Corporate Social Responsibility
For a sustainable business and practices, companies need to operate in a socially responsible manner.
SOCIETAL IMPACT
Through business actions there are positive and negative impacts on the surrounding community.
The negative impacts can be analysed and a CSR plan developed and implemented to minimise or offset these impacts. It is important to recognise this may not only be environmental but in other ways, for example of the families of your employees. With an established corporate mission and vision, this plan can be strategically aligned for an authentic approach that not only benefits the community but also your team, culture and business.
SUSTAINABLE ACTION
Corporate Social Responsibility should aim for a sustainability and progressive behaviours.
Establishing expected behaviours can align with personal values and beliefs, giving your staff and stakeholders close alignment resulting in positive habits forming. When developed in-line with your corporate strategy this can improve culture and create purpose. When there is a purpose that meets personal values, working to complement your strategic direction business can see enormous changes and improvements.
CSR: The Ascendis Way
We practice what we preach and this also means we apply our own strategy in doing so.
At Ascendis we look at our own skill-sets and the impact we can create. Whilst also considering being a small team of dedicated professionals often operating in different areas and having little if any negative impact to offset, we aim to contribute to those around us and provided maximum benefit.
Through our community connections we seek out projects and ventures to apply our skills, experience and resources. Working with these groups or individuals we develop strategies and equip them with the systems and technology to enable them to move forward and achieve more.
There are some that really want and can use our help, so we see how we can assist.
We normally work with clients from the $1M+ annual turnover as it's easier and quicker for them to receive value once we're engaged. However, there are smaller businesses that really want to improve and grow, where owners just need support and direction.
We created a heavily discounted (up to 40%) package to enable access to our knowledge and experience for these others. Our Small Business Support and Mentoring package is structured to allow us to provide real value with owners that had been facing challenges alone.
A recent project we've undertaken with some local groups is an app for the homeless.
Through some local community work with preparing meals for the homeless we were told of a problem with having current information made available to the homeless on where meals could be found, Many great people and organisations are doing what they can to help but there can be communication challenges with reaching everyone with up-to-date information on what's happening.
So we're now working with them to develop an app they can use to keep details of meal points up-to-date and available to those that are homeless or facing difficulties.