Courage or Caution: How Should Companies Approach Social Impact?.
There is a tension sitting at the heart of corporate social impact right now, and I do not think it is talked about honestly enough.
Benevity's 2024 State of Corporate Purpose report, drawing on data from nearly 1,000 companies and a survey of over 400 CSR leaders, found that 87% of UK impact leaders believe corporations should be courageous and take a stand on social issues — while 78% believe they should be more cautious about which issues they choose to support. Both of those things are true simultaneously, held by the same people. That is not a contradiction. It is an accurate description of the environment companies are operating in.
The desire to do the right thing has never been stronger. The risk of getting it wrong — of backing an issue that becomes politically contentious, or of being seen to be performative rather than genuine — has never felt higher. Navigating between those two realities is genuinely hard.
ERGs: from nice-to-have to business-critical
Employee Resource Groups have quietly become one of the more important infrastructure decisions a company makes. Benevity's data found that 98% of UK companies affirm ERGs' importance in unifying employees during times of crisis, and 61% are increasing ERG budgets.
That trajectory is the right one. But there is a version of ERGs that I want to call out directly, because I have seen it from the inside: the ERG as a side-of-desk expectation. Employees are asked to volunteer their time, their energy, and their lived experience to support the company's diversity and inclusion narrative — and in return they receive recognition in a report, maybe a slot at a conference, and the warm feeling of having contributed. The company, meanwhile, uses their participation as evidence of its commitment to social impact.
That is not a fair exchange. Research consistently shows that ERG leaders typically spend several hours per week on group management on top of their day jobs — and that without proper recognition and compensation, ERG participation risks becoming a tax on the very employees these groups are designed to support. If ERGs are genuinely business-critical — and the data suggests they increasingly are — they should be resourced and recognised accordingly.
Companies that do this well see real returns: a sense of workplace belonging drives a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in turnover risk and a 75% decrease in employee sick days. That is not a wellbeing argument. That is a commercial argument.
Volunteering: building culture in a hybrid world
Volunteering has taken on new significance in a world where hybrid work has made the informal cultural glue of an office harder to maintain. Benevity's data shows 63% of UK companies are evolving their volunteer programmes further, investing in skills-based volunteering and nonprofit board service to create stronger connections and drive deeper social impact.
Skills-based volunteering is the right direction. It is more meaningful for the volunteer, more valuable for the recipient organisation, and more clearly linked to the company's actual capabilities. Sending employees to paint fences is a team day out. Helping a charity redesign its customer journey or improve its financial literacy programme is a genuine contribution of expertise.
The best volunteering programmes I have seen are the ones that connect employees' professional skills to problems that actually matter — and that give employees real autonomy over how they engage, rather than a list of pre-approved activities.
AI and CSR: cautious optimism
Benevity's research found that while 67% of UK companies worry about AI's societal impact, 87% are optimistic about its ability to address social issues. That balance — genuine concern alongside genuine excitement — seems like the right place to be.
AI is already being used in the social impact space in meaningful ways: to identify people at risk of financial exclusion, to improve the efficiency of grant distribution, to personalise financial education. The risks around bias, transparency, and unintended consequences are real and need to be managed actively. But dismissing the potential because the risks exist is not the answer.
The customer question nobody is asking
Here is the thing I keep coming back to when I read research like Benevity's. The conversation about corporate social impact is almost entirely an internal one — about employees, about ERGs, about volunteering programmes, about what the leadership team believes.
The customer barely features.
If you are genuinely trying to define which social issues your company should engage with, the most logical and defensible starting point is your customer base. Who are your customers? What are the outcomes they are trying to achieve? Where are they most underserved — by you, by the market, by the system? The answers to those questions should point directly toward the social issues where your company can have the most credible, connected, and commercially coherent impact.
A financial services company whose customers include millions of women approaching retirement has an obvious connection to the gender pension gap. A retailer whose customers include millions of people on low incomes has an obvious connection to financial inclusion. These are not arbitrary social causes. They are the lived realities of the people the business depends on.
Purpose that is disconnected from customers is fragile. Purpose that grows out of genuine understanding of customer outcomes is both more defensible and more likely to make a real difference.