Businesses have always played a crucial role in communities and that role is only becoming clearer to members of said community. Not only do they provide income for members of the area, but they also harvest a lot of the time, skills, and resources that community has to offer. If focus those assets solely towards earning a profit, you miss the value that corporate social responsibility has to offer.

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Join the cause

Partnerships are crucial to any business and more and more business owners are reporting that partnerships with charitable and voluntary causes, in particular, are some of the most important to them. Pairing with charities and forming a partnership gives a clear signal of the virtues of the business to the market. It also gives you the opportunity to provide the platform your business has built and use some of the marketing budget that the charity might not otherwise have access to. It’s mutually beneficial, though you can expect that most of the material benefits flow from the business to the charity. The reward you gain in return is in the long-term.

Community events

You can get involved a lot more actively that using that platform and creating an official link with a charity. You can use the organizational expertise, physical resources, manpower, and social reach of the business to run community events in partnership with the charity, as well. With a supply of color powder and links in the community, for instance, a colour run gives the business the opportunity to be involved in an event that’s truly positive in public, all about combining fun with good.

Walk the walk

The business’s involvement with good has to go beyond the work they do in the community and with other organizations, however. It has to run through the core of the business. Ethical and positive treatment of the staff and creating a good community within the work environment is crucial, for instance. Similarly, if a business speaks as a proponent of environmental awareness and protection, it needs to go further than just creating and selling eco-friendly goods. It needs to make green practices standard in every level of its operations. Otherwise, the discrepancies get noticed and the business’ reputation suffers greatly in the process.

Giving back

A lot of culminating effort, training, and education goes into making the whole of a business better. Besides using its resources to help the community and causes within it, a business should play a role in actively giving back that effort, training, and education. For instance, business owners tend to be strong administrative minds that can help organizations by serving as trustees. They can also get involved in education, by providing practical learning opportunities to students to better prepare them for work in the industry. Many successful businesses even go as far as profit sharing to ensure that they’re not just giving back what they can spare, but what the community has helped them earn.

Using the business to do good can improve the reputation of the business, solidify a fan base and increase revenue. But more than anything, it’s fulfilling the responsibility that you should already have been.