Marketing social values
Totum consultant Jenny Owen discusses the role for marketing and business development functions in developing and communicating their firm’s social and environmental values.
In these times of global challenge and uncertainty, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environment, social and governance (ESG) strategies have become a critical component of today’s business infrastructure.
As millennials will make up three-quarters of the working population by 2025, they bring with them the social consciousness of a generation in which climate change and social equity dominate thinking and drive decision making. If professional services firms overlook the importance of the values encapsulated in CSR and ESG, they risk the business fundamentals that underpin growth.
Firms must prove their social and environmental credentials to attract and retain great candidates – but they must do so to win work and build client relationships too. We are helping more firms recruit professionals to head up critical CSR, ESG and Sustainability functions – to align and integrate many complex areas, including environmental impact, waste management, employee relations, diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI), business responsibility, as well as ownership transparency, leadership remuneration, etc.
It's no longer good enough to communicate your firm’s charitable endeavours or fund-raising activities – or indeed do the odd survey to check on your employees’ wellbeing and engagement. Firms across the professional services sector understand that they need to live and breathe values that make a positive difference or risk losing great team members as well as bids for new or more work.
Our learnings
This translates to our own role as recruiters as, although we are a small business, our influence spreads wide through our networks of firms and candidates. We are keenly aware of the importance of CSR, sustainability and ESG both to our own business and those of our clients. As we work with more firms advising them on trends across this area and help them to make placements across these growing functions, we are working hard to show that we too can do more than just talk the talk.
We’ve always prided ourselves on being a recruitment firm with a difference – we genuinely care. We engage in many activities that reflect this ethos. Most recently, we launched the ‘Totum Foundation’ to commit to three elements of our social strategy:
- Supporting the development of people across our community via initiatives like our Totum Bursary, which helps fund the studies of students from low-income backgrounds.
- Partnering with key charities, such as Support SEND Kids, which helps families who have children with special educational needs and/or disabilities through the education system.
- Pledging to plant 54,000 trees (in partnership with environmental start-up Brynk) to be carbon neutral by 2025.
We are also working hard to achieve B-Corps status following in the wake of law firms like Bates Wells, Radiant and Mishcon de Reya.
But while we’re really proud of these activities, we share with all professional services firms the recognition any work we undertake must reflect our core purpose – and that means how we engage clients, support candidates, build relationships, report on our successes and challenges, and look after our own team.
Everything we do for a good cause has to be an authentic representation of who we are and how we work. If it’s not we risk being seen as hypocritical or fake – and not only is that a miserable way to do business but it’s also a reputation that’s hard to shake off.
“It's no longer good enough to communicate your firm’s charitable endeavours or fund-raising activities – or indeed do the odd survey to check on your employees’ wellbeing. Firms across the professional services sector understand that they need to live and breathe values.”
Marketing, BD and Comms
We think that’s why the marketing, business development (BD) and communications function across our sector plays a key role in helping to make social and environmental values a living, breathing part of a firm’s brand identity. Such professionals have a real influence in how a firm’s values play out in the broader market, how they can flow through to client engagement activities, and how efforts to make a difference can be communicated internally and externally to show the firm has a clear purpose that translates into action.
In law firms, we see more BD and marketing managers supporting lawyers to build out their own ESG practices to advise clients on their own ESG and sustainability policies. But no client is going to work with a firm that does not have its own house in order. These professionals are ideally positioned alongside lawyers and clients to play a pivotal role in bringing together internal efforts with external messaging. They are also key teams that can help in client pitches where demonstrating your firm’s CSR/ESG credentials are more important than ever.
BD and marketing professionals play an important role too in supporting a firm’s wider ESG, CSR and sustainability teams to identify issues impacting clients, and ensuring efforts are appropriately aligned with the BD and comms strategy to ensure consistent and clear brand messaging. This may be particularly useful across global operations, where BD and marketing teams can help bring together strategies across different offices, respecting the focal points that might be more or less important to communicate in different cultures.
Of course, where a firm’s purpose and social value are concerned, no business services function is an island. All play a key role in defining and demonstrating who and what a firm stands for. But in concert with other vital functions, BD and marketing has a real role to play here – in helping to shape and articulate their firm’s enduring identity.