“Talking to clients about their vision for society helps to build deeper and longer-lasting relationships with clients.
"Clients feel better understood and respected as individuals with their own hopes and dreams. They are enabled to align their wealth with their purpose."
Moreover, understanding a client’s priorities also helps to shape more tailored advice – such as efficiency and simplicity of process.
Steeden says Stewardship also helps clients to consider their “personal values and what they are most passionate about. This then enables them to develop a giving strategy that aligns closely with their aspirations.”
This can be beneficial to both adviser and client. She continues: “In my experience, our clients’ generosity is more joyful and impactful when it flows from a holistic understanding of the purpose of wealth and it focuses on proactively choosing who and what to give to.”
Sustainable impact
Dr James Corah is head of sustainability at asset management company CCLA, one of the largest sustainability and ethical investment asset managers in the UK.
CCLA was set up in the 1950s to solve market problems for investors who were either churches, local authorities or charities, helping organisations who didn’t have the ability to enter the investment market to scale to pool together to influence the market in line with their values.
By doing things to scale, gathering together individuals and organisations wanting to make a positive difference to society, Corah says that CCLA “is engaging on their behalf…one of things important in terms of engagement is that it is cohesive. So pooling civic society and individuals together is a really powerful dynamic".
CCLA is now influencing companies on behalf of 35,000 charities, and individuals and Corah believes “this creates a powerful voice. It gives us legitimacy in talking about (a company’s activity) in terms of what is right”.
He feels that pooling organisations together to influence companies through engagement is essentially “keeping the common call, and common spirit together”.
They work on the principle that “genuinely sustainable companies are only as good as the companies and communities that support them, so using our voting and engagement rights is genuinely about being a force for good”.
“The most important part of what we believe about is being a force for change. We want to be a catalyst for change in under-served issues.
"If everyone is engaging in the same thing that a company is doing, we don’t achieve that much extra. We want to do something about building more, and building into making things happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise.”
