Key findings

Our members recognise that there is a significant amount of business-community engagement happening already. Yet they identify and support the need to increase their engagement and that of others, by growing the numbers of companies involved, making it less complicated to engage effectively at a local level and continuing to drive for best practice in cross-sector partnerships.

In particular, there is a real sense that the activities needed are not new – many best practice examples exist – but the operational environment has changed for all and the need for increased scale to create long-term meaningful change is evident.

77% of business leaders say they could do more to scale up strategic support for communities across their business, while 80% feel they could do more to engage other businesses to scale up their support.

Although many business leaders feel that it is not currently clear what the key opportunities or relevance is for business  in the ‘Big Society’, there is support for it as a focus for promoting and increasing the level and quality of effective local business community engagement. There are a number of areas cited as opportunities to maximise engagement and obstacles that act as disincentives.

The biggest of these are:

• raising awareness of effective local business community engagement across sectors
• better identification and support for businesses to work together on local priorities
• removal of perceived red-tape structural and cultural barriers
• public sector procurement as a positive lever for change

Overall, there is strong support for needs-led, collaborative action by companies at a local level and, to enable this, recognition of the need for an individual to take the lead in making the most appropriate connections between local issues and businesses. This is seen as critical to growing effective business engagement, particularly among small and medium-sized businesses.