Top 5 Business Benefits of Encouraging Charity Work

Top 5 Business Benefits of Encouraging Charity Work Corporate charity fundraising challenges are not only an important part of a company’s corporate social responsibility, they can have a significant impact on your employer brand. The time and effort involved in supporting charities can bring many positive benefits. In addition to supporting and contributing to a wide range of charities, it may also bring many positive business returns. It promotes an organisation as a socially responsible business, helps make it stand out as a good employer and can have a far wider impact on reinforcing a culture of teamwork and camaraderie. This could significantly improve an organisation’s ability to attract high-quality employees, a key factor in achieving business growth. What attracts talented employees to an organisation is also what is likely to encourage them to stay and retaining staff can save money and help businesses achieve their strategic goals with less disruption. Being able to demonstrate that an organisation is a socially responsible business is becoming more important than ever when it comes to attracting up-and-coming talent. Numerous pieces of research show that that the latest generations entering the workforce care more about company ethics and the opportunity to give back to their communities than ever before. Here’s our top five business benefits of charity participation, all of which help organisations to retain the talented employees they’ve worked hard to recruit and to make the business one which potential new recruits will aspire to join. Team building opportunities Completing charity initiatives together helps people to build strong relationships with their colleagues. It’s a fantastic way to bring different people and departments together, and for senior managers and directors to connect and share experiences with their team. Some of our team recently volunteered to help transform the gardens of two local residents supported by the Papworth Trust charity. One of the key things they all said about the experience was how much fun they had all had working together. Build and maintain a supportive culture A supportive and team-focussed culture is one which many businesses strive to achieve and creates a place where people want to work. One way to help maintain and develop a culture like this is to bring everyone together through the common ‘feel-good’ factor of charity activity. Even if only a few members of staff are involved in a fundraising initiative, it can still be used to unite teams. Share stories and updates on the staff intranet and encourage colleagues to cheer them on, for example organising an office-wide send off or a welcome back event to congratulate them. Fantastic PR Charity activities will provide excellent news content for your own website and social media and can also be shared with local and trade press. Being seen as an organisation which invests in its local community will also help to attract and retain customers and can help open doors to developing relationships with key stakeholders. Finally, charity initiatives can also play a significant part in helping organisations to win prestigious awards. The Directors at  our business judge ‘Employer of the Year’ awards and one of the key things we look for are organisations which have empowered their teams to make a difference for a charity or their local community. Extra training and development opportunities Offering clear development opportunities is an important element of keeping current employees engaged and making an organisation an attractive place to work. There are many aspects of charity initiatives which can provide employees with the opportunity to develop new skills that can be included within overall training and development plans. For example, managing charity events is a great opportunity for employees to develop communication, leadership and project planning skills as well as improving confidence overall. Volunteering placements can also provide the chance to develop new skills and the opportunity to lead different teams. Introduce healthy work-place initiatives Many fundraising initiatives often involve physical challenges which require people to do training in the lead up to the event. All colleagues, whether they are taking part in the event or not, can be invited to get involved in any training initiatives held during lunch-breaks. This can help to encourage more health and wellbeing initiatives in the workplace and happy, healthy staff are more engaged and productive. When some of our team took part in the gruelling 24-hour, National Three Peaks challenge to raise money for the Arthur Rank Hospice Charity and Thrombosis UK, lots of other colleagues joined the team on their lunchtime training walks. A spin-off pedometer challenge was also organised, with a team walking in their lunch breaks until they clocked up 500 miles between them.