Nonprofit Partnerships

City Year partnership. Throughout the late 1990s, Timberland maintained its financial support plus its in-kind donation of supplying the entire uniform for City Year's corps members. According to a senior executive at City Year's national headquarters, the in-kind donation's value could not be overstated: "If we were going to pay for outfitting our entire corps, we just wouldn't be able to do it. So the in-kind donation is incredible!" For its part, City Year continued to lend its expertise in service delivery. When In April 2000, City Year established its 11^th site, directly within the Timberland headquarters building. The site housed 24 corps volunteers and six administrative staff. A City Year staff member reflected on the new Stratham site:

I would point to City Year, New Hampshire as one of the keys to the partnership—having a City Year corps working out of the Timberland headquarters presents some unique opportunities for partnership. What does it mean? It's very direct. . . . We're connected, side by side. . . .

Timberland employees get to know City Year, New Hampshire corps members personally—so when they go to serve with City Year corps members, it's just a totally different level of interaction because they feel like they understand these guys and it's not foreign. It becomes very personal for people, and it wasn't that way four years ago when there was no corps in Stratham. City Year was more of a concept.

Share Our Strength In the 1990s, Timberland began a collaboration with the nonprofit Share Our Strength (SOS), a leading antihunger, antipoverty organization. To carry out its mission, SOS focused on mobilizing "thousands of individuals in the culinary industry to organize events, host dinners, teach cooking and nutrition classes to low-income families and serve as anti-hunger advocates."^[4] Its signature event was called Taste of the Nation, through which thousands of community leaders came together each spring to donate time, money, food, and expertise to put on over 100 fund-raising events throughout the United States and Canada. These events, which included food and wine tasting, seated dinners, brunches, and barbecues, raised tens of millions of dollars used to alleviate hunger and poverty. SOS also actively pursued partnerships across a range of for-profit industries to help promote social change.

Beginning with cash and in-kind donations, Timberland's involvement with SOS quickly expanded to include cobranded products, including footwear for infants called "crib booties." From the sale of each pair of crib booties, Timberland donated $0.50 to SOS.

As the partnership with SOS continued to evolve, some managers were optimistic about SOS's ability to help Timberland advance its strategy of commerce and justice. They believed that even as the organization helped reduce hunger across the United States, its well-established national presence would help Timberland expand its brand and impact on a national level. In addition, the potential for cobranded products and events was ripe, they reasoned. Still, others within Timberland worried that the partnership was not inherently strategic.

SkillsUSA In 2001, Timberland began a collaboration with SkillsUSA, a Virginia-based non­profit that served students in the trade, technical, and skilled service occupations—high school and college-aged students training in what used to be called vocational education. At the time, SkillsUSA provided professional development, competitions, community service projects, employment, and social opportunities to over 250,000 students who joined its national membership association.

For Timberland's part, sponsoring community service events through SkillsUSA provided a chance to give away boots and shirts and also to set up a centrally located tent where participants could try on boots from the PRO line. While no merchandise was sold during the events, many managers within Timberland believed that direct sales flowed from exposure the events gave to the company's products and brand. Now that Timberland's alliances had broadened beyond City Year, Jeff wondered how he should assess the partnership portfolio, which was also related to the larger measurement issues.

The Measurement Challenge

By 2003, Timberland was a $1.3 billion company doing business in 75 countries around the world (see Exhibit 1b for selected financial data, 1998-2003). Its product lines included men's and women's footwear, apparel, and Timberland gear, which included hats, carrying cases, watches, and wallets. Footwear was the largest segment of the business, generating 75% of revenues worldwide, with apparel accounting for about 24% of revenues and gear generating the balance. About a third of the business was international.

Jeff had reason to be proud of not only the financial and operational strength that Timberland demonstrated but also the company's innovative stance of integrating commerce and justice (by 2003, Timberland had completed an estimated 223,000 community service hours).^[5] As his connections to a multitude of for-profit and nonprofit organizations grew, he was more and more convinced that the social value Timberland created was at once critical to the development of society and to the development of his business.

But while his instinct told him that Timberland's broad and deep efforts in the social enterprise realm were consistent with, if not a cause of, the growth of the company, he was looking for more concrete ways to make the business case. Recently, analysts had been pressing him for more quantitative explanations for the social and economic value he created through Timberland, and he also began to feel the responsibility, as a reference company for CSR, to make a more explicit commerce and justice case to the industry. Jeff wanted his management team to recommend what exactly should be measured and how, as well as how it should then be analyzed, interpreted, and incorporated into company decision making.

The Globalization Challenge

As Jeff wrestled with the best way to think about the commercial and social value associated with Timberland's investment in community service, his mind moved to a second, evolving challenge. With international sales likely to be the major source of future growth, he was focused on how best to "export" the company's values and social commitment. While the Global Business Alliance was a step in the right direction, he believed a lot more could be accomplished in terms of spreading the service ethic abroad. Timberland's approximately 11 million pieces of apparel were produced in 36 factories across 17 countries.

Given the truly global nature of its supply and distribution chain and the range of countries in which Timberland competed for business, Jeff wondered how best to create the programs, infrastructure, and culture to make Timberland's commerce and justice strategy truly global.

^[1] Forefront Web site, http: //www.forefrontleaders.org/partners/profile.php?RecordID=51, accessed June 1, 2004.

^[2] Wendy Ducharme, "Building on Excellence: NH's 10 Best Companies to Work For," Business NH Magazine, December 1, 2002, p. 14.

^[3] The Timberland Company 2002 Annual Report.

^[4] Share Our Strength Web site, http://www.strength.org/learn/index.htm, accessed July 23, 2004.

^[5] The Timberland Company 2003 Annual Report.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 624