Make a New Year’s Resolution Your Company Can Keep in 2018

For most, the beginning of the year means one thing: New Year’s resolutions. Every new year brings a chance for improvement, a chance to better oneself not just in January, but throughout the entire year.

While many of us abandon our ambitious gym goals after just a few days, improving upon your corporate citizenship initiatives is an objective well within reach. The Civic 50, an initiative of Points of Light, annually recognizes and honors the 50 most community-minded companies in the nation. How? Through a quantitative annual survey that looks at four dimensions of corporate community engagement programs: investment, integration, institutionalization, and impact. In other terms:

• Investment: How extensively and strategically does the company apply its resources to community engagement in the United States, including employee time and skills, cash, in-kind giving and leadership?
• Integration: How does the company integrate its U.S. community engagement programs into key business functions, including employee engagement, marketing/PR, diversity and inclusion, recruiting, stakeholder relations and skill development?
• Institutionalization: How does the company support community engagement in the United States through organizational policies, systems and incentives?
• Impact: How does the company measure the social and business impact of its U.S. community engagement program?

While we can’t promise that every company that takes the Civic 50 survey will be recognized as an honoree, there is one thing we can guarantee: applying to the Civic 50 will help you and your team evaluate your community engagement program as related to these four dimensions, while also providing you with a personalized scorecard that ranks your company against the other applicants. Every company that takes the Civic 50 survey receives a benchmark to gauge organizational progress against a core group of leading organizations – true peers.

Time and time again, we hear from Civic 50 companies that the survey is an annual exercise for its corporate citizenship team to scrutinize their community engagement program’s impact, investment tactics, and overall integration and institutionalization into business strategy. The Civic 50 not only is a means to celebrate the great work companies are doing to strengthen the communities where they do business – it’s also a way to strengthen their programs through extensive analysis and inspiration from fellow applicants and honorees.

The evaluation doesn’t stop once the survey is submitted: companies receive scorecards from survey partner True Impact in the spring of 2018. These scorecards summarize how your company scored on the survey, ranked in each dimension, and more. The three options for the scorecard include:

• Individual Scorecard | Free of charge: This one-page scorecard includes your company’s score, ranking as compared to all Civic 50 participants, and tier for each of the four dimensions.
• Sector Scorecard | $1,500: In addition to all the content included with the individual scorecard, this enhanced scorecard includes  sector-specific rankings and tier categorizations to quantify your performance as compared to your peers, and the additional percentage needed to be in top performance tiers for each dimension.
• Comprehensive Scorecard | $3,500: The comprehensive scorecard builds upon the content of the individual and sector scorecards, adding question-specific rankings and benchmarks, information on score distribution across all companies and where your company falls, and more.

These scorecards help you take a deep dive into your corporate responsibility initiatives and provide a springboard for improvement in 2018 and beyond. Learn more about the different scorecards.

The Civic 50 sets the standard for excellence in corporate citizenship. Make 2018 your year to set yourself up for continuous improvement and distinction in community engagement. Get started.

The Civic 50 survey, powered by True Impact, is open to all private and public companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more and operations in the United States. Learn more at www.civic50.org.