When well implemented, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can significantly improve society, your company’s reputation and relationships, and its ability to attract and retain top talent.

Too often, however, promising CSR initiatives are developed and implemented haphazardly or in silos, yielding much less than their potential. Typical programs include: 

• Corporate giving

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I)

• Sustainability 

• Employee engagement, including employee giving, traditional volunteering, skilled volunteering, and pro-bono service

• Supply chain management

• Environmental, social, and governance (ESG)

Proper strategic planning, within or across CSR programs, means aligning your social and business interests and defining a practical plan that will make a real difference.

Here are three simple steps to strengthen your CSR strategy for 2023.

Step 1: Set Goals. Which communities and causes should you support?

With all the pressing issues facing society today, it can be challenging to narrow down the concerns that should be supported through your philanthropic efforts. We recommend considering three main factors: what (cause), who (demographics), and where (geography). 

Aligning your CSR strategy by cause area focuses on the what, such as the issues, interventions, or specific impacts you wish to create, and mostly aligns with your company’s mission or key concerns.

By focusing on who will be impacted, your community investments can be directed to specifically support priority demographics based on race, age, gender, income, education, employment, or other interests.

You can also consider where your investments should have an impact—such as a specific city, country, or region—based on the locations of your employees, customers, or other key stakeholders.

If your what, who, and where priorities haven’t yet been established, consider building at least an initial draft of them by finding out:

• What are your executive, investor, and board needs and requirements?

• Whose buy-in do you need to support your programs? 

• What “success message” would you want to be able to communicate in your marketing, communications, and public relations efforts? 

• What causes are your colleagues already supporting?

• Are there any initiatives you want to add to your CSR strategy in the future? What steps can you take now to prepare?

Schedule a demo with to learn how our impact measurement platform and social impact team can help you invest more strategically.

Step 2: Define Success. How much can you move the needle on your key issues? 

We all know good intentions don’t always equal positive impact. In the CSR world, poorly executed intentions can easily turn into greenwashing, lip service, and bad PR. How can we ensure that our actions go beyond virtue signaling to become drivers of meaningful impact? Here are a few techniques to help you evaluate the performance of your CSR initiatives:

• Set impact goals: What metrics and success outcomes matter the most to your team? Setting impact measurement goals will establish a framework to help you track the results of your CSR investments.

• Monitor data quality: What data are you currently using to track your programs? It’s important to find a balance between burdening your nonprofit partners with overly specific data requests and not collecting essential metrics to help your programs succeed. Once you’ve established clear guidance on data quality, transparency about the data sources becomes essential. If your data and metrics are not evidence based—or could possibly mislead your stakeholders entirely—make sure your team notes their limitations and does not overestimate their reach.

• Learn from benchmarking: What do similar CSR initiatives look like at other companies? External benchmarking can be used to motivate your leadership to change strategies or increase their budget to generate more impact.

Step 3: Improve Results. Are you maximizing your social impact?

Translating data into insights and acting on them is an essential part of any organization dedicated to continuous improvement. Once you know how well your investments performed, you can refine your goals, improve your social impact, and help even more people. Here are a few methods to maximize your impact:

• Social return on investment (SROI): SROI quantifies how efficiently philanthropy benefits society. This framework can offer insights into what’s working and what’s not, helping you understand which programs are generating the most impact.

• Learning and evaluation: Measure with the aim to improve. Once you’ve gathered insights from your data, share your findings with your nonprofit partners to help them become more effective.

• Capacity building: Helping your nonprofit partners become more efficient and effective will empower them to do their best work. Offering training, equipment, or skilled volunteers will strengthen their infrastructure and increase their—and your—impact.

• Catalytic/higher-leverage investments: Joining forces with other funders or investing in replicable programs can propel the extent of your impact far beyond your initial investment. 

Next Steps

An effective social impact strategy will give your team a framework to improve society while demonstrating value to the business. With time, teamwork, and the right tools, your CSR strategic planning will ensure that 2023 is your most impactful year yet.

Are you planning on changing your social impact strategy this year? Do you want to make sure that your KPIs are in line with your business strategy, priorities, and CSR measurement goals? Schedule a CSR strategic planning consultation with our team to get on the path toward measuring meaningful impact.