Corporate philanthropy has been known to come in charitable contributions. Money.
Philanthropy can also come in the form of in-kind contributions. Goods or services offered free or at less than the usual charge result in an in-kind contribution.
Starting a company in a garage without a budget and with no name recognition was a challenge. Let alone that no one had ever heard of a blog.
What I did have was an undying belief that blogging would help lawyers and help people. By helping people through blogging, blogs would give a lawyer a good name.
I also had an undying passion to help other people. It was in my genes and in all I did, including as a practicing lawyer for seventeen years.
Harnessing these two passions was key to LexBlog’s success. The more people we helped, the better we did.
LexBlog’s first in-kind contribution was eighteen years ago when we built an informational resource center for the Legal Marketing Association and its members.
Proved to be the single best method we had for getting known by association members, many of whom became our customers.
We then moved to doing a blog a month for non-profit legal organizations.
The more in-kind contributions we did for non-profits the better our team felt about the work we did. We were making a difference in other’s lives.
We’ve gone on to build a law school blog network through which professors, students and staff use the LexBlog platform for free.
We’re now talking to large non-profit legal organizations to aggregate and curate the blogs of members or donors of the organization, so as to give visibility to the blogs and bloggers.
The latest was our being part of Seth Godin’s Carbon Almanac project where we helped build a legal section and provided a Climate Change Legal Blog Archive to aggregate climate related blogs worldwide.
Sure, LexBlog gets visibility and is achieving a competitive advantage through this kind of philanthropy.
Corporations make contributions to generate goodwill.
When LexBlog started we didn’t have the cash to make contributions. In-kind contributions were all we could give.
As time has passed, in-kind contributions to help others become who we are. Caring is a core value of ours.
Sure, we get contacted to host one of our well known ”Beer for Bloggers” events at a legal association event or asked to throw a few dollars at another.
But philanthropy in the form of in-kind contributions is where LexBlog wants to be.