A lot of attention has been paid lately to companies who are focusing their attentions on making a difference – Dawn is used to clean cute animals covered in oil, Dairy Queen is partnering with the Girl Scouts, and TOMS shoes gives a pair to a needy child for every pair sold. Part of the idea behind publicizing these charitable actions is to give them an advantage over their competition. I know that when I bought dish detergent last month, I picked Dawn because I associated them with adorable ducks being rescued (I’m a girl and cute things appeal to me, sue me!).

This partnership is valuable to Dawn – if you can gain one indisputable competitive advantage over the product next to yours on the shelf, you win. But now think about how valuable it is to the volunteers to cleaning up oil spills – they could have asked their neighbors to bring in extra donations of soap, but that would have an extremely limited reach. They could have written to their state government and asked for funding and publicity, but that’s still limited to their state’s borders. They could have started a website, and maybe people already interested in cleaning up oil spills could have found them (but with the amount of information on the internet, even that wouldn’t yield much). Short of getting a spot on Oprah during Sweeps Week, there really isn’t much they could have done to grab the attention, and more importantly the donations, that their partnership with Dawn is getting them.

Dawn has a map of donations on their website, and every state has contributed something. It’s mutually beneficial relationships like this that are the key to making change happen on a large scale.

If you have an organization you’d like to support, don’t just think about what you can do for them. I have a friend who works closely to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and she said something once that really stuck with me. “If I had millions of dollars,” she said, “I wouldn’t just give it all to St. Jude’s. I’d pay to have people visit the hospital to see the work they’re doing, and see how important it is, so that they’ll be just as motivated to go out and work for their own donations.” That’s the key – one person, even one important person, can’t change things as well as communities. It’s about getting others to want to make the change too.

From a business standpoint, your reputation grows with every potential customer who hears about the good you’re doing. From a personal standpoint, any opportunity to get others to support your cause means it will benefit from the wide net of support you can give them. There’s nothing wrong with working for change – just make sure you’re going about it the best way you can, and soon you, and everyone who is helping you, will be making those changes.

Is your company making a change? We’d love to hear about it!