Stay persistent
As with any other process in a business, you need a way to
measure how community involvement is affecting your company, then you need a means by which to adjust and refine your
strategy.
Caylor says it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.
“You set up a process, as you would run a business,” she says.
“You set up your goals, your tactical game plan, you’re going to
review your commitments and make sure that you have regular touch points. Longer term, you want to review business
results.”
Caylor says some business leaders make the mistake of immediately evaluating every strategy in terms of its bottom-line
impact on their companies. But when developing relationships
with the many potential customers in your community, you
must have a longer-term view of the results.
“This is a key point: Because we didn’t approach this from a
standpoint of return on equity — and I think some leaders
might do that — we had a longer-term time on the horizon and
weren’t expecting business or employees to come in one
month or six months or even a year,” she says. “We were
expecting that there would be benefits down the line. We are
now two and half years into this and are now starting to be able
to quantify the results.”
Caylor and her senior managers have set up semiannual
meetings to review the action taken in the previous six months.
The initiatives undertaken are analyzed to gauge their impact
on both Merrill Lynch employees and the community.
Caylor also holds bimonthly meetings with the community
involvement group, and those include members of the company’s diversity marketing team.
“They participate, and we’ve just built a system around it,”
she says. “We’re evaluating, we’re measuring, we’re changing
course, and we push out information and create venues for all
employees to give us feedback. Through that, we’re really
able to modify, change and improve on what we set out to
do.”
