Better Business Bureau Guide For Holiday Gift Giving

As the Holiday season is gearing up, so too are businesses starting to plan their Holiday charity drives and gift giving. While businesses are unlikely to view their philanthropy, especially around the holidays, as a purely marketing tool, it's still useful to know about the The Better Business Bureau's results of a study that: "donating to charities is not just something your business can do to help the community, it can also help your bottom line."

In their recent study they provided evidence:"That for every dollar given to charitable organizations, two to three dollars is returned in sales."

There is more good news here, in another survey by the Better Business Giving Alliance: "more than 91 of small businesses in the U.S. support charitable organizations. While 85 percent of those surveyed had donated money, the research revealed that small business giving is not confined to writing checks. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of small business owners/managers had supported charities through in-kind contributions of products or services."

If you’re looking to have your business give to a worthy cause this holiday season, Better Business Bureau offers advice and guidance that can help you give wisely. Here is my summary of the best of BBB's tips and suggestions.

-Check out the organizations that you would like to support. You can view more than one thousand BBB Wise Giving ReportsTM on national charitable organizations as well as local charities at www.bbb.org/charity to see whether they uphold BBB standards.

-Do some research on your own about the charities-ask them questions, go see what they do. Learn what percent of their proceeds truly go to the charity.

-Define which causes you want to support. This is the season for getting inundated with requests from a great variety of charities. A well planned giving program will help define which charities are your priorities and will help you to say no to the requests that you cannot fulfill.

-Include your employees in your charitable decisions, and give them an opportunity to include their personal causes in the decision making process.

-Make sure you track you donations. Write a check instead of giving cash. Request a receipt for your tax deduction records.

-As a way to save time and maintain records, have all the requests handled by one staff person.

-If you volunteer, your time is not tax deductible, but your out-of-pocket expenses that directly relate to your volunteer services, such as transportation costs, may be.

For more information and advice you can trust from the BBB Wise Giving Alliance about being a savvy donor this holiday season, go to www.bbb.org/charity.

Philanthropy: An Effective Tool for a Good Business

Author: Eric Melin

Philanthropy, a wonderful thing for any business to be involved with, as it is a universal law that "to give is to receive" and is proved true on so many occasions, in so many ways.

I've also observed that those with the least to give are the ones who give most in terms of time and money to various causes such as homelessness, domestic abuse, children with cancer, and the list goes on.

I suggest that anyone who has not dabbled in philanthropy should try it. For every hundred dollars that you make, give ten dollars to a cause that you would like to support. Save the Whales, Hug a Tree, Stop Pollution, Halt Elder Abuse, House the Homeless. The choices are endless.

Corporations in the United States annually give away over $11 billion to non-profits and other charitable organizations - an average of 1.3% of pre-tax income. Yet, many do so without realizing the strategic value it provides. Philanthropic donations provide a useful, though seldom fully-leveraged, channel for improving outcomes for both the corporation and the community.

Large corporations typically have a staff dedicated to philanthropy with structure and parameters built in, giving at small companies tends to be more grassroots. Small and non-publicly traded companies can often utilize unique ways to give, such as putting their companies in a charitable trust or donating company stock. In fact, 80% of Minnesota businesses with fewer than 500 employees contribute annually through some type of giving program, according to the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Businesses of any size reap the benefits of social investment with successful communities in turn supporting successful businesses.

It's important to be very observant. Upon donating your time or money, you will see a return on this investment in ways you may not have imagined.

The idea is to give what you can without any strings attached. Once you have started this movement of energy, then "what comes around goes around," and you will be pleasantly surprised at what ensues. I suspect that people like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Buddha and Jesus were well acquainted with this universal law, and thus spent their lives practicing it.

For More details, Please visit http://www.philanthropist.org/

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/organizational-articles/philanthropy-an-effective-tool-for-a-good-business-933116.html

About the Author:
Eric Melin has been writing since the age of 16. His favorite topics include women's issues, homelessness, homeless veterans, the arts, cinema, biographies, nature and video production. His work has appeared in many publications around the world. You can read her blog, at http://www.ericmelin.com . His business site is: http://www.philanthropist.org/

Good Capital'sTriple Impact on Business, Society, and Environment, Part II

In part I of my story about Good Capital, I focused on what made Good Capital a business innovation, who was involved in the innovation, and how it emerged. In part II, I focus on what is both the short and long term impact of the innovation both on business, society and the environment.

While Good Capital's primary focus is to make available capital to promising and innovative social mission and profit making enterprises as well as to non-profit organizations with earned income, its impact reaches well beyond the organizations it supports in some surprising and unusual ways.

Good Capital invests in businesses, like Better World Books, that have a focus on their double or triple bottom line, that of social impact, paired with environmental and financial returns. Working alongside the management at their portfolio companies, Good Capital’s staff brings expertise, hands-on involvement and knowledge from the diverse worlds of investment capital, philanthropy, technology and entrepreneurship.

The organization is still young, but the results of their first investment in Better World Books has been far reaching. They were directly involved in creating a strategy that placed the business’ environmental mission at the core of the brand, and increased sales. Says Jones, “Those college students understand it. They are starting to buy more from Better World Books. They realize that used things are of more value now. They realize the environmental cost of production.” Good Cap also influenced Better World Books to reduce their costs by partnering with the non-profit literacy organizations Room to Read and Books for Africa, and by fine-tuning their book pricing strategy. As a result, Better World Books has increased its revenue from $17 million to $23 million since Good Capital’s involvement began.

Good Capital’s involvement affects the stakeholders also. They influenced the decision to give Better World Books’ charity partners, Room to Read and Books for Africa, 5% of the founders stock and a seat at the board, making them shareholders and giving them a voice. In so doing, GoodCap wove literacy groups into the fabric of Better World Books, and ensured that the cause had an economic value to the business, and thus survived a potential buyout. This is a fresh concept. As Jones puts it, “Nobody has ever put that kind of constraint on any kind of business.”

Good Capital is realizing a similar impact with their second investment, Adina for Life. Here they are helping create more demand for the sustainably grown Fair Trade and organic brand by creating unique, delicious coffee and juice cooler drinks. Good Capital is excited about the results of investing in a company like Adina. For them, a commitment to Fair Trade enables coffee growers in cooperatives around the world to develop economic self-sufficiency, devoting profits toward the building of schools and clinics, the development of clean water infrastructure, or similar community causes.

But Good Capital's impact goes beyond the investments it makes in these companies. On the whole, Good Capital seeks to fill the important role of icebreaker and trailblazer, educating potential investors about this sector, helping bigger funds come in behind them, and setting a new standard for philanthropically motivated investing, proving it as valuable and rigorous as any other type.Ultimately Kevin Jones hopes Good Capital can change the outmoded mindset that “giving is over here and investing is over there.”

They are committed as well to developing a community of socially-minded and change oriented leaders and have several projects to help and foster interaction between socially conscious business development and socially conscious investment such as the Social Capital Markets Conferences, SoCap 2008 and 2009, and the Hub/Bay Area.

For decades, the San Francisco Bay Area has been a center for some of the most successful venture capital firms, the most innovative social entrepreneurship, and the most generous humanitarian enterprises on the planet. It seems natural that this innovation center would give rise to a fusion of these sectors. And yet rumbles of doubt remain over whether any savvy investor should consider investing in a fund that supports social businesses. Without question, Good Capital still faces steep hurdles in raising both awareness and funding.

Innovative ideas often seem idealistic and unrealistic. Not long ago a concept like micro-lending sounded noble but unproven, just like the profit potential of organic and Fair Trade food looked unrealistic. But Good Capital is determined to succeed in forever changing the financing picture for promising social ventures by developing a communications and support network that can further this mission. In spite of the skepticism, Good Capital is already well on their way. As Kevin Jones says, “By our standard, we have succeeded. But we didn't want to sell for success; we wanted to sell a story that has a catalytic impact.”

Good Capital has a triple bottom line of its own. Not only are they changing the landscape of this sector, they’re supporting change for the environment and for society. Most importantly, their fund is growing. “Actually at this point,” Kevin Jones says, “our returns are doing embarrassingly well.”

Certainly Good Capital has nothing to be embarrassed about and plenty to be proud of.