More Mileage Series: Business Visibility

On today's episode, Graham Pansing Brooks and Kyle Cartwright discuss ways for socially responsible businesses to maximize their visibility and profit. It's crucial for businesses to consider how they're communicating their efforts when building a brand. The recent shift in the global economy reimagines consumer and employee expectations and as a result, companies with a clearly defined purpose are rising above their competitors. Tune in to hear more!

Listen to this episode here: https://www.seachangeltd.com/podcast

Questions? Contact us at hello@seachangeltd.com or on LinkedIn.

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[Kyle] Kyle and Graham here again, welcome back to our More Mileage Mini-series. This is again, a collection of bonus shorts as part of The Stream of Conscience Podcast. We are co-founders of a business impact and philanthropy consulting. And as part of that work, we tend to encounter quite a few terms and strategies and concepts that could just use a little demystifying and you know, some talking points.

[Graham] As we've mentioned, these episodes will be rapid fire so don't hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more, find us on LinkedIn and at www.SEAchangeLTD.Com. In the last episode, we talked about team engagement within corporate social responsibility or CSR. Today, we keep rolling with maximizing visibility of your CSR initiatives. So Kyle may be a softball, or to lob one up for you, why is visibility of the CSR initiatives important?

[Kyle] Well, it's good for business, right? If we, if we're noticed for things outside of just how convenient or cheap or, or qual high quality our product is or service is that's, that's people are making decisions beyond just those those elements these days, right? That' s the market shift we're talking about.

And so it's really important that businesses consider how they are communicating their efforts and how they are, you know, telling a good story about the good they're doing in the world.

[Graham] Yeah. And, you know, I think that we, we experience a lot of organizations that are struggling with this a little bit, especially being in the Midwest.

We come from a place that is self deprecating, has a humble nature to it.

You know, the last thing organizations in the Midwest are gonna do is go out there and beat their chest. However, It's critically important that we find ways to increase visibility of the good work that's happening within our organizations. Not only as a differentiating value proposition for the organization, but also collectively, as we look across towards workforce development in the state, how do we elevate ourselves as a whole and help change the narrative around what we stand for and what, what we are.

We're not just fly over country. We're doing great work here in the Midwest.

[Kyle] Absolutely. That is a cultural shift that I think a lot of neighboring states could take a page out of the book there too.

But we acknowledge those short shortcomings and that's, you know, part of our big, hairy audacious goal is to, to really bring this region into the, into the forefront of the business business impact. And so some of those pain points that I will frame for you is, you know, what we find is some of our clients will say that our giving is relatively unnoticed outside of maybe the top executives and things like that.

That kind of goes back to the team engagement piece there as well. We wanna see a little bit more bang for the buck, so to speak, right? These are yes, social outcome decisions. These are environmental outcome decisions, whatever the, that stakeholder is, but it's also a business decision, right? This doesn't operate in a vacuum.

They are tied together. And we find that there's under leveraged giving strategies. Again, they're not telling a great story around these things and worse yet is that our competitors are seen as being social is responsible, but we are not, but here we are doing bigger things potentially, or, you know, just things that we think are really great, but we're not being seen for that.

[Graham] Yeah. And you know, again, so I'll throw out a little statistic here and then we'll go from there. But you know, 76% of millennials will consider a company's social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work. You know, so this is critical visibility of the good work that's going on is critical to talent attraction and retention.

It's also critical for consumerism. There was a statistic out there that was 66% of consumers are willing to switch from a known brand to an unknown purpose driven brand. So these are these decisions to your point, Kyle, not made in a vacuum. It's critical to business development. It's critical to talent, attraction, retention. It's critical to the overall success of the organization. So, so how do we, how do we increase that visibility?

[Kyle] Yeah. Well, and I think again, you know, talking about this humble nature, and I think, you know, there's a lot of businesses out there that are not afraid to tell the story of the good that they do and to really own that story, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this is not a chess meeting. This is not a braggadocios act.

I'll put it this way. You are leaving opportunity to do more good on the table if you are not communicating effectively, the good work that you're doing, right.

Because if you are using your good work to fuel your profits and you're using profits to fuel your purpose. You know, it's this, it's this cyclical act that, that spins out and you just have a lot of good done. And you know, those that engage in this activity are rewarded for it as well.

The flywheel is spinning and you know it, and it ties back to some of the conversations we had in earlier episodes from team engagement to also operational efficiencies right there.

There's critical components to this that are really tied back to how do we communicate what we're doing? How do we make sure that we are doing this for the greater, you know, to the rising tide lifts all ships. And so you know, our, I think our secret mentality would be if, if every organization can get into a competitive race to try to do more good, the world would be such a better place.

But we have to figure out ways to be able to communicate that more effectively. Right.

So on our next episode, we're gonna be talking a little bit about some of the more technical strategies that you can employ specifically for your philanthropic activities. But certainly there's some elements in there that can lead to team engagement, community engagement, other elements.

So in the meantime, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. You can contact us at hello@seachangeltd.com or give us a call Graham, what's your number?

[Graham] (402) 430-6432.

[Kyle] And mine (402) 430-1328.