Corporate Giving

High Impact Corporate Giving

Is your business looking for a trusted partner to help you achieve your charitable and corporate social responsibility goals?

We know that businesses want to support their local community, but often other demands on your time mean it is a struggle to respond to all the approaches you receive from local charities. Partnering with your local Community Foundation and setting up a named fund is a great way for you to ensure that your good intentions are delivering real impact and helping those most in need.

Your ring-fenced fund can be created to benefit causes and themes important to your organisation. You can choose to restrict your gifts to a geographical area, for example near your company offices, or to particular charitable activities, such as developing the skills of young people. The Community Foundation will promote and seek applications that meet your required criteria.

When You Set Up Your Fund

We have a strong record of working with corporate clients in managing and administering corporate funds on their behalf. We provide a flexible and cost-effective vehicle to manage charitable funds as well as access to our expertise in grant-making, governance and wide knowledge of community needs.

The Community Foundation will:

Manage all the administrative details, promote the fund, receive, vet and assess applications and issue grants to charitable organisations on your behalf.
Ensure all aspects of your company’s charitable giving is administered under the highest standards of governance.
Provide you with regular outcome reports and funding statements.
Can facilitate short-term (flow through) grant making or can invest your gift in an endowed fund.

The benefits for companies are:

Flexible fund that can make payments to any charitable organisation
Third party transparency and accountability
Expert advice and support in reaching groups
Tax efficient donations but no need to register as a charity / trust yourself with the attendant costs
Minimum staff time required to co-ordinate the fund in comparison to setting up an in-house fund

What can a corporate fund achieve

Nationwide Building Society

Nationwide Building Society was founded to help people into homes of their own and its ambition is that everyone should have a place fit to call home stands firm today. They provide charities, community land trusts and housing co-operatives with grants of between £10,000 and £50,000 to make a change in their local area. And it’s more than just money, the funded projects also get community and volunteering support from nationwide employees. Street Soccer was one group that benefited

Bank of Ireland

Bank of Ireland and the Community Foundation teamed up to give away £25,000 to the best technology innovations for community benefit this year. Our ‘Techies in Residence’ programme matched local charities with technology companies to build digital solutions for social benefit.

Energia

Energia is working in close partnership with the Foundation to reach local groups from the areas surrounding their Wind Farms. In the last year Long Mountain Wind Farm was able to support 18 local organisations with over £60,000 making a difference to over 6,000 local residents. But whilst statistics can be impressive, the real impact can be seen when individuals’ lives are changed. Clochmills Community Action Team were one group to benefit

Employee Engagement

By partnering with the Community Foundation your employees and clients can become involved in the projects you support. We organise regular funding panels and employee engagement opportunities such as our ‘Seeing is Believing’ visits where employees can meet directly with the organisations they have supported and hear first-hand the impact of their support. These visits really bring home to people how their support makes a difference and can lead to increased engagement, motivation and volunteering.

Community Benefit and Social Value

Companies increasingly make voluntary payments – commonly referred to as ‘community benefit funds’ in the communities they are working in. These voluntary payments which vary in value are often linked with renewable energy developments such as wind farms or other infrastructural projects.

The Community Foundation runs a number of these funds. We offer a professional, efficient and flexible service that avoids the need to set up a separate charitable trust, and which prioritises good governance and maximum impact from the fund in the community it supports.