SMART MARKETING: Involvement Makes Good Business Sense

For many reasons, our company is involved in our community. Besides the idea that "giving back" is a right thing to do, there are compelling business arguments to be made for getting involved.

In the past 12 or so years, I’ve served on several community and civic boards of directors. My employer, Harvey Massey, also volunteers for some high-level organizations. We don’t do it to get out of the office or because we don’t have other things which we could be doing. We do it because community involvement is good for business and it matters to employees.

BENEFICIAL EFFORTS. Let’s take these two issues one at a time. When you serve on a non-profit organization board of directors, you immediately connect with a group of like-minded people. Usually, you make new contacts and you get to know some of the "movers and shakers" in the community. (I should note here that it’s not uncommon for people who do this sort of thing to serve on several boards at once and to see many of the same faces, over and over again.) If I’ve learned one thing since I’ve been in the pest management industry, it’s that everyone is a customer or potential customer for one or more of our services. Therefore, I regularly bump into current customers who either say nice things about our company and service(s) or who have some issues that I can address. I also regularly bump into people who need our service(s) and who, in a heartbeat, become a proprietary lead for our company. I also meet people who are being serviced by one of our competitors, and who often share information of a valuable nature.

So while I’m contributing my time, effort and support to a worthwhile community-based arts, cultural or human service organization, I’m taking care of customers, getting referrals and obtaining information useful to my company. Talk about your classic "win-win" situation!

A vivid example of how this can work involves my service to a local hunger relief fundraising activity. Over the 12 years I’ve been involved with this effort, I’ve gotten to know many people in the food, food-service, restaurant and hospitality industries. One day, one of those contacts mentioned that her company (one of the largest restaurant chains in the world) was reviewing their current service provider. One thing led to another and we obtained a large customer we might not have were it not for that relationship.

A CARING EMPLOYER. Service to your community also matters to employees. It may not seem like it at times, but employees like to work for an organization that cares about the community. People like to be associated with worthwhile endeavors, and simply going to work and making a living, while it feeds the body, sometimes doesn’t feed the spirit.

Putting together a "team" of company employees to participate in a walk for a charity or helping to build a house for a subsistence-level family creates an environment of camaraderie that often doesn’t come just from going to work every day. It also exposes your company, your people and your more noble purposes to others that are similarly supportive of community endeavors. Remember, the organization that you and your employees are helping has clients, employees and directors who all need one or more of your services. When those needs strike, whom are they going to call?

It’s also OK to donate services to individuals and organizations that need them. This should be done within reasonable guidelines, but a termite treatment we did without charge for a local shelter resulted in a number of paying customers who learned of our contribution and appreciated it enough to choose us to service their homes and businesses.

As with everything in business, community involvement needs to be managed and needs to be dispensed in a sensible and somewhat focused manner. You can’t do everything, but you can do some things. And the things that you elect to do will, sooner or later, pay off in both tangible and intangible ways.

Simply stated, it’s OK to do well while at the same time doing good!

The author is senior vice president of Massey-Persons-Brinati Communications, a subsidiary of Massey Services Inc., Maitland, Fla. He can be reached via e-mail at bbrewer@pctonline.com.