Isn't it amazing how doing one thing right can be so gosh derned beneficial to everyone?

The new trendy thing for corporations to participate in is volunteer work. Of course corporations would like to let you believe they are only doing it for the Team building, but we know where their new big idea really started. Don't we?

Alan Ranzer, executive director of Impact 4 Good, an organization that matches corporate groups with volunteer opportunities, said the number of requests he had received has gone up by 50 percent in the last year. - source: New York Times article (registration required)

The fact is, a lot of surveys, including the Fleishman-Hillard CSR survey I reported on recently, have been trying to get corporations to wake up for quite a while - consumers value hands-on corporate contributions more than just financial windfalls.

It's a win-win-win situation. The corporation gets a great team-building program, the volunteer programs get all the help they need, and consumers are not only happy about the arrangement, they may even benefit directly from it too. Not to mention all the people outside of this equation that are getting the help they need as well.

Now if only we could get corporations to be wholly honest about their operations...