multinational.

    The book outlines the history and future of Corporate Community Involvement, explaining the business context and why companies need to manage their programs strategically. It also distinguishes between the growing lexicon of terminologies and provides clear definitions of terms such as "philanthropy", "sponsorship", "Corporate Citizenship", "Corporate Responsibility" and "Sustainability", advising when they are appropriate and how each can add value to corporate activities. This will be an indispensible resource for those working at the interface between business and the community. New or developing practitioners will learn from both the successes and failures of those before them. Representatives from other sectors, notably government, international agencies, NGOs, and academia, will come to understand companies' internal requirements for cross-sector collaboration programs in the community better. And students interested in this field will be better equipped to start careers.

    Preface

    Introduction

    1. How to develop the right Community Involvement strategy

    2. Company roles, responsibilities, and skills in Community Involvement

    3. "How much does it cost?" How to budget for Corporate Community Involvement

    4. How to manage corporate giving, foundations and disaster relief

    5. Integrating Community Involvement into your core business: How to work with Operations, Marketing, and HR

    6. Make it stand out: How to create and implement leading Community Involvement programs

    7. How to manage cross-sector collaboration

    8. The power of employee involvement

    9. "You can't manage what you don't measure": How to measure, evaluate, and report Community Involvement effectively

    10. "But why haven't we heard about this before?" Communicating your Community Involvement effectively

     11. "I knew it would be worthwhile": Overcoming challenges and instigating change

    Biography

    Lakin, Nick; Scheubel, Veronica

    As the sub-title indicates, Lakin and Scheubel's book provides a guide on businesses engagement with communities, what they label as, triple-win situations (benefiting employees, communities, and the company). The book is quite easy to follow and understand; its structure will appeal to practitioners who are involved in community engagement, corporate responsibility, communications, corporate social responsibility, and even to some corporate sustainability officers. The authors draw from their personal experiences in Nokia and E.ON, and complement their knowledge with narrative examples from one-on-one interviews with experts from companies (such as Shell, Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, and Ericsson) and a collection of management theories and models. This results in a comprehensive list of stakeholders (e.g. communities, government, employees, and consumers) that the company may be involved with, as well as the roles that the company departments (such as Human Resources, Marketing, and Operations) could play in such activities. The authors also offer a discussion on employee involvement within the community and how the company could facilitate this, whether it may be through employee volunteering, matched time, or matched funding. ... In summary, the book provides an easy to read and understand guide/manual of corporate community involvement, mainly directed to practitioners and readers who have had little experience with the topic. - Journal of Cleaner Production 18 (2010) - Rodrigo Lozano, Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Le |

    | With all this investment in CCI, wouldn't you think companies would spend a little more time and energy actually planning their CCI program so that it delivers full strategic value rather than just a theoretical reputation boost? That's where Nick Lakin and Veronica Scheubel come in. Their book, Corporate Community Involvement: The Definitive Guide to Maximising your Business' Societal Engagement is the most comprehensive guide ever written to help companies and their internal CCI leaders do just this ... The detail in this book is incredible, providing models, tools, frameworks, checklists, definitions, assessments and advice at every step of the way ... This book speaks head on to those charged with developing CCI programs. For the novices, it holds their hand at each twist and turn. For the more experienced, it answers all the questions they have come across in their efforts to date, and provides new insights and approaches. There is much in this book that can help CCI Managers do it better. If they use it, we all benefit. Full review - CSRwire, 20 October 2010 - Elaine Cohen |

    | ... The book's 11 easy-to-read chapters present the readers with every feature of Community Involvement that one deals with in a company. The book covers topics such as devising a strategy, budgeting and staffing programmes, partnering across sectors, involving employees, measuring, evaluating and reporting, leveraging results in internal and external communications as well as networking and influencing. An interview with an experienced practitioner is presented in the opening parts of most of the chapters; this presents the topic while also sharing a best-practice example of Corporate Community Involvement in action. Each chapter is then enriched with tips, tools and hands-on advice to deepen the reader's understanding. Case studies and inspiring stories portrayed come from numerous and world renowned corporations such as Microsoft, TNT, Siemens, Betapharm, Ericsson, Telefonica, Coca Cola, HSBC, BMW, The Body Shop, FedEx, Intel, McDonald, Nike, Unilever, IBM and UPS, including companies where the writers have served. The book offers the readers support in planning and executing a comprehensive and detailed approach to Community Involvement. It is indeed a worthwhile read for corporations who need to engage with their stakeholders in society. Full review - CSR International, 28 November 2010