Brady Press, Managing Director
For many corporate grantmaking professionals, having time for strategic planning can feel like a luxury. Between reviewing grant requests, supporting nonprofit partners, managing employee engagement, and responding to leadership, there is rarely extra bandwidth. Yet a clear strategy is what makes that day-to-day work more effective – helping teams prioritize opportunities, align giving with their company’s business priorities, and communicate impact with greater confidence.
Strategic planning isn’t just for large, mature giving programs. Companies of every size and budget can benefit from a focused social impact strategy, grounded in a few fundamental questions:
- What social issues is our company best positioned to address?
- How do our investments support both community needs and business priorities?
- Who makes decisions, and how will we measure success over time?
Our recent engagement with Servier US demonstrates how an evolving CSR program can use these questions to build a focused, scalable approach to corporate giving.
Start With An Honest Assessment
Many corporate giving programs evolve organically through local sponsorships, employee requests, executive relationships, or responses to immediate community needs. While valuable, these efforts can become disjointed over time.
That was the opportunity facing Servier US. With charitable giving, sponsorships, and employee engagement activities already underway, Servier needed a clearer framework to guide future investments – one aligned to company priorities and capable of telling a cohesive social impact story. With a growing commitment to corporate giving, the company wanted a more focused framework to guide future funding and maximize the impact of its philanthropy while equipping its small team with a clear, scalable approach for the future.
Our Approach
Before setting priorities, we needed to first understand the current state of the program. This meant looking beyond a list of past grants and asking more strategic questions, such as:
- What issues is the company best positioned to address?
- Do current investments align with clear social impact goals and stakeholder priorities?
- Where are there gaps, opportunities, and capacity constraints?
To answer these questions, we gathered leadership perspectives, issued a targeted employee survey, and benchmarked peer companies at similar stages of philanthropic investment. This process surfaced both opportunities and tensions: multiple possible focus areas, differing stakeholder expectations, and a need for clearer ownership and decision-making.
By identifying where perspectives aligned, and where tradeoffs were necessary, Servier could better determine the “must haves” from the “nice to haves,” and chart a decision-making framework that ensures accountability to execute the strategy.
Make the Difficult Choices to Streamline Giving
Strategic planning requires focus. Teams often feel pressure to support many worthy causes, particularly when employees, leaders, and community partners have different priorities. But trying to address everything can make it harder to create meaningful, measurable impact in any one area.
Effective strategies balance business alignment, community need, employee interest, geographic relevance, and organizational assets. The goal is to identify the intersection of what matters to stakeholders, what the business can authentically support, and where the company can make a distinctive contribution.
Our Approach
In Servier’s case, the team was considering four broad areas of focus. Our assessment revealed strong internal alignment around two, Supporting the Patient Journey and STEAM Education. These priorities created a clear foundation for future investments while connecting Servier US’s giving strategy to the issues most relevant to the business and its employees.
Focus does not require rigidity. These two priorities are broad enough to leave room for local needs and emerging opportunities, while still providing guardrails for consistent decisions.
Design a Giving Model That Fits Your Capacity
A strategy is only effective if it is actionable. For many teams, this means selecting a giving framework and grantmaking process that balances ambition with operational feasibility.
There is no one right model. Teams may adopt:
- A focus-area portfolio, which supports multiple causes and organizations.
- A signature initiative, which builds visibility around one major issue or program.
- Strategic partnerships, which allow for deeper, long-term collaboration.
Teams must also choose a grant process. Open application processes can broaden access and uncover new organizations but require greater administrative capacity; employee-nomination models can strengthen internal engagement; invitation-only processes allow smaller teams to focus their time on organizations that have already been assessed for fit.
Our Approach
Servier US selected an invitation-only, focus area grantmaking approach to reduce administrative burden while maintaining a strong connection between prospective grantees and the company’s strategic priorities. The team incorporated elements of other giving models into their approach as well; by coining their grantmaking program, “Tomorrow’s Promise,” they unlocked the storytelling potential of a signature initiative.
At the same time the team established a Grants Review Committee, where leader-nominated, mid-career professionals review applications and make funding recommendations, creating meaningful opportunities for employee engagement and leadership development. And critically important is that this work was done compliantly and in collaboration with the legal and compliance teams and the company’s policies and applicable laws.
Note: Invitation-only does not mean relying solely on existing relationships. Companies can build a diverse pipeline through research, referral networks, and proactive community outreach.
Establish Governance Early
Even the strongest strategy can lose momentum when roles are unclear. Social impact often touches multiple functions, including communications, HR, public affairs, legal, finance, and executive leadership. Without a shared governance model, decisions may be delayed, inconsistent, or overly dependent on one individual.
Our Approach
As part of the planning process, Changing Our World helped Servier US develop a governance approach that clarified ownership, decision-making, and cross-functional collaboration for managing grants, employee engagement, and impact storytelling. Together, we documented roles and responsibilities, approval thresholds, and how requests and the portfolio would be reviewed. Making these decisions in advance helps prevent delays and keeps the program sustainable.
Build Measurement in from the Beginning
Measurement is often viewed as the final stage of a grantmaking process, but it should be built in from the start. Establishing clear measures upfront helps teams select aligned partners, track progress across a portfolio, learn what is working, and communicate impact with credibility.
Early on, track practical outputs such as grants awarded, people reached, employees engaged, and volunteer hours completed. Partner feedback and stories add important qualitative context. As relationships mature and more data becomes available, teams can work with nonprofit partners to identify meaningful outcomes tied to their focus areas.
Our Approach
Changing Our World worked with the Servier team to embed measurement into the strategic framework and establish accountability from the outset. Together, we mapped out a set of baseline metrics for internal reporting, including grants awarded, number of people served, and number of hours volunteered.
We also identified focus-area-specific metrics to show how the grants were advancing Servier’s priorities, for example the STEAM enrichment activities implemented, and patient care barriers addressed. We also included open-ended questions within the application so organizations could describe any other anticipated outputs and outcomes. The goal was not to measure everything immediately, but to create a foundation for consistent reporting, continuous learning, informed funding decisions, and impact storytelling.
Final Takeaways
Strategic planning is ultimately about making everyday decisions easier, more consistent, and more impactful. For companies of any size, the first steps are straightforward: assess your current program, gather stakeholder input, and identify where your company can contribute most authentically. From there, a practical framework for giving, employee engagement, governance, and measurement can help maximize the impact of every investment.
Changing Our World helps companies design and implement practical, high-impact giving and employee engagement programs. Contact us at bpress@changingourworld.com. If you’re attending ACCP’s Annual Conference September 14-16, please stop by our table at the Activity Zone – we’d love to meet you!
