Why Giving is Good for Business

We all know giving feels good. Certainly, at TOMS, I’ve had that experience many times.

But giving doesn’t just feel good. It’s also a good business strategy. And that’s true for three reasons:

1. When you incorporate giving into your business in an authentic way, you turn your customers into your most avid and loyal marketers. I’ll never forget how I first came to realize this. Four months after starting the company, I was at a kiosk in JFK airport when I happened to see a young woman wearing a red pair of TOMS. It was the first time I’d ever seen a stranger sporting the shoes and I was curious to hear what she had to say about them.

So trying to play it cool, I casually told her how much I loved her footwear. I wasn’t prepared for what happened: She grabbed me by the shoulder and told me, “You don’t understand. This is the most amazing company in the world. When I bought this pair of shoes, they gave a pair of shoes to children in Argentina.” Sheepishly, I admitted my true identity, and the first thing she said was, “Why did you cut your hair?” (It was summer and I had a really short haircut).

That wasn’t the response I’d expected. But later on, as I mulled over the experience, I realized the reason the young woman knew about my new hairdo was because she’d watched our YouTube videos and they’d made an indelible impression. And it dawned on me: If she was telling the TOMS story to a stranger in the airport, how many friends had she talked to about it? How many tweets had she sent or Facebook posts had she written?

I also saw that TOMS didn’t need conventional advertising; it just had to focus on giving and doing so in a sustainable a way—in other words, on our story. In the process, we would turn countless other strangers into our most vocal marketers.

2. When you incorporate giving into your business in an authentic way, you attract amazing employees. You can only grow and keeping growing if you hire great people. We have employees who have left impressive companies and with generous perks to work in a warehouse without air conditioning or heat. And the reason certainly isn’t because we pay them more. It’s because they want to be part of something bigger. In fact, the greatest competitive advantage you have is to allow your employees to feel they’re making a difference.

Of course, many businesses can’t have a One for One model like ours. But every company can afford to give employees one day off a week, or a month, or even a year to volunteer for a charity they care about. And when you do that, people forget about their problems and focus on helping others. It does magical things for the company culture.

3. When you incorporate giving into your business in an authentic way, you draw in the most extraordinary partners. Why? Because they want to be a part of what you’re doing.

At TOMS, we’ve been able to attract some very big partners--real game changers for us--and it never would have happened without our focus on giving. Take AT&T. I’m almost never in the office and the only way I can run my business is through my mobile device. So AT&T’s advertising agency decided to go on a giving trip with us and produce a commercial about it and how the company’s services allowed me--and TOMS--to function.

We probably sold and gave an additional 100,000 shoes because of that ad. Additionally, it provided TOMS with a bigger platform to be able to use our message and business model to inspire others to give and do good through business. We receive stories everyday from these individuals and companies who have been inspired by TOMS, which in turn inspire and excite us.

When I thanked the chairman of AT&T afterwards, he explained how important the commercial was to him, too. It gave the company a rare opportunity to help customers make an authentic, emotional connection to a technology. Ultimately, what was good for AT&T was great for us.

As I said, giving doesn’t just feel good. It’s also really good for your business.

How does your company incorporate giving?