Corporate social responsibility is an organisations initiatives to assess and take responsibility for their effects on environmental and social well-being in the communities they operate. It can also involve incurring costs that don’t provide an immediate financial benefit to the organisation, but instead help to promote positive social and environmental change in some way.

Large corporations can have enormously detrimental effects on the environment and have been using their own corporate social responsibility programs for years to mitigate against them.

Oil spills are some of the most conspicuous examples, but industries as varied as chemical manufacturing, mining, agriculture and fishing can do permanent damage to local ecosystems. Climate change can also be attributed in part to large corporations.

While large corporations responsibility is hard to untangle from the consumer (who demand electricity and transportation), it is difficult to deny that many large corporations have profited from the deterioration of the global environment.

To offset these detrimental environmental effects, large corporations do invest in local communities. A natural resources firm that begins to operate in a poor community might build a school, offer medical services or improve irrigation and sanitation equipment. Similarly, a company might invest in research and development in sustainable technologies, even though the project might not immediately lead to increased profitability.

But today, we believe a shift has occurred in the size of organisations taking corporate social responsibility seriously…

For decades, it was the large corporate who used corporate social responsibility programs as a way of mitigating or reversing the damage caused to communities and resources while carrying out their business.

Today though, many smaller organisations (including ourselves) are starting to consider how they can impact their local communities in a positive way, with their own corporate social responsibility programs.

But, it’s a real challenge. Small organisations don’t have the large revenues, profits and available cash like the large corporations. Which means, we’ve really got to think hard and be super inventive.

Take us as an example. It’s taken years for us to get to the point where we feel ready to help make a difference in the communities we operate. And it’s taken another year to develop our own corporate social responsibility program which is affordable, can work across all communities and will make a real difference.

Our program is simple really…

We work with charity partners operating in our communities (Lancashire & Greater Manchester), and donate to them a third of the profit that we both generate in doing business together.

This recurring monthly donation doesn’t just include the business we do directly, it also includes a third of any profit generated by the charity referring other business contacts on to us. The aim is to grow this (recurring monthly) donation for each charity partner, allowing them to better support the area of our local communities where they and we operate.

The donations collate by the number of monthly colour pages processed and the number of registered telephone handsets. So (through a charity and across their referred business contacts) if we processed 10,000 colour pages and had 50 registered telephone handsets. We would donate to the charity £200 each month, and the donation amount will grow for any additional colour pages and extra handsets.

This is not just great for the charity, it’s also great news for the businesses the charity refers to us. As this scheme could also form part of their own corporate responsibility program, because (through us) they are also donating to a charity, which in turn is supporting their own local community.

Today, the truth is many smaller organisations (not just large corporations) are devoting real time and money to corporate social responsibility programs. And although, financially it may seem a really hard thing to do, take some time to really think it over, and design a program that works not just for the communities where you operate, but also works financially for you too.