Google's Brilliant CSR strategy and what startups/SMEs can learn

DISCLAIMER: This was a draft from December 2016. All information here is gotten from publicly available information. Views are solely the writer’s!

In many climes of the world, we see businesses and brands engage in responsible business practice or other variations of it like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Some big corporations even have dedicated responsible business departments e.g Sky UK. Others probably have it as part of their Human Resources department.

It is believed that if you work in an area/community, you ‘take’ — benefit from that place e.g by recruiting talents from there, running generators/machines in that environment, adding to traffic congestion and putting pressure on the social amenities there. Therefore, you should ‘give back’ — contribute to the development of that area and even maintain a sustainable culture filled with less CO2 emissions.

Related article: Two ways to stare down on pollution.

As a result, I had put together a list of what some top companies have tried to do over the years as their own form of ‘giving back’ to the society. But, in this post, I will be sharing from one of the companies, Google.

Google’s CSR

Google.org is the charity arm of the multinational technology firm, Google.

Google engages in several CSR /community initiatives which can be seen in their partnerships with NGOs and their $50 million budgetary allocations to support nonprofits that are expanding economic opportunity for everyone.

They focus on these main areas: Education, Economic Opportunity, Inclusion, Crisis response and their impact challenge.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll like to focus on their volunteering arm, Google Serve.

GoogleServe is a week of volunteering embarked upon by Googlers, (aka Google employees). Googlers are encouraged to give back to the charitable organizations that they love. They volunteer year-round and celebrate volunteering collectively every June during GoogleServe, a week of volunteer service that includes everything from cleaning graffiti and building homes to helping nonprofits use technology to improve operations. In 2015) more than 6,500 Googlers (out of 57,000) volunteered almost 200,000 hours. Google also matches contributions of both time and money to charitable organizations. Through GiftMap, the Google – Benevity partnership, they’ve matched $21 million in employee donations to over 9,000 organizations around the world.

Summary

Google commits to social causes that improve people’s lives. But also growing her own business potential. So, while their support for non-technology related activities buys them goodwill — an intangible asset, their support for digital training also increases their business earnings potential as more people learn about the web and them in one way or the other learn about their range of digital services e.g Google search, YouTube, Google finance etc and probably buy Ads or add to the number of hits on their site. Quite famous is the Google Search which is being used by more than 50% of the connected world¹. What this means is, at least 1 in every two internet user has used or will use Google Search which simply translates to business (albeit, in the long-run) for Google Search primarily via their Ads business².

So, your CSR initiative could also have some real business value in the form of generating tangible and intangible assets. An example of a tangible asset is cash which is derived from sales .

Remember, your CSR could at least start the process that leads to conversion (sales).