All large organisations have a formal Corporate & Social Responsibility statement and policy these days. In many developed countries, it forms part of a legal requirement.

As part of that policy, all large organisations, more or less, also have a CI or Community Investment strategy.

With some companies, charitable support feels like something that’s been bolted on; they do it because they have to or because it’s simply good for business. You can barely sell anything these days without saying something is going to some good cause somewhere or other.

The problem with this is it all begins to feel a little cynical. But in some organisations – that isn’t the case at all.

According to real estate gurus, the best community investment strategies are those that really make it real by enabling employees to make their choices of NGO partners in a democratic way and by enabling the employees to take time out of their work schedules to get hands-on involvement with the charitable organisations concerned.

If you look around on the internet, you’re bound to find review and advice websites, like the David Lichtenstein blog, which offer opinions on a range of subjects that could help you out in your quest to gather more information.

In this way, the employees get to really own their organisation’s community investment strategy, rather than simply paying lip service to what is, effectively, a cynical bolt on extra.

In straightforward commercial cases, the situation is slightly different. If it makes good business sense for a commercial organisation to support a charitable cause, and everyone understands the deal; then that’s fine – all the partners concerned are happy. But when a large organisation makes pretence of caring about communities but doesn’t take the kind of steps outlined above to make it have true resonance with the people who work for an organisation as well as those they intend to assist – then it runs a danger of ringing a little hollow.