How You Can Make Your Business More Socially Conscious

Ensuring that your company is socially conscious can help you in more ways than simply reducing your tax bill via charitable donations. 

It has been shown time and time again that being socially conscious in business can positively impact your sales and profits. Partaking in a social mission and supporting causes builds trust and loyalty in your brand for both customers and employees. Both of these groups care deeply about supporting organizations that give back to the community and are socially and ecologically responsible. On top of this, a clear, socially conscious business plan can even help to attract new investors to your company. 

Here are some ways that you can make your organization more socially and environmentally responsible.

Achieve Your Vision by Creating a Mission

A social responsibility mission should be a crucial part of any business road map. What this means is that you should incorporate your socially conscious ethos across all aspects of your organization. Corporate responsibility should be baked into the very DNA of your company to ensure that everyday values and practices are seeking to further this goal. 

When developing your mission for corporate citizenship, you should focus on several factors. 

Firstly, the vision should come from an authentic place. There is little point in half-hearted or token donations to charities. Consumers are more intelligent than this and will see through any practices that aren’t genuine. 

You should also look at how you can minimize any harm your business might be doing. Consider the harmful impacts your business might have on the climate or on your local environment. Things like reducing and offsetting carbon footprints can be an excellent way to improve social responsibility. 

Thinking locally is also vital at this stage. Consider how your company can promote local industry or lift up businesses around it. For example, you could try your best to only use local suppliers for your organization, which will help to strengthen the local economy. 

Ensure that Your Goals are Achievable

While it might be tempting to set your company a large, world-changing goal, this will likely be unattainable unless you operate a massive, global business. While it might be admirable to propose providing clean water to every country on the planet, your company will probably never be able to actually realize this goal. 

Instead, your goals should be set up in such a way that you can make slow but sure progress towards achieving them. For example, focusing your efforts on your local community by supporting local charities is much more attainable than something on a global scale, especially if your business is small. If you were particularly interested in setting sustainability goals, but you’re not sure what is actually achievable for you, it might be worth getting in touch with a company offering sustainability strategy consulting who will be able to work with you to create realistic goals to work towards.

Raise Money for Causes You and Your Clients Care About

The internet and social media platforms have made raising money for important social causes more accessible than ever. Nowadays, more and more people are waking up to the power of these platforms for shedding light on important issues and taking steps to resolve them. 

One way that your business can raise awareness and money for social causes is to start fundraising campaigns. Crowdfunding is an excellent example of the power of the internet being harnessed to build a better world. This new form of fundraising means that everyone can support something they believe in regardless of their financial means. Using social media platforms, these fundraisers can be spread far and wide and reach thousands of people. This strategy can be especially powerful if your business has a significant presence on social media. 

If you are looking for unique fundraising ideas to raise awareness and funds for social causes, check out this article. Ultimately, this is a brilliant way of showing consumers that your business is socially responsible and is willing to make a difference.  

Work Alongside Likeminded Businesses

Working with other small businesses to further your social agenda can be a powerful way to achieve your social responsibility goals. Collaborating and sharing resources can help you and your partners develop new and exciting ways to build socially conscious business practices. 

You can do this in various ways, but one of the most effective ways is to network. Going to conferences for socially conscious businesses or using platforms like Linkedin can be excellent ways to connect with other companies. The beauty of such an approach is that partnering with other businesses will help you both to grow while also developing more sustainable practices simultaneously. It can benefit both your local economy and the community as a whole. 

Ask the Community for Ideas

It’s common for many large companies to use crowdsourced ideas from their customer base to influence their social policies. In fact, a study has found that of 216 executives surveyed from Fortune 200 companies, 44% had used crowdsourcing as a way to generate ideas to influence their approach to social responsibility. Of these executives, 95% claimed that crowdsourcing was a valuable method for assessing public opinion and developing socially conscious business practices. 

The great thing about these methods is how accessible crowdsourcing is and how easy it is to get started. You can use digital tools to send surveys out to your customers. Using email and social media to disseminate these surveys, you can ask consumers questions about what they want your company to do to give more back to the local community. These ideas can provide a great deal of insight into the thoughts and opinions of your customer base and can be used to shape your corporate responsibility strategies. 

Conclusion

Overall, at present, there is more scrutiny on businesses and their practices than ever before. The average consumer is more aware of the importance of companies supporting their local community. As a result, you must develop a corporate social responsibility strategy to improve your brand’s image and public trust and loyalty. 

The methods outlined above are valuable ways that a company can develop and improve its social responsibility. Ultimately, this will pay dividends in various ways and help you create more sustainable business models for the future.