If you’ve been following Lincoln Strategy Group’s Corporate Social Responsibility blog here, you probably know a few things about CSR by now. You probably know that better, more efficient and more involved socially responsible initiatives taken on by an organization can help yield larger profits. You probably also know that CSR can help establish your brand, increase employee retention and breed innovation. And, of course you’re aware of the positive impacts that strong CSR practices have on the beneficiaries and recipients of the good will.
So while you and your organization can spend a large chunk of your time mapping out your CSR plan for the future and the effects it may have on your community, what you can’t control is the social responsibility of others. No matter how large your organization’s CSR plan is, the importance of collaboration and mass-involvement in corporate social responsibility cannot be understated. To effect meaningful, positive change around the world we need everyone to step up and do their part–and as of now, more and more organizations are beginning to recognize this.
The world is, as a whole, beginning to grow more and more socially responsible in recent years. The $358 billion donated to charities around America in 2014 was the highest in the 60 year history of Giving USA’s data tracking and reporting, and that’s just monetary donations, not taking into consideration the huge amount of volunteer hours and physical donations made to nonprofits around the country.
Looking through a wider lens, CSR ideals have historically been prioritized by younger people–namely millennials. Recently though, the attention paid to CSR by older generations is growing at a rapid pace. More and more people are recognizing the importance of putting more resources into creating a CSR plan.
The question of why this shift is happening is an easy one to answer: prioritizing CSR is simply becoming too important to a business to ignore. Consumers are too conscious of what an organization is doing in the social responsibility sphere for CSR practices to be a non-issue. As it stands now, if a business isn’t already diving headfirst into the CSR realm it’s high time to start. The changes that result from strong CSR practices don’t just affect a business, they affect the community.
Alone, a business is capable of changing its community–but together, we can all change the world.