What are the key themes in CCI?
Strategic planning: Employers are looking at their community investment activities from a strategic perspective, defining themes that are aligned with core business objectives, taking advantage of core competencies, and customising areas of focus to their customer base. They are taking a long-term approach rather than supporting one-off activities and proactively seeking ways to achieve their community objectives.
Creating partnerships: Employers are taking an increasingly active role in the communities where they operate, forming complementary partnerships with non-profit organisations, government agencies, suppliers, other companies, and their stakeholders to fulfil a wide variety of community needs.
A global focus: As employers increasingly 'go global', multinational companies are redefining “community" and are looking beyond local, domestic geographic communities and are extending community investments geographically to all sites around the world that make a significant contribution to the success of the business. For example, employers may choose to make grants globally in the geographic areas of greatest need, or extend their commitments to include the geographic locations of their suppliers.
Measuring and reporting the benefits: Traditionally, corporate community investment was seen as goodwill and rarely tracked or measured. Increasingly, employers are measuring the impact of their community investment, using the information to compare their efforts with those of other companies, or to publish internal or external reports on CCI. CCI reporting is increasingly incorporated into broader CSR or corporate citizenship reports these days. However, there is a growing trend towards producing regional or site-specific community reports.
Involving employees: More employers are making their employees important partners in their community activities. In the past, employee involvement was limited principally to volunteering. Now, many companies of all sizes have employee advisory committees on corporate giving, volunteer activities, and other community investment priorities. Some companies regularly survey employees and other stakeholders in their process to determine which causes or organisations to support
