Sandra Macleod Echo Research
As CSR becomes embedded in business, firms must be able to demonstrate its role in their success.
The CSR landscape over the past ten years has been like sand in the desert - shapes constantly shifting in the wind, barely perceptible in real time, and dramatic up close.
A noticeable change has been to the language. For some, CSR has become CR (corporate responsibility); for others, sustainability is the word chosen to drive business transformation.
The geography has changed, too. Out of the PR department, away from mere compliance, CSR is becoming embedded in every part of a business. It has also created a coming together of like-minded companies in 'coalitions for causes', similar to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, or the Equator Principles, where large financial institutions have placed CR conditions on their clients' projects.
CSR has also enabled companies to tell personal stories about their people - and, more convincingly, to allow their people to tell their own stories. It has also made it possible for staff to articulate better than ever a moral position for working with companies: they see the mesh-in between the business and their own values, feeling more at ease with questions such as `can I identify with this company?' or `can I tell my friends about it? 'And we have seen CSRS benefits being better
quantified and becoming part of an ethical balance sheet alongside the financial one.
Perhaps one of the main changes from the early days is the arrival of more internationally recognised measurement tools. The Global Reporting lnitiative is prominent here, and organisations are increasingly serious about discovering the expectations of stakeholders and assessing their satisfaction levels. If CSR is part of the company's audited, external reporting frame world, it strengthens claims, enhances plausibility and builds trust. Another must have for better CSR is a system of
gauging how well one is communicating it.
The key to this is judging your audience. Research involving interviews with 250 stakeholders and the evaluation of 5,500 pieces of news has shown how stakeholders and the media want to hear about CSR. Journalists complained of drowning in a flood of good news stories and CSR reports showing endangered species and smiling children. what are the routes through sceptics such as this?
Research tells us there has to be an untiring search for fresh angles, to get beyond compassion fatigue and beat suspicions of greenwash. The media want us to deliver material they can link with bigger hooks. They also want us to help them see that critics may be putting pressure on companies to benefit their own agendas, and to encourage them to report how corporates have resolved social problems. We need to enable them to understand that businesses can be a force for good in the way that
individuals can, and that without them the delivery of public services by governments would be weakened.
On communicating CSR to the widest audiences, a chairman of a global mining company said: `It's pretty impoctant to get the policies and implementation right before you start spending too much time on the external communications:
Involvement by everyone in the company, at some level, makes it real. Staff, an organisation's best envoys, communicate its worth and value -and the sense of engagement it gives them - outside the workplace.
Looking to the future, we should keep an eye on several factors that will change the face of CSR. First, it will depend on the degree to which companies succeed in demonstrating the contribution of CSR to their business success.
Then there is the impact on perceptions of the sustainability debate and climate change programmes.
Finally, companies will have to show determination to breakdown one of the worst bastions of unfair privilege: corruption. Examples of poor corporate governance will continue to grow if organisations fail to ensure that, along with transparency, they improve their businesses.
CSR is not just about talking the talk. If organisations fail to walk the walk, exposure will be the ultimate price.
Published in the PR Week CSR & Thought Leader Series, Spetember 2008
CSR's Impact on Business.pdf
