Small business owner Heather Claycomb learned the hard way that donating till it hurts is not how to change the world. She offers some tips for making an impact.

How many emails have you opened in recent weeks from companies telling you they donated to charity for the holidays? Corporate charitable giving at Christmas is now the norm rather than the exception, and Kiwis are caring people – according to the latest World Giving index, New Zealand is the third most generous country in the world.  

If you’re one of those corporate givers, what I say next could be rather challenging.

I believe if you want to create a wider community impact through your giving there’s a better way than making a deposit into a charity’s bank account once a year.

Before I go much further, keep in mind I own a very small business.  We’re a team of nine running Hamilton public relations agency HMC Communications. We operate on a typical SME budget, so when it comes to giving, we don’t have heaps of extra cash to flit away.   

But the glue that sticks our team together is that we wholeheartedly believe in the power of generosity. So that’s made us think more strategically about how to maximise the power of every donation.

During our 15 years in business we’ve learned a lot. We’ve found that you need to be quite strategic about your generosity or it can be your downfall. As a small business it’s easy to say ‘yes’ to giving away time, money and resources more often than you should, and that can impact on the bottom line in a big way.

So, here are four lessons that might help move your team from a casual Christmas donor to a purposeful year-long impactor.

Your time is valuable

As a small business we tend to donate more of our time than our cash. Last year we donated the equivalent of 6% of our revenues in time to two not-for-profits. Plus, we’ve put time into being a founding member of The Good Collective, an initiative where Waikato businesses are banding together to offer services to the region’s charitable and not-for-profit sector.

Giving time is common for many small businesses.  f you’re a plumber, you’re unblocking drains for people in need. If you’re a graphic designer, you’re developing websites for cash-poor organisations. If you’re a lawyer, you’re giving free advice to people in a pinch.

According to the latest Giving New Zealand report commissioned by Philanthropy New Zealand, for every $1 businesses give in cash they also give an estimated $1.43 worth of sponsorship and $3.27 worth of in-kind goods and services.

My business has found that donating our staff time, advice and skills has been personally and collectively transforming in many ways.  

By allowing staff to give their time during working hours it helps them feel like they’ve made a difference beyond the day-to-day, profit focus of the business. And giving back as a team contributes to camaraderie and a positive work culture.

However, from our experience I recommend proceeding with caution. Once you start donating your team time it’s easy to end up giving way more than you ever intended. When that happens your generosity can become a burden that impacts negatively on your bottom line and drains rather than fulfils your staff.

If you decide to donate time to a good cause, set your threshold. Determine the maximum amount of time you’re willing to give away every year or month. Track it and stick to it.

Practising generosity has many team benefits, but as the boss you need to be firm about turning off the tap when enough is enough.

Arrows are better than scatterguns

Pausing and thinking strategically about where you’ll donate your cash and time will reap huge rewards.

In the early days of running my own business I took a scattergun approach. If I’m honest, if someone asked for a handout I most often said ‘yes’ without thinking. I felt mean saying no to people who could really use my help. I often over-extended myself by doing way too much unpaid work.

In my experience donating a little bit to a lot of different organisations or causes never has the same impact as picking a few good initiatives and putting your weight behind them.

My team has chosen to spend most of our pro bono time helping Waikato Women’s Refuge. This targetted approach allows us to create a much larger impact than if we did bits and pieces here and there.

The same is true when it comes to giving cash: larger monetary donations to one or a few good causes allows you to create immense, positive change where small gifts just don’t.

The first step in honing your generosity is having a conversation with your staff. What causes get them excited? Where do their passions lie? Pick a charity or cause that resonates with them while also being aligned with your business, set your generosity goals as a team, and then determine together with your chosen charity the realistic goals you can help them achieve.

The added benefit of being more strategic in your giving is it becomes easier to say no. The guilt no longer takes over when you can say, ‘sorry, but we’re doing good elsewhere’.

Warm fuzzies depend on you

In the world of corporate giving there seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to telling others what you’re up to.

Often companies donate simply because it’s the right thing to do. They aren’t always looking to increase brand affinity or gain more customers because they’re great givers.

But a lot of the time companies give because they want their brand to be associated with ‘doing good’. When that’s the goal it’s easy to forget that the warm fuzzy brand associations don’t just happen by osmosis. You’ve got to be purposeful in getting the word out.

We’ve certainly found our team getting lost in the ‘doing’ and not taking the opportunity to let people know what we’re up to on the donation front. (Yes, that’s right, even in the PR business we don’t always do this well).

A word of caution, however, is that corporates must keep it humble when telling their generosity story. Nothing grates more than a business shouting about its good deeds. The public will see right through any giving that’s solely for the PR value and not truly from the heart.

My recommendation is to remember to leverage your generosity stories when it’s appropriate. No one else will do it for you.

‘Giving ‘til it hurts’ is bollocks

According to the 2018 Acumen Edelman Trust Barometer, 44% of New Zealanders agree with the statement that “companies that only think about themselves and their profits are bound to fail”.

This statistic points to the fact that giving back is good for fostering a positive business reputation.

But it’s absolutely essential to set a limit. One thing I’ve found from experience is the more your company gives, the more you will be asked to give. Even if you don’t shout your generosity from the rooftops, organisations will somehow find you.

Don’t be a sucker, particularly if you’re a small business. You need to ensure your donation practices don’t break the bank. At the end of the day commercial organisations exist to make a profit. Giving back may be good business, but it’s not core business.

Oh, but there’s a thought: what if giving back is your core business? When that’s the case we call it a social enterprise.

The desire to make generosity our core business has prompted my husband Rod and I to take our corporate donation goals to a whole new level in 2019. We’ve started a charity called All Good Ventures which is helping social entrepreneurs start and build profitable businesses.

Starting this financial year I’ll be donating 100% of my business profits to our new charity. And in the near future my husband will donate dividends received from his business investments as well.

It’s a new adventure in giving for us, but one we trust will create a lasting impression on our community for generations to come. It’s a personal journey we’re starting to move ourselves from donors to impactors.

Heather Claycomb is the owner of HMC Communications, a public relations agency in Hamilton, and is the co-founder of All Good Ventures. She’s a trustee on the boards of The Good Collective, Habitat for Humanity (Central North Island) and a representative on the PR Institute of NZ National Council.

From furniture to food, wholesale import businesses are on an upward trend.

From plush, leather Chesterfield sofas to marble coffee tables framed with brushed stainless steel, wholesale furniture company Hawthorne has managed to strike a pleasant middle ground between classical and modern.

“Contemporary but timeless” is how Julian Frizzell, the general manager for the business his parents started back in the 1980s, describes Hawthorne’s look. Today, the company employs 12 staff, importing goods from all around the world and supplying them to local furniture retailers, particularly smaller, independent ones in towns like Cambridge, Palmerston North and Hawkes Bay.

According to Frizzell, business in the last two years has been booming. But it’s not just retailers that are causing the upward spike: as New Zealand experiences an unprecedented housing boom, adjacent industries — like furniture wholesalers — have also been reaping the benefits. Frizzell estimates that approximately 20% of Hawthorne’s business now comes through interior designers who are increasingly being tasked with the job of decking out these new homes.

“The interior designers market has definitely grown in New Zealand. In the last 18 months, it’s just gone crazy. [I think because] people like to think they’re buying the right thing, to have that reassurance. They might pay a few thousand dollars to an interior designer to help them style their home and buy furniture through them.”

Also making the most of selling premium goods from overseas is Cook & Nelson, which was founded by husband-and-wife pairing Nick Brown and Becs Caughey a little over three years ago. But instead of chairs, tables and wooden cabinets, Cook & Nelson sell artisan foods: ‘handcrafted tonic’, ‘bloody mary pickles’, ‘barrel-aged shoyu’ and ‘bourbon jam’, among other products.

Like Hawthorne, there’s an appetite (literally) for what Cook & Nelson has to offer. Several of its brands, like McClure’s and Seedlip, have experienced huge waves of popularity since arriving in New Zealand. McClure’s, for example, has made a name for itself for being the go-to choice of craft pickle for Burger Burger, Miss Moonshines and Federal Deli, while Seedlip — the world’s first ever non-alcoholic distilled spirit — sold out within a week of being stocked on Kiwi shelves.

Brown says a large part of what makes Cook & Nelson successful is the fact that it’s able to be in several parts of the food market at once. For example, its twofold business model of both wholesale and retail means that success with one translates to promoting the other. “Maybe if they try something at Burger Burger and they really like it, they can go to their local New World and have a crack at it themselves,” says Brown.

If Hawthorne and Cook & Nelson’s experiences are anything to go by, New Zealand’s wholesale industry seems to be doing a pretty good job of not just keeping afloat, but making the most of a strong current in their direction. But don’t just take their word for it — the numbers clearly speak for themselves. According to Stats NZ, total wholesale trade sales value has gone up for the last 10 consecutive quarters (the last time that figure experienced a drop was back in March 2016).

Adam Day, commercial banking manager at Kiwibank, speculates there are a variety of reasons for greater confidence among consumers: an increase in GDP, low-interest rates, and a rise in the minimum wage. “I think all of those together, they start to give it a little more confidence that you can go out and get that new sofa or splash out on some nice food,” he says. “There’s a lot of downbeat news about the economy lately: falling property prices, low business confidence, a lot of global tension. But actually, the average person still seems to be putting their hands in their pocket and buying products for their houses and buying [premium] food.”

That’s not to say it’s all plain sailing. The biggest challenge for wholesale businesses has to do with managing cash flow, especially if they’re importing large quantities of expensive products. This is where the bank comes in — they’re the ones that can lend big sums of money — because it can be weeks, even months before a wholesaler can actually sell a product its paid for. With Hawthorne for example, there can be up to a six-month gap between when they order a piece of furniture (and have to start paying for it) and when they actually start getting some cash coming in for that product.

“The challenge for them is really making sure that their margins stack up,” says Day. “[At Kiwibank] we have the ability to finance the products from when they’re purchased to when they arrive in New Zealand. We can also offer the foreign exchange risk management, so making sure they’re not taking too much risk with the exchange rate, and then when it arrives in the country, we can finance the time frame between when they sell the product and when they get paid for the product by their customers.”

However, these sorts of challenges are nothing new — they’re part and parcel of how the wholesale business works. Ultimately, things are looking up for the industry, particularly when it comes to premium goods.

“Wholesaling and importing are probably going to grow,” says Day. “There’s so much product outside of New Zealand and there’s such a demand now that’s getting bigger and bigger. The market is probably going to change again very soon.”

This content was created in paid partnership with Kiwibank. Learn more about our partnerships here.