Community Footprint

A Business in the Community project to develop tools to understand and manage your local socio-economic impact

View our interactive Community Footprint  Presentation to find out: What is your Community Footprint? How to understand and manage your Community Footprint

Register your interest in the Community Footprint project

Register for the Introduction to Community Investment training session to find out more about the Community Footprint tools and guidance: Key diary dates

The project

By just existing a business can have both positive as well as negative impacts within its community – their Community Footprint.  These impacts result both from what businesses do and the choices they make: choice of location and how they manage their operations; who they hire; their supply chain and procurement; how and what they produce and sell; and their community and social investments.  

Business in the Community is developing an easy-to-use series of practical tools allowing managers to understand the Community Footprint their business has on the local people, economies and places they work in. It assesses what they do, matches business strengths to community needs to help companies take action, and suggests how to measure impact. By collecting information locally and taking site-specific actions businesses can better assess the social and economic contribution they make regionally, nationally and internationally and the role they play in making a community thrive.

The need and the opportunity

Business in the Community's work with companies on CommunityMark, the standard for excellent community investment has shown that the barriers to greater local corporate involvement include:

• A lack of a shared focus by the sectors
• Poor articulation of social needs locally
• Duplicated, competing and poorly targeted asks for funds
• Weak implementation frameworks for partnerships

Recent research conducted by Ethical Corporation has shown that whilst companies are increasingly measuring the social and/or economic impacts of their business on the communities in which they operate this is still not commonly undertaken nor does there appear to be a commonly used tool or methodology.    

Business in the Community research with our member companies has shown there is a genuine appetite for a tool and an understanding that the localism agenda is going increase both the risk and opportunities of site level engagement.

A collaborative approach

To create a product that really works the tools are being developed in collaboration with, and tested by, companies on real-life sites and operations.  The development of the Community Footprint is sponsored by Santander and overseen by a working group of company practitioners providing strategic input and feedback on the methodology and its adaptation following testing.  Working Group members are: Anglo American, BAE Systems, Costain, E.ON UK, Halcrow, KPMG, Laing O’Rourke, Thames Water and Foretica.
 

For further information on Community Footprint, look at our Community Footprint Q&A (68 kb)  

For further information about the project and opportunities to get involved please contact Stephanie Hagan or Clare Jenkinson.