The Smarter Startup

The Power of Giving Back Early On

The effects of giving back early on for your organization, and with your key customers, can be transformational if you design them well.

A well-thought initiative for giving back will help you reach the top faster.

The first days of the year are an ideal time to think about empathy and all the good we can be doing before our To-dos take over all the available energy. This can be a perfect time to realize that building a culture of giving in your early stage company is more than just thinking about giving. The good news is that you don’t need to have a “do good” scheme built in your product strategy or in your business plan; it is much simpler than that, yet the effects in your organization, and with your key customers, can be transformational.

Focusing your team on a cause other than the quarterly goals can help you create strong bonds, build motivation and foster loyalty. Giving back through your company also gives your people meaning and a sense of connection. Finally, having a cause you officially support can boost goodwill and adoption with your customer base.

  1. Giving back is good for teams

The days when people were satisfied with donating a tiny portion of their monthly paychecks to causes are over. Millennials, who now dominate early startups want it all: they want you to give back and they want to be actively engaged in that process. Heeding to their demands is good for your organization. Enabling engaging opportunities for your team to give back builds bonds outside the office thru things such as volunteer days, pro-bono consulting and joint projects.

Better if you let your team choose the non-profit to volunteer to for or to work with, there are hundreds of non-profit organizations around you that need your help. You can choose to focus your giving back efforts at places around your location, to causes connected to the nature of your products or services, to charities who are close to your heart, or all of the above. There is no shortage of organizations that can use the expertise, energy and resources of your team to make the world better.

If you want to get creative, you can also think inside the box. For example, just a few blocks from our office here in San Francisco, AirBnB employs several people from The Arc – an organization that focuses on helping individuals with developmental and mental disabilities have normal lives. AirBnB employees love having them around to help with all kinds of office tasks.

  1. Giving back is good for employees

Research shows that a higher sense of purpose is a better motivator than money. Millennials come with a chip for this, and have forced tech giants like Google, Facebook and Salesforce to make giving-back a centerpiece of their mission.

The energy that your people spend helping others on your behalf is actually re-charging energy. It is very common in non-profit and community organizations around the Bay Area to see employees from the likes of Google and Deloitte work on specific project during the day – not after work. For example, the City of San Francisco has an initiative called Civic Bridge where pro-bono consulting volunteers work together for 3 months to use their expertise to help the municipality on very specific issues. These volunteers then bring back to the office new ideas, connections and a sense of purpose that spreads through their companies.

Engaging giving-back opportunities for your employees will ensure your company’s social DNA is built and nurtured, internally and externally, through individuals that become the ambassadors of what your organization is doing beyond profit.

  1. Giving back is good for business development

The third pillar of giving back concerns the effect it can have on your business development efforts. Having your people donate their talent, time and energy locally will connect you to the community in a way that no PR effort can, and will bring in more business and potential employees.

Additionally, combining business with giving builds empathy into your DNA. Actions that you can take early on involve things like creating a .org for your company, giving your product away for free or at a huge discount to non profits. Toms and Salesforce.org  are good examples on how giving can be weaved into your core business to generate additional sales; after all, we are more prone to buying products and services from companies we like and admire.

In order to activate this business development-focused giving, you need to make it easy for a nonprofit to take advantage of your product and for a paying customer to see where some of their dollars go when it comes to social responsibility. In the case of Salesforce for instance, many big non-profits become profitable paying customers when they grow and have the resources to pay full price for a product they’ve been using for years.

It’s never to early to give back.

The positive effects on your team, your employees as individuals and your business development – just to name three areas affected by it – indicate that it is never too early to give back, even for a seed round company. Think about it, and if you need help with the right set-up to make it sustainable, ask your CFO.