3 Reasons You Should Talk About Your Corporate Charitable
Giving Stories and “Accomplishments”
How Ben & Jerry’s Restarted their Corporate Giving Using Givily
| Ben & Jerry’s has always been a company that gives back to its community. But being known for being a generous company can have its downfall if you do not have a streamlined process in place. Due to so many requests for ice cream and donations, the company had to shut down their corporate giving for a time. They later reinstated it with a better process in mind: Givily. In this article you will see and read about the results! |
About Ben & Jerry’s
Ben & Jerry’s is a company that believes in giving back to its community. It was founded on and is dedicated to a sustainable corporate concept of linked prosperity. It is their goal to make, distribute and sell the finest quality all-natural ice cream and euphoric concoctions with a continued commitment to incorporating nutritious, natural ingredients and promoting business practices that respect the Earth and the Environment. As a result, in 1985 the company created and opened the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation which focuses on furthering social justice, protecting the environment, and supporting sustainable food systems.
Situation
Unfortunately, being a generous company started taking its toll since there wasn’t a streamlined process in place for keeping track of their donations. In fact, the employees and leaders of the company became so inundated with requests for ice cream and donations that they had to shut down their corporate giving for a time. Partnering with Givily helped Ben & Jerry’s get back to giving back.
How Givily Helped
Givily is focused on helping local communities by partnering with community-focused businesses like Ben & Jerry’s. The unique software system that the Givily team puts in place helps companies get back to doing what they do best by:
- Streamlining the corporate giving process.
- Organizing responses to requests so more donations can be approved.
- Aggregating the data in one place so businesses can stay organized and efficient.
Results
- They reinstated their corporate giving in a streamlined and efficient way.
- An estimated 199 hours saved in labor using Givily.
- Telling the story of Ben & Jerry’s Giving internally, boosting employee morale and pride for their workplace by sharing their giving data and story internally.
- Every applicant receives a response in a timely manner, building a better rapport with customers.
But don’t just take our word for it, check out this interview with Julie Mclaughlin, Ben & Jerry’s Brand Specialist.
Interested in learning more about how Givily can help your company? Check out other reported benefits of using the Givily platform here!
What keeps people from being able to talk about what’s going on?
Most companies don’t collect enough information to be able to talk about their giving as a whole at the end of the year. That’s one of the things Givily’s software solves. Each request that comes in is a story. Every partnership you create is a story.
You need to collect enough data up front with organizations to be able to tell a story at the end in light of your brand. Ask enough questions.
Here are a handful of reasons data isn’t looked at in a company:
- It’s not collected.
- It’s not aggregated.
- The person managing the requests is more focused on completing the work than analyzing the data for higher purposes.
- Marketing hasn’t realized/considered that heaps of customer data are being collected.
- Marketing/Leadership doesn’t know how this data could benefit their brand.
Analyze the data.
What do I mean by analyze the data? Find the story that’s being told by the numbers. Your giving tells a story of your priorities, brand focus, and mission.
If you leave the numbers alone and don’t aggregate them, you can’t see the story. If you put the numbers together by category, you’ll start to see some interesting facts. Pair interesting facts together, and you start to develop a story.
In the most mature and progressive organizations, marketing plans are intertwined with donation questions, data, and decisions. They aren’t separate from each other. They coincide.
Make the approval process efficient and effective.
The transaction between company and organization has many possible places to maximize. Making it more efficient to intake a request and look at it saves time. 60% time savings on average with Givily’s system. Approval emails will still take a good bit of time, but there are ways to have a simple format/template saved that you can use every time you are approving a request.
If I were to summarize maximizing your corporate giving through this transaction it would be:
- Ask enough questions at the beginning.
- Collect & aggregate the data.
- Look at the data.
- Find the story in your data.
- Marry your marketing plans to your donation program.
It’s time for a personal brainstorm on how to streamline this process. Get out a piece of paper. Draw out your current workflow of managing donation requests. You should end up with a lot of lines moving from left to right, maybe some boxes. Take a look at that thing! Hopefully, it provides a bit of clarity seeing your process drawn out.