In a radio interview a few weeks ago, the host told me how he’d actually cross to the other side of the road if he saw a charity group ahead of him ‘rattling a tin under everyone’s nose’.

And a senior executive in a major corporation told me how the way the giving worked in their company was essentially like this: ‘we figure out what the profit is and then we decide how much of that we can give away – taking into account tax breaks of course’.

Then the President of a major charity told me, 'Oh Paul, with the current economic conditions, it's getting so hard to make our budgets. Some corporations have simply stopped giving'.

These three stories illustrate well how giving can be often an after-thought – one that we might choose to avoid if we think someone's about to make us feel guilty when we're walking down the street and one that we 'bolt-on' after everything else is taken into account in the corporate world.

Buy1GIVE1 (or B1G1 as its better known now) changes that.

B1G1 is now a movement; a series of systems, processes and people, that transforms giving in any company from a bolt-on Corporate Social Responsibility activity to a Customer Social Responsibility, positively impacting resonance and retention. Through B1G1 transaction-based giving, giving becomes a core component of your business, embedded right in your business DNA.

B1G1 effectively alters the giving value-chain, taking giving from an after-the-fact event or donation, to make giving a core component of product design so customers are engaging and participating in it on a day to day basis, either in store, over the phone or online in a retail environment. What's more, giving done this way – embedding it into the corporate DNA - becomes an integral part of employee reward and recognition as well.

When giving is done the B1G1 way, the organisation gets a purpose bigger than itself. Partnering with B1G1 gets you a bigger 'why'. And it does much more too<

Embedding giving into the DNA of your organisation allows you to:

• Articulate a purpose of giving that becomes a clear picture to everyone involved

• Positively impact customer attraction and retention, by engaging customers in a much deeper 'heart-to-heart' way

• Significantly enhance your core market position and commitment to give Create clear market differentiation for your products and services

• Influence desired customer behaviours

• Become an industry leader in the B1G1 Giving Movement

• Motivate and inspire employees

• Give more, more consistently, more sustainably with more impact

And the B1G1 systems and process make the implementation of B1G1 transaction-based giving. You simply select products and/or services and 'match' those services to create highly resonant stories that focus directly on the impact of that transaction. For example, stories might be; 'you buy a TV, a cataract-blind person gets the gift of sight'; 'you buy a cup of coffee, a child gets access to water for a day'.

Through B1G1, every small contribution creates a vivid picture of a tangible contribution your company makes involving your customers. And because B1G1 has created and is at the very heart of this transaction-based giving movement, there are literally thousands of possibilities of 'matching' to create equally resonant stories for any company.

Importantly though, in the Corporate arena, B1G1 only works with companies who a) are already giving and b) are already established as trust and integrity leaders. And it's because of that Corporate involvement that B1G1 can offer substantially reduced B1G1 Business Membership Fees to Small to Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) to (in many cases) get them started on giving.

In the B1G1 model, 100 per cent of the giving goes direct to the chosen cause – a cause that the company either selects or already works with. The 'trick' is to break the giving down into micro components. With B1G1 giving, it's never as bland and un-resonant as 'we give $x (or x% of profits) to charity' or even 'we proudly support XYZ Foundation'. It's saying, in effect, 'you buy this, this specific action happens'.

Significantly, it moves giving from something often associated (or even marketed) with guilt to a much more joyful state. As B1G1 puts it, 'we're sharing the joy of giving, every second, every day and in every way'.

And we'd love to share that joy with you at B1G1 – DNA to DNA; heart to heart.