You may have found a cause close to your heart that you want to help but are not to sure what to do.

Below we have shared 10 different ways your business can support a charity, which will make a huge impact to the beneficiaries they support. It will also have benefits for your business by showing you care about your community, develop new & existing skills and raise awareness of your business.

1. Donate a percentage of your sales or profit to a charity, setting a time limit on how long you would like this to last for. You could ask the charity to give a breakdown on the cost of one of their charitable activities, so that you can see the difference the donation would make. For example - £3.60 would provide 1 gift for someone going through cancer treatment.

2. Volunteer a specialist skill or knowledge. Charities often need help with skills and experience to help raise awareness and get the support they need to carry out their charitable activities. Examples of volunteering could include website design, social media creation or accountancy. This not only helps save the charity time but also money.

3. In Kind Donations. You could donate items that the charity needs to enable them to do their work. Members of staff could hold collection drives for items that a charity needs, ask customers to donate to a collection drive or donate unsold stocks.

4. Fundraising. Your place of work could organise a fundraising event to raise money such as a cake sale, raffle or office challenge. The aim is to get staff involved to raise money to help support the charity, whilst doing some team building in the process.

5. Buying products, you need from a charity. A charity may sell products that you need to purchase for your business. One way to support the charity is to buy these products directly from the charity. This could be food if they offer a catering service or notebooks if you need to purchase this for your staff. By doing this you get the items you need, whilst supporting a charity at the same time.

6. Use business resources. Often charities need businesses resources to help them do their work, which you are not currently using such as physical space or equipment. This could be donated for free to a charity to support them in doing their work, whilst saving them the costs of having to try and fund this.

7. Act as a Charity Ambassador. A great way to raise awareness and support for the work a charity does is by acting as an ambassador where you tell others about their work and how they can get involved to help.

8. Supporting a Charitable Event. This could be providing members of staff to help provide volunteer support at an event, providing funding for the event or providing a prize for the event. Whether it is time or money, it all helps to makes a difference to the charity in achieving their objective.

9. Regular Donations. This is a financial donation that can be made to the charity to support their work from your business. To take this further, you could ask members of staff if they want to donate via Payroll Giving so they pay a donation directly out of their wage.

10. Sponsorship of a project. You could ask the charity if there is a specific project they wish to achieve, which you can financially help support. For example, they may wish to set up a monthly support group and you could fund this for 12 months.

Please share your comments and thoughts below about this post and would love to hear if you have any of your own suggestions about how businesses can help support charities.

Lorraine Lewis BCAh

The Lewis Foundation

The Lewis Foundation is a charity that provides free gifts and support to all adults going through cancer treatment in hospitals around the Midlands.

You can find more about us and why we started by visiting: www.thelewisfoundation.co.uk/aboutus