2.
Re: Do you track the value of your community involvement activities annually (time, product, dollars, etc.)? Jan 13, 2008 12:47 AM
My companies track the cost (to us) of donated time, money, products, and services very closely -- we know exactly what we give. (Most other companies do, too, I think.) We don't necessarily track the
value of those donations, because we rarely get any feedback to tell us what our contribution was worth to the recipient organizations.
In that way, my local community is similar to this on-line community. I know how much time I spend providing answers and advice here, but I don't know the value of those responses to the people who asked the questions. Some people are gracious enough to follow up and say, "thank you" -- but only 16 percent of the questions posted in these forums have an indication that a "helpful" or "correct" answer was provided. (Does that mean 84 percent of the time that people spent answering questions was wasted? Are 84 percent of these threads useless? I hope not.) At any rate, almost
nobody follows up to say how they applied the answer and what it worth to them.
So you've asked a very thoughtful question. In my view, the sense of "entitlement" that some charitable organizations and individuals exhibit (suggesting that a successful business somehow "owes" them something) is a very bad approach. After all, who are we more likely to help in the future: someone who accepted our assistance in the past, and then never interacted with us again until they wanted more -- or someone who accepted our assistance in the past, and then told us over and over how beneficial and valuable it was to them? We tend to offer
more when we know it had
value. We tend to offer
less (especially if money is tight) when we only know what it
cost us.
