What is social impact?

Social impact is the act of making a significant and positive change that influences and overcomes a pressing social challenge. Your organization can successfully accomplish this by implementing projects, strategies and policies that focus on taking action to solve a problem happening in the community or to improve the lives of a group or an individual. When potential customers and employees see your company working to make a difference, they’ll feel more empowered to do the same by supporting or joining your organization.

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Advantages of social impact

Making change and creating a positive social impact not only provides happiness and inner-peace to yourself and community members, but also to your customers and employees. Common advantages of social impact include:

Understand the positive influence and opportunities your business brings to others

Using your company’s resources and profits to invest in social causes helps you better identify the power of your company and how it can help others. When researching which social impact to dedicate your time and money to, search for organizations or opportunities related to the services your company provides. For instance, if you’re a women-owned business in the technology industry, you could implement social impact programs that focus on providing free coding language courses to younger girls.

Attract passionate employees who share your values and goals

A goal of many employees is to work for companies with a clear purpose and meaning. Knowing your company works to inspire change and help others makes employees feel more passionate and motivated to contribute meaningful work to your company. When your business demonstrates a clear focus on social impact, this sets a vision for your employees. Employees feel motivated to improve the company’s performance to earn more profits that go toward your social impact program.

Be sure to mention your company’s goals, purpose and social impact projects in all of your hiring materials to clearly communicate your business’ purpose. This showcases your values to candidates and makes your company look more appealing to them. Your employees also feel more committed to staying with your organization, essentially boosting your employee retention.

Build stronger bonds and relationships with customers

Showing your customers that you’re constantly working to make a difference with your social impact efforts makes you stand out from competitors. When you communicate to customers that a portion of your profit goes toward helping the community, they’ll feel more excited to financially support your company and cause by purchasing your product.

Knowing you’re a business with employees who work to help others tells clients that you’re a trustworthy and positive organization to collaborate with.