Five steps to building a strong corporate giving program

Create a corporate giving program that aligns with goals and engages the community.

One of the most important things you can do for your business is to establish a corporate giving program. This type of program offers multiple benefits: it can increase your exposure and reputation in the community; it can boost employee morale, making it easier to recruit and retain top talent; it can have tax benefits; and it can provide you an opportunity to partner with your customers, suppliers and community, which is always a good thing.

Engaging your employees

Employees will be key to the success of your program and should be involved in creating it. Here’s a five-step approach:

1. Establish an employee committee. An employee committee should manage the process and develop guidelines, objectives and a budget. Top management needs to be involved: the single most important ingredient for starting a corporate giving program is strong support for giving from company leaders.
2. Survey employees. Get the pulse of employees by starting with a survey. What do they want to rally behind both locally and globally? Are there causes and organizations employees are passionate about?
3. Choose the giving approaches. Use the survey results to help define the giving campaign to offer a portfolio of charity choices that reflect employees’ (and the company’s) values and interests.
4. Brand the giving campaign. Create a strong, powerful theme for the campaign to build momentum, and relate it to the business. Tie the theme to employee involvement activities that may fit with the initiative. Start locally to test the program. Incorporate social media to spread the message, get people involved and let internal and external audiences know what you’re doing.
5. Tie into benchmarks for public relations and participation. Promote the success of the campaign by holding events. Encourage participation by providing incentives or rewards for participation, and recognize employees’ involvement.

Structuring the program

You’ll need to decide how to structure your program. Here are some common ways companies donate (select one or all of them):
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• Charitable donations—Many corporations operate an annual giving program to make charitable grants, funded as part of their annual operating budgets. A corporate giving program enables the corporation to deduct up to 10 percent of its pretax income for direct charitable contributions.
• Corporate foundations—Some companies create an independent, tax-exempt foundation. A corporate foundation is usually started with a single gift that becomes the endowment, to which the company adds future contributions as it wishes. Foundations generally rely on regular contributions from the parent company to support their giving programs. The corporate foundation is subject to the same rules and regulations applicable to other private foundations.
• Employee matching—Companies often offer to match their employees’ gifts of cash to nonprofit organizations. Many companies assist and encourage their employees to give by organizing workplace-giving programs.
• Noncash giving/volunteering—Some companies also organize employee workplace volunteer efforts, donate their products or offer their services to charities on a pro-bono basis.

Determining the budget

Knowing how much to donate, and what’s appropriate for a company your size, may be the most difficult part of creating a corporate giving program. Start by researching what other companies similar in size, revenue and industry are contributing. A great resource for this type of information is from the Giving in Numbers, 2015 Edition. It’s an annual report developed by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) in association with The Conference Board. It can be downloaded for free and incorporates data from 271 companies, including 62 of the largest 100 companies in the Fortune 500.

If you don’t have the funds to contribute your full target amount your first year, develop a three- to five-year plan that will get you there over time. The important thing is to get started, and I hope these steps will help you.