Brugger und Partner AG

Strategic philanthropy and volunteering

Above and beyond what's required – or: doing good things even better.

In pursuing their (CSR) strategies, more and more companies are no longer satisfied with a sole focus on their core business, key support processes, and key stakeholders, but rather aim to achieve multidimensional added value for the company and society as a whole. This entrepreneurial engagement beyond the core business seeks to achieve a balance between social impact and corporate added value. Purely financial engagement is increasingly supplemented by the contribution of company's own expertise and skills to address social challenges – challenges that often have an understandable relevance to the company as well. Especially when addressing social challenges, this approach makes possible new, future-oriented ideas and projects during their early development phase and facilitates their progress, even though they would otherwise hardly attract support due to their risk profile.

Foundation strategies and the targeted search for partners

We advise companies and their foundations in the development of a credible and effective strategy for philanthropic engagement. We base our advice on the idea of engagement for society that is strongly linked to the values, core competences, and – in the best case – the supply chain of a company ("co-creativity"). We build sustainable bridges between companies and their stakeholders and facilitate the use of synergies. Beyond this, we support organisations in their selection of suitable partners for high-impact programmes. Thanks to our many years of experience, we are familiar with the various selection, award, and jury procedures. We rely on personal interviews in the local context and on web platforms in the global context. The latter we use to standardise our management and detailed evaluation of written project submissions. As a promising instrument of strategic philanthropy, we develop volunteering initiatives that correspond to the competencies and culture of the company.

Strengthening volunteering as social engagement

In this context, volunteering is the social engagement of a company that permits its employees to carry out unpaid work for a public or non-profit organisation during working hours. We advise companies in their planning and implementation of specific volunteer work as part of their human resource development or strategic philanthropy. We focus especially on "skills-based volunteering": Employees contribute their professional and specialised skills in their volunteer work, thus increasing the added value for beneficiary organisations, including public institutions, as well as appreciation and satisfaction on the part of the volunteers.