As a startup, you are uniquely positioned to make meaningful CSR decisions that will establish you as a company with morals and ideals from the outset and help ingrain that into your brand and brand awareness among consumers as you scale and your business evolves.
Businesses that wait too long to start carefully considering these things often find themselves making poor use of their CSR funds and with ill-defined initiatives both inside and outside the organization. With that in mind, below are some ways you can make good CSR decisions as a startup business.
Choose a Green Bank
When you first start out you will need to make a number of important financial decisions, including who you bank with. For most people, interest rates and branch proximity are the overriding considerations when choosing with whom to bank, but individuals and businesses can (and should) do a much deeper dive on what kind of business activities a bank or financial institution engages in before choosing to give them their money.
A wide range of banks around the world (though still the minority) are taking green banking and investing seriously and a good way to have an outsized positive impact early on with your CSR is to choose to keep your money with one of them. They might be a smaller bank or perhaps even a credit union, but part of their mission is to maximize their positive impact on the environment and society through investing. These sorts of steps are especially important if you are a company with a sustainable mission or product.
Outline a Mission or Vision Early
There is a lot to be said for the importance of ironing out and establishing your mission and vision early on. A company’s vision is a formalized aspirational statement about what they want to become and, importantly, the impact they want their product or service to have on the world. A vision is something that is developed by founders and ingrained in employees through organizational culture. Having a well-defined vision allows for better decision-making and strategizing, is something that many early investors and early adopters want to know about, and will go a long way to driving and informing your CSR and philanthropic efforts moving forward.
Go Green Early
Another way to ensure that you are establishing a strong CSR foundation from the early stages of your business is to go green as soon as you can. This could involve a mixture of small and large gestures, but the objective is for these initiatives, and the philosophies that underpin, them to permeate the company and its culture. If you are designing an office space, consider things like water-saving appliances and more energy-efficient lights and windows. If you are contemplating transportation, think about the kinds of vehicles the business will use and whether or not you will offer your employees allotments for bicycles and public transportation, or for making their own homes more energy efficient.
Have a Philanthropic Theme
Many businesses haphazardly throw money at flavour of the month causes and charities, and that is not to say that you can’t help people or causes in need by doing this, but it is a far more efficient use of your philanthropic capital if you choose one or two kinds of charities or social or environmental causes, and structure your current and future giving around them. It makes sense if they overlap with your company’s vision and how you see your ethos.
Conclusion
CSR isn’t just something that your customers expect of you or that you do to garner good PR or make a splash on your annual general statement; it is done in recognition of the fact that profit shouldn’t be the only motive for being in business and that companies can and do have an impact, for better and often worse, on the world around them. Keep the above CSR recommendations in mind as you go from start-up to growth to established company and build social and environmental responsibility into your legacy.
