The Benefits of Social Impact Committees

Employee engagement is essential to driving social impact. Even if your company culture and workplace giving program are generally pretty good, you may be looking for more ways to involve your employees. One way you can do this is to create a social impact committee in your organization.

What is a Social Impact Committee?

A social impact committee is a group of employees with a shared passion for creating positive social change, and engaging others in the workplace to do the same.

The committee acts like a liaison between employees and upper management, and can help represent your employees’ thoughts in decisions regarding social impact initiatives. This will ensure that your community efforts also represent the people internally in your organization.

In addition, it can aid in organizing events, volunteer groups, and networking opportunities and bring a lot of value to the company by incorporating these social aspects to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and workplace giving.

Benefits of Social Impact Committees

Make Your Workplace Giving Program Unique

Having a social impact committee can help make your workplace giving program unique by incorporating the interests of your employees.

As no two companies are the same, social impact initiatives should be unique to each organization. You may be using the same platform as another company, but it is your mission and employees that allow you to make your social impact truly yours.

Increase Employee Engagement

By incorporating your employees’ ideas and thoughts into your social impact initiatives, they are more likely to be engaged as people tend to support what they help build.

And at the end of the day, it is your employees who you want to encourage to interact with the initiatives. They will be the main users of your workplace giving program and be community ambassadors for the company.

Here are other ways to engage employees.

Foster Creativity

The committee is the perfect place for socially-responsible individuals to bounce ideas off of eachother on how the company can improve internally and externally. Two heads are always better than one, especially when thinking of creative ideas and solutions.

Nonprofit partnerships are a common way for companies to differentiate their CSR and make themselves stand out in the community. Some committee members may already have established relationships with nonprofits, which could help in creating these partnership opportunities.

Build Expertise around Social Impact Matters

Many companies don’t have the budget to hire a CSR manager or dedicated “Chief of Social Impact” to keep the company up to date on the latest news and industry developments.

The committee can help build expertise around social impact matter by opening discussions and encouraging collaboration between socially-driven individuals. They may be even more aware of the effectiveness of strategies as they're on the ground interacting closely with any initiatives that your workplace has in place.

Identify and Cultivate Leadership

Giving employees an avenue like social impact to channel their passion is a great way to find "hidden" leaders who may not be recognized in the existing hierarchy.

A social impact committee can plan events and activities and promote campaigns and opportunities, and you'll get to see which people really get the work done.

Did you enjoy this blog post? This is the first part of our Social Impact Committee blog series. Check out the next part "How to Start and Manage a Social Impact Committee" here.