Community-centered, employee-driven corporate social responsibility (CSR) can help organizations make strategic business decisions. Businesses benefit from understanding their community, the interests of their employees and the priorities of the customers they serve.
Empower Retirement, a financial retirement services company headquartered in the Denver metro area, leverages the benefits of its CSR practices to inform its business strategy. Incorporating the two simultaneously engages clients and increases employee retention. It works because it’s the right thing to do.
For companies looking to use CSR to inform their business models, here are a few key takeaways that guide Empower Retirement’s CSR work and its integration into Empower Retirement’s overall business strategy.
1. Invest in employees
Instead of having the C-suite guide CSR efforts, businesses should look to employees to see what issues they care about most. At Empower Retirement, philanthropic efforts, volunteerism, board placement and other CSR activities are initiated based on the nonprofits and issue areas employees express interest in.
2. CSR should underpin everything
For companies with strong CSR programs, and the data to back it up, integrating your CSR work into proposals is a key way to communicate your impact to potential clients. The Empower sales team integrates volunteer and giving data into proposals to demonstrate their thoughtful, intentional incorporation into target markets. Guided by their value of “doing the right thing,” the company seamlessly integrates its positive community impact into its business presence.
Beyond sharing CSR data in proposals, Empower leaders consider associate interests when deciding how to prioritize their own community involvement. Seeing an increase in associate giving to organizations working on the issue of food insecurity, an Empower executive decided to pursue a board seat with an organization addressing this same issue. Integration demonstrates a company’s commitment to the people in the communities they work with.
3. Impact is important
For a company to communicate its impact effectively, it’s important to ensure there are measurement tools in place that are working efficiently. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Empower worked with development teams on grantee organizations to track how their funds were being used. For organizations that didn’t have the capacity to collect data, they helped them track their impact based on available resources.
Internally, Empower assesses their grant recipients to learn more about the people they serve. When they discover homogeneity in the grants they allocate, they seek out organizations to support that fall within the overlooked category. Consistently monitoring impact improves a company’s ability to strengthen their CSR efforts and share them with the community.
Empower Retirement is intentional about incorporating CSR into their business strategy. Through these efforts, Empower — and many other companies across Colorado — have proven that caring is good for business.
Article Credits: Denver Business Journal