Community giving

Most of our clients support community and charitable organisations and we have worked closely with them over many years to help develop their community strategy, set up governance arrangements, make relationships and even manage projects. We've seen the other side too, working with charities and groups of charities on corporately-funded projects.

This experience has given us a particular perspective; that there is still some way to go to make corporate giving as rigorous, effective and well thought-out as other CR topics. In our view, there needs to be a clearer focus on the results - who gets what. What benefits has the company got from the project? And - even more importantly - what has been the impact on the charity and those it serves. It is surprisingly hard to give away £1m effectively - choosing the right projects, defining what you are trying to achieve and following through properly. We have enjoyed thinking these issues through with clients and setting up - or re-vamping - community investment programmes.

One measure (but by no means the only one) of corporate engagement is the scale of the programme. We recently researched the giving levels in the FTSE100, comparing our results against the last published Giving list from 2006.

For more information, please get in touch with Simon Hodgson.