There’s no doubt that corporate philanthropy has transformed the nonprofit world. In fact, corporations have donated at least $20 billion to charitable causes in recent years.
But why is corporate philanthropy so widespread? Corporations also profit from these programs, as they improve their brand reputation, boost employee engagement and recruitment success, and establish strategic partnerships with community organizations. It’s an all-around win-win.
However, companies like yours can only reap these benefits if they can secure buy-in and demonstrate their programs’ effectiveness. In this guide, we’ll explore how to do just that by making a comprehensive yet digestible corporate philanthropy report that includes a few core components.
Introductory Section
In the first section of your corporate philanthropy report, you must captivate your audience immediately to keep their attention. The following content sections allow you to draw the reader in and hold their interest from the get-go.
Executive Summary
This section is a short (ideally less than one page) overview of your philanthropic and corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals. Its purpose is to prime the reader with basic information that allows them to understand the data presented in the report’s body. Your executive summary should hit these main points:
- Introduction to your corporate philanthropy program, including summaries of key programs and focuses
- Corporate context or overall fundraising trends that explain your company’s goals and intentions with corporate philanthropy
- Strategic goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Major outputs, outcomes, and impacts from your program
Vision and Mission Statement
Your vision and mission statements detail your philanthropic focuses and your CSR program’s intended long-term impacts. Here are example mission and vision statements from a fictional corporation that’s focused on reducing its eco-waste:
- Mission statement: We aim to reduce environmental waste and negative impacts on our community by actively offsetting our own environmental footprint. Through team education, commitment, and external partnerships with nonprofits, we mitigate our carbon footprint and serve our communities sustainably.
- Vision statement: We envision a future where we have a net-zero carbon footprint. In fact, this will be the norm that communities and other companies strive towards in order to preserve the planet. Ultimately, this future empowers businesses to use resources responsibly, setting future generations up for success.
Overview of Philanthropic Programs
In this middle section, you’ll explain how your company is pursuing its philanthropic goals. Describing your approaches in greater detail helps outsiders understand your rationale for choosing these programs. In this section, include the following information to make your report as extensive as possible:
- Goals and objectives. You already briefly went over your goals in the executive summary, but you should go even further in this section, explaining each CSR program’s goals in greater detail. You might choose the SMART framework to ensure your fully-fleshed-out goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Program design and structure. Depending on the resources you can spare for your corporate philanthropy efforts, you likely have multiple strategies and programs supporting your end goal. For instance, matching gifts and volunteer grants are two popular conduits for corporate philanthropy. Explain your own approaches and how they work.
- Participants and key stakeholders. Most corporate philanthropy programs are a team effort, with all employees invited to participate and make a difference. Explain who participated and, if applicable, what their unique contributions were. For instance, you could highlight members of your corporate philanthropy committee who put extra time and dedication into developing your program.
Impact Overview
Now that you’ve explained your programs, it’s time to explore how successful they were. The impact overview section allows you to get into the nitty-gritty of your programs, exploring and reporting on KPIs established in the introduction.
However, while this section is extremely important, all the raw facts and figures can confuse or overwhelm your audience. Follow these tips to make your impact measurements more digestible:
- Use color-coded graphs and charts. These formats help you display data in a streamlined way that’s easy for anyone to understand. Just ensure you include comprehensible legends and titles to clearly label the visual elements.
- Tell a story with data. Simply stating facts and figures won’t have as strong of an effect on your audience as describing the real outcomes. For instance, saying your company improved your employee participation rate by 20% doesn’t mean much to the average person, but saying that this change provided $20,000 to install solar panels is more tangible.
- Segment data. Chances are, your report’s audience includes many stakeholders with diverse interests. Create subsections within the Impact Overview section that speak to different audiences. For example, you might have sections for each program that lists the impact on employee engagement, external communities, and the company itself.
Takeaways
By the end of your report, your audience understands the impacts of your philanthropic efforts. So, you can now apply this information to provide a big-picture overview of your CSR program’s successes and challenges. The takeaways section allows you to reflect on your programs and establish what you’ve learned from this cycle.
Once you’ve established takeaways, you can start to build a vision for the next cycle. At the end of this section, create a sub-section called “Looking Forward,” explaining how you’ll apply what you learned and any planned next steps.
Going back to the eco-waste program example, some takeaways and next steps might look like this:
- Takeaway: Collaborating with a new environmentally-focused nonprofit broadened our network and allowed us to form new partnerships, reinvigorating our business strategy.
- Next steps: We’ll deepen our relationships with our new connections to spread our impact even further.
- Takeaway: We saw higher employee engagement in corporate philanthropy when we hosted a one-off corporate volunteering initiative.
- Next steps: We’ll devote more resources to this idea and add it as a core part of our corporate philanthropy program.
Whether your business is looking towards corporate philanthropy to improve employee retention or simply to help a relevant cause, let your genuine passion for philanthropy shine through in your report. You can make the report even more authentic by supplementing the data with quotes from employees or beneficiaries — just ensure you have their permission before using their words.