There's a word that has quietly shaped how businesses think about their communities for decades. The word is 'giving'. Giving back. Corporate giving. Community giving programmes. The language is generous, but perhaps that's precisely the problem. Not because generosity is wrong, but because framing community investment as something a business gives out of goodwill - on top of its real work, as a discretionary expression of good character - makes evidencing it feel unnecessary. And what's left informal is easier to overlook, easier to cut, and easier to underestimate.
Today, we're launching something built to change that: the Neighbourly Mark.
Something has shifted in how businesses are expected to account for their impact on the places they operate in. The Procurement Act 2023 has formalised and explicitly scored social value in public sector procurement — evidence is now required, not just encouraged. Across boardrooms and bid teams, the conversation has moved from purpose to proof.
This might feel new, but the underlying argument isn't. The case for treating community investment as foundational rather than optional has been made by responsible business bodies, academics and the communities that depend on it for the better part of thirty years. What's changed is that consequences now attach to the gap between that expectation and reality.
The more useful frame here is citizenship, not philanthropy. A business that operates in a place is part of that place. It draws customers, colleagues and social licence from the community around it. It depends on the infrastructure that community provides. And it has a stake in whether that infrastructure holds.
Independent evidence shows that voluntary and community organisations across the UK face persistent financial pressure, and that community resilience can't be assumed to be self-financing — it requires active, ongoing investment from multiple sources, business included. The communities a business operates in aren't a backdrop to commercial activity. They're part of the foundation it depends on.
Whether community investment is treated as foundational or discretionary is a framing question — but framing shapes decisions. It determines whether community investment is the first thing cut when budgets tighten, or whether cutting it requires justification.
The philanthropic framing has had a practical consequence. Discretionary things tend not to get evidenced. Things that aren't evidenced tend not to get made visible. And things that aren't visible tend to happen less than they should, because visibility creates accountability.
The scale of the current gap is significant. Research has found that only one in five people think most large companies donate to charitable causes, despite the real figure being far higher — and that most people believe corporate responsibility is largely a PR exercise. The investment is happening. Most people simply can't see it.
There are structural reasons for that. When the requirement to disclose charitable donations in annual reports was relaxed a decade ago, reported giving among the UK's largest listed companies fell sharply within just a couple of years.
The consequences aren't just reputational. Recent global trust research shows that businesses perceived as disengaged from their communities are seen as significantly less ethical and less competent by the consumers who are already feeling left behind. Invisibility has a direct commercial cost.
The reality is businesses have channelled more than £2.2 billion of verified community investment through Neighbourly alone since 2014. That's real, tracked activity — and it's only a fraction of the total community investment happening across UK business.
Visibility changes what happens next. There's a useful parallel here with the Fairtrade Mark. It didn't just make ethical sourcing visible — it made it expected. Businesses that hadn't adopted it became conspicuous by comparison. That shift, from visible to expected to normal, is what changes behaviour at scale.
The businesses that have been investing in their communities properly, all along, already have the record. What's been missing is the infrastructure to make that record visible.
The Neighbourly Mark is a clickable, scannable badge that takes anyone — a customer, an employee, a buyer — straight to the real record of a business's community investment: the funding, volunteering and surplus products it has donated through Neighbourly, verified and current.
The Mark isn't an award, an accreditation, or an audit of a business as a whole. It doesn't claim to capture everything a business does for its community — only what's been tracked through Neighbourly's platform. What it does is simple and, we think, powerful: it turns a claim into a record anyone can check.
Scan it in a shop window, click it on a website, or spot it on a workplace wall, and you land on a public page showing exactly what's behind it — the causes supported, the activity that's happened, updated in real time.
We're launching the Neighbourly Mark today, on the UN International Day of Charity, with a founding cohort of businesses already carrying the Mark — spanning retail, finance, energy, food and more. Each of them chose to make their community investment visible before there was any external pressure to do so, knowing that visibility was important for how they're perceived.
That matters, because the standard the Mark represents doesn't rise through any one business setting an example. It rises through collective visibility — through enough businesses making their investment checkable.
If you spot the Mark, click it or scan it. See what's behind it. And if you're a business that's already investing in the communities you operate in but haven't yet had a straightforward way to show it — this is what we built for you.
Find out more about the Neighbourly Mark, and the businesses that hold it.