There's More to Your Business Than Money

Are you looking to build a strong brand that will trigger positive emotions whenever someone sees your logo? Then you should consider giving back to the community.

Improving someone's quality of life and putting smiles on people’s faces will give you a sense of fulfilment and happiness that no amount of money could.

JSGuru always looks for ways to give back, even in our early days when there were only four of us and before we had U.S. and European business development offices. Now, we have 40 web and mobile app developers – and we still see the importance of giving back.

In this article, I will discuss the importance of giving back and will give some examples of how you and your company can do the same.

Create a Company Mission

A great example of a company that gives back is Grounded. Its mission is to bring high-quality, ethical artisan products to people all over the world through its e-commerce platform.

Grounded sells high-quality products and makes money while at the same time giving back and creating a positive company mission. It shows off its mission with virtual reality videos.

According to Grounded: "We are leveraging and applying emerging tech (virtual reality) with a deeply developed supply chain to celebrate heritage and build perspective about where our goods come from."

Grounded creates videos about how its products are made with 360-degree cameras so you can experience the whole process in VR. After you watch a video, you can get a better picture of where the product originated and how much effort went into its production.

Grounded’s mission of selling products made sustainably and fairly probably helps it more than just selling great products without a story.

In addition, I bet the people who are behind Grounded feel more accomplished knowing how much positive influence it generates for developing countries and people around the world.

Having a mission to give back will both improve your external image and give people inside your company a bigger sense of purpose.

How We Give Back

Our first contribution to the community at JSGuru was to help organize free local dev meetups; it was a great way for us to gather new knowledge and meet other people in our industry. Our obligation was to find a venue and a speaker to talk about a certain topic.

Later, after we opened a coworking space, our goals became more ambitious, and we wanted to organize bigger events that could have a broader impact. Topics included entrepreneurship, design, development, soft skills, and hackathons.

So far, we have organized more than 145 free events that have impacted people in our community, and unimaginably good things started happening to us.

Because of the contribution and our work, we started meeting entrepreneurs from all over the world who wanted to do business with us or share their knowledge, and that knowledge saved us tens of thousands of dollars and most importantly, time; after these entrepreneurs become familiar with your business and the good work you are doing, they are usually willing to provide some advice or consulting for free.

We also began a coding school for children.

In the beginning of 2017, we only had our offices and a few enthusiasts ready to transfer their knowledge to young ones: no curriculum and no idea of the best way to teach someone between 6 and 16 years old.

We reached out to a programming school for children in Serbia, told them about our intentions, and asked for help. The school pointed us to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s curricula for Scratch and AppInventor courses, and we gave a free two-day training on robotics and programming.

With Scratch, children can program their own interactive stories, games, and animations and share them with others in the online community. With AppInventor, they can learn how to create Android apps.

Gradually, we increased our courses, offering more sophisticated programming languages such as JavaScript and Python, but we would not be able to if there was no help from the Kliker programming school in Serbia, which is now a long-term partner.

To this day, more than 160 students have taken our courses. The program has been so successful that it could even become a self-sustainable business if needed.

This part of our business is equally as important to us as the app development we do for our clients all over the world because this creates new generations of future developers who will power our economy.

How Can Your Business Give Back?

Now, let's talk about some things that every business can do to positively influence the community.

You don’t always need money to give back; most of us are experts in our respective fields, and we can teach others who don't have any experience. If you have a place to teach and a social network account, you can start right away.

You can always team up or partner with businesses that have the same goal. You would be amazed at how much others are willing to help when you have a good idea and you show them how it could positively influence others.

One actionable and quick step a company can do is to form a team of employees on a volunteer basis who could organize activities for the community.

The team can hold a regular meeting where members could exchange ideas. Ideally, it would be great to give the team a monthly budget so it would have more freedom with ideas. Sometimes, even $500 can make a difference.

These activities can be straightforward, such as holding a meetup and talking best practices on how to enter your field, or they can be more complex, such as hackathons. Knowledge is always the best thing to give.

If you are seriously considering giving back and you lack resources, coworking spaces are always a good starting point. People who run them are usually ambitious individuals familiar with entrepreneurship struggles. They are used to helping others.

There is also one easy thing that you could do: Sign up your whole team for a volunteering activity at least once every three to four months. It doesn't require any resources, and you can plan activities and prepare them.

This can be your company’s team building, a reason to connect and bond. So, go for a walk with a cause, help your city become greener, or help an older couple move.

Whatever you choose to do, you’re giving back in some way.

Give Back to the Community

We are all balancing daily tasks and challenges; business can be harsh and competition can be relentless, and this can cause us to make some selfish and even immoral decisions for our business.

It's crucial that we do our best to give back. What counts is that you feel happy about yourself in the end and that your business leaves the world a better place.

About the Author

Srdjan Sukara CMO at JSGuru at JSGuru

See full profile