Taylor Amerman: Trusting and empowering stakeholders
Taylor Amerman leads social responsibility at CDW, a global IT solutions company. Her approach to social impact is all about balance. Balancing strategic focus with empowering stakeholders and balancing the need for impact data with narrative storytelling.
How has CDW’s social responsibility mission evolved since you first joined less than a year ago?
We’ve gotten more strategic around aligning our efforts and resources towards our new focus on Digital Equity. Our new mission and vision define how we’ll increase Digital Equity through increasing access to technology, education, and workforce development—and the resources we can leverage—financial contributions, coworker time and talent, and technology expertise. Finally, we’re evaluating our processes in alignment with our values of equity, humility, transparency, and integrity.
CDW has always been a caring company—it’s been giving back to the community since the company was founded. Having a cohesive social impact strategy will just make it clearer where and how we are giving back.
How do you think about the dynamic between aligning employee volunteering and grant-making efforts with CDW’s strategy, vs. letting employees take the lead in engaging with the local programs they’re most passionate about?
Companies need to have a social impact strategy because the need in the world is so great—you need to figure out what you as a company are best positioned to impact. Especially when it comes to grant-making, being strategic is important.
At the same time, one of our values is humility. You must have focus, but you also need to be respectful of your nonprofit partners. For example, I don’t believe in time-consuming application processes or reporting templates. Accountability is crucial, of course. But as a company, you need to get the money out of the door because there’s a lot of work to do.
I’m open when it comes to employees’ engagement with the community as well. I believe in trusting and empowering coworkers and partners in support of our shared goal of Digital Equity.
Having too many rules and limitations around volunteering can be counter to a companies’ goal of increasing their employees' engagement with the community. There are a lot of great solutions out there. We don’t do this at CDW, but one idea that I like personally is having employees track acts of service rather than hours. It frees people up to think about giving back in different ways.
What is your vision for the impact that CDW will have, 5 or 10 years in the future?
I want for CDW to be a hub for social impact in the tech industry. We work with so many other companies in tech and are well positioned to make a big impact in achieving Digital Equity.
How are you thinking about outcome measurement?
Outcome measurement is important and we’re working with an external consultant to further develop our outcome measurement framework. I’m a proponent of being mindful about data and not for having data for data’s sake. You don’t always need to rely on metrics to show impact. Stories and engagement are powerful. It’s most important to have challenging discussions around what you’re doing and then living it out. Data’s important but there needs to be a good reason for it if you’re going to have your social impact partners spend time getting it.
Logic models are a great tool because the evidence of impact is often in research that already exists. They can help you come up with the right questions to ask and enable you to rely on research that’s already been done.
What advice would you have for other leaders that are looking to align a company’s social impact strategy with their core business?
Trust yourself. We all want to create buy-in but remember that you’re the expert. Companies care, but they might not know how to care. Don’t wait for direction from your leadership—propose something and get their feedback. You can influence your company to act. Employees and consumers need more than words, they need to see action.
