Nelio’s vision of corporate social responsibility

Whether you’re a founder of a small start-up company or an employee in a large corporation, you can (and should) commit to society. As many of you know, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to companies taking responsibility for their impact on society. As evidence suggest, CSR is increasingly important to the competitiveness of enterprises. It can bring benefits in terms of risk management, cost savings, access to capital, customer relationships, human resource management, and innovation capacity.

It is clear that being “socially responsible” goes beyond strictly enforce the laws in the countries where the company operates or investing more and more in areas such as human capital development and environmental protection. Social responsibility aims companies to include in its strategic plan is to create value in the community, i. e. to improve the possibilities and opportunities of the community where the company is established.

A typical example is Nestlé, who redesigned its coffee procurement processes working with small farmers in poor areas, by helping them to improve their farming practices, to get more capacity per hectare, and to improve the quality of the beans. Nestlé created a shared value.

Now, if your organization is not an NGO, neither has a direct relationship with people or organizations of charity organizations, how can you improve the chances and opportunities of your environment so that, in turn, it adds value to your business?

Let me discuss some of the contributions that we have initiated in Nelio Software and how, without explicitly looking for it, it has given us an added value to our company.

Contribution to the WordPress community

One of the main advantages of WordPress, apart from being one of the most developed and extended content management systems worldwide, is the vast network of users and contributors it has. We are a community of administrators, developers, and users seeking growth and constant improvement of the platform, which can only be generated by cooperation.

The idea is quite clear: If we benefit from the community (and we all do), we should also contribute to it! I will give you some examples of our contributions:

• Related Posts based on Swiftype: A few days ago, one of our customers wanted us to develop a plugin for related posts based on the search engine Swiftype. Once the job was delivered, we asked him whether he’d like to publish the resulting code as an open-sourced plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. He agreed, and now you can all benefit from this simple, yet powerful plugin.

  

  The results have been, on the one hand, more customer loyalty: the client himself was very happy when he saw his indirect contribution to the community of WordPress and, moreover, we earned his trust. On the other hand, it is clear that this contribution also helps to enhance our reputation as expert developers in WordPress.

• External Featured Images. As we explained here last week, we recently released a new open-sourced plugin called Nelio Featured External Image. In this case, we developed the plugin for our own use, but we thought other might benefit from it as well.

  

• WordPress Day Madrid. in March 8th was held in Madrid the event that host both users and developers of the WordPress platform giving a series of specialized talk in different areas. We sponsored the WordPress Day Madrid and have a talk on A/B Testing.

  It was a pleasant surprise when, some days after the talk, Antonio Villegas, the speaker, was invited to repeat it to the WordPress Euskadi in May 24th.

• WordPress Blog for the Hispanic Community. Another contribution to the WordPress Hispanic community is our weekly posts published on WPrincipiante. There are not so many Spanish WordPress blogs, so we also believe that a blog for beginners, where we talk about wordpress, discuss hot topics, present tutorials, and so on, can be very helpful to promote WordPress to a huge community of people.
• Services for NGOs. Usually, when our target customer is an individual or company willing to pay for our service, we tend to exclude non-governmental organizations and non-profit clients as possible. We think that to provide these services to these organizations for free or with a great discount is a double support, we do not only help that with our service, they can use the money they raise precisely to the cause for which the NGO was created.We basically offer WordPress migration and conversion optimization services of WordPress sites. We’ve migrated, with great discounts NGO websites (see more details in our site). We also offer our services of conversion optimization to NGOs to help them find new donors and volunteers, increase their social impact, work efficiently, and increase compliance with their goals.

You see, these examples shows that without changing the social purpose of our company, corporate social responsibility is also the task of the start-ups.

Any new ideas of how to create added value to the community? Sure they’ll be helpful!!

Featured Image provided by Rafael López-Monné.