How to tell social impact stories for corporate foundations
Legally, corporate foundations are independent charities, but telling their stories requires a different approach from typical charity storytelling. Corporate foundations were established for different reasons, have different institutional relationships and audiences, and require different communications outcomes. Charities and foundations both have powerful stories to tell about their social impact, but to get them right, storytellers need to understand what sets them apart.
In this edition of Stories For Social Good, I discuss:
The differences between corporate foundations and traditional charities
Why we need social impact stories more than ever
Four key considerations for telling corporate foundation impact stories
Why do corporate foundations need social impact stories?
Whoever’s telling the story, storytelling for social impact is both more needed and threatened than ever before. Needed – because of swingeing cuts to global aid budgets, increasing inequality, and growing demand driven by conflict, climate change and the rising cost of living. Threatened – because of the current vogue for macho, survival of the fittest stories, and the woke backlash against narratives that challenge the unequal and unjust status quo.
Corporate foundations know this just as well as charities do, but their experience and practice of storytelling is quite different. The clue is in the name: corporate foundations are indelibly connected to their parent brand, whose story toolbox mostly includes tales of products, services and profits. Whereas, for charities, storytelling for social impact is deeply embedded, justifying and defining the organisation’s very existence. Corporations may have a social purpose, but charities are a social purpose.
The need for social impact stories among corporate foundations is just as urgent, and they share many social impact themes with charities. But foundations are juggling different priorities, which means the storytelling itself requires a particular approach.
Understanding the context of corporate foundation social impact stories
Social impact, whether it’s tackling global poverty, helping more girls go to school or conserving nature, is the desired end point for both charities and corporate foundations. But for foundations the start point is different. With foundations, there is a step before ‘how can we deliver on our charitable mission?’, which is, ‘how best can we harness our particular corporation’s skills, knowledge, products, services, people and values for the greater good?’ This is why the LEGO Foundation focuses on nurturing and protecting children, for example. And why Nationwide Foundation works on affordable housing.
Zooming out, foundations are only one of several ways corporations can choose to deliver social impact. Other channels include charity partnerships, sponsorships, education programmes, impact investments and workforce initiatives. Many corporates don’t even have a foundation, choosing instead to focus on what the business can do directly. But where foundations do exist, they play a critical role in determining how and where the parent organisation delivers on its social and environmental objectives.
Taking an even wider view, sitting above all these activities is the obvious but perhaps uncomfortable fact for charity storytellers, that for most corporations, the primary objective is profit (exceptions include Patagonia and Divine Chocolate). There’s no shame in that; it’s what businesses need to survive. And while debates rage about the ratio of profits returned to shareholders versus money channelled into social value, profit in itself can be a positive thing: social value funding is often worked out as a percentage of pre-tax profits, so the more profitable the business, the more money available for the foundation – which means more impact and more impact stories to tell.
Four key considerations for telling corporate foundation impact stories
1. Know your audiences
Most charity stories directly or indirectly concern fundraising from supporters, philanthropists, governments and, yes, corporates. However, for corporate foundations – who receive funding from their parent brands – social impact stories are more often used for awareness-raising among customers, the corporation’s senior management and employees, NGO partners and peer organisations.
Calls to action may include an invitation to find out more or get in touch about partnership opportunities, but they rarely carry a fundraising message. It can also be particularly important to signal social impact to senior corporate executives, so they become valuable advocates for the foundation within and outside the company.
2. Understand the bigger social value picture
Like charities, corporate foundations’ activities will be designed to deliver against a defined charitable purpose. Unlike charities, however, that purpose will have been shaped by the corporation’s view of how its particular corporate strengths should be transformed from generating profits into delivering impact. This strategy will also be informed by the corporation’s ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) requirements.
As noted above, the foundation is just one way corporates can channel their social impact. For storytellers, understanding how the corporation’s objectives and its social value levers align helps clarify and distinguish the foundation’s stories.
3. Prepare for close scrutiny of motivations
Corporations and their foundations are more likely than charities to find themselves scrutinised for greenwashing and purpose-washing. The media can be sceptical of foundations’ motivations and communications, especially when they brush up against corporate profit-making activities related to, for example, uses of natural resources in supply chains. Such is their nervousness, green hushing, where corporates deliberately under-communicate their social impact, has become a recognised practice.
The equivalent for charities is possibly the scrutiny applied to perceived political partisanship, such as the cultural war sparked by the National Trust’s report on its colonial history a few years ago. But the impact of these debates on social impact storytelling for charities is felt more lightly. Interestingly, many corporate foundations share the impetus currently felt among non-profits for telling stories – and structuring support – that seek to overturn inequitable balances of power and focus on co-created self-sustaining solutions.
Storytellers for corporate foundations need to familiarise themselves with these debates and their implications for language and messaging.
4. Understand the difference between direct and indirect impact
As with any grant-making organisation, a corporate foundation is often one step removed from the impact it is helping to create. Even if it provides skills, products and services rather than or as well as grants, actual programme delivery often falls to the charities or NGOs it is working with.
As any social impact copywriter will tell you, this requires careful phrasing to avoid overclaiming what the foundation itself can say it has achieved. Instead, focus shifts to the collaborative nature of the NGO partnerships and the wider vision of the corporate foundation and its parent brand.
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With cuts to global aid budgets and local government funding, there’s a pressing need for the private sector to fill the gap. Many corporations are stepping up, continuing and expanding their social value work across a range of channels. It’s a challenging time for the charity sector, but charities still bring a wealth of fundraising and service delivery experience to the table. Corporate foundations can collaborate to turbocharge these efforts, and the more compelling and distinctive stories we can tell about their social impact, the better.
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