Giving Compass' Take:

• Vess Pearson, writing for Forbes, lays out strategies that employers can utilize to foster more corporate giving and volunteering. 

• How are you participating in these corporate giving strategies? 

• Learn about creating a culture of philanthropy in business. 

By now, the benefits of corporate giving are well known. By answering the call to do good in the world, companies can act as a force for positive change, improve their communities and attract — and keep — employees who also feel strongly about giving back.

While you can easily answer the question of whether to engage in philanthropy, it’s more challenging to figure out how to do it in the most effective and meaningful way.

That’s one puzzle we’ve tried to solve at my company. And we think we’ve hit upon a winning formula — from our founding, we have made giving a priority and have broken our own records year after year. We’ve found that as we encourage our employees to become active participants in the process of corporate giving, they feel more engaged and excited about the work they're doing, and our business directly benefits.

We’ve tried to weave charitable giving into different parts of our company, so it's a large part of who we are. Here are some of the ways we’ve made corporate giving work for us that other companies can adopt:

  • Get Employees Involved It can be tempting to just set aside a certain percentage of profits to use for philanthropy, but companies can easily overlook employees’ individual contributions.
  • Align Giving With Your Goals In addition to enlisting employees to solicit monetary donations, you should actively talk about the causes you're involved in so they understand the impact their efforts have and how they connect to their work.
  • Make It Personal Many of our employees are college students who are seeking a way to get through school without going into debt.
  • Serve Far And Near There are many opportunities to do good closer to home, too — especially during the holiday season.

Read the full article about engaging in corporate giving by Vess Pearson at Forbes.