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Corporate social responsibility

New angles on responsible CSR communication

Ages ago I bookmarked an article on the Ibero-American CSR Blog about how the media engage with CSR.

The guts of the article come from the book La Responsabilidad Social en América Latina (Social Responsibility in Latin America) by Mercedes Korin, founder of the Argentinian firm Mapeo de Promotores de RSE.

In the book Mercedes highlights how the media tend to be uncritical in their coverage of CSR, celebrating practices which are responsible and sustainable and tending to ignore those which are irresponsible and unsustainable.

There’s a very close relationship between PR and the media and while all journalists will tell you they report fact fairly and without bias, the reality is that much of the business news agenda is driven by companies seeking to portray themselves in the best possible light.

So yes the media probably should be more critical of business activities, but a business should also be more self critical … more aware of how its policies and procedures affect its staff and stakeholders and how analytical it is being of its own behaviour.

In order to encourage this kind of analysis within the the media, Mercedes suggests four areas which should be addressed and they form the basis for the four angles I mention below.

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Shining transparency into CSR websites


Think of elves … what do you get?

Happy chappies I’ll bet, full of light and song and laughter.  That’s the legacy of Victorian Romantics for you.

In reality their folklore tradition is more complicated.  Often seen as the root of minor ailments, elves were sometimes portrayed as having more malign intentions.

Even in modern literature, the great elf-lord of them all J.R.R Tolkien (not Timothy McGee) made sure there was at least one pure-evil elf in his Middle Earth cycle, Maeglin.

The reason for this odd intro is because this illusion/reality concept reminds me of Canada.

Canada?  Yes, Canada.

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How to do CSR in just 10 days

Recently British Gas (BG) were round at my house.  We had a problem with the boiler and .. well, after three visits they still didn’t fix it.

In the course of all this we had a new carbon monoxide alarm fitted, which BG helpfully charged £29.95 for.  Somehow we forgot to pay this so a few weeks later a letter from Moon Beever arrived.

This isn’t a strange version of an Andy Williams song but a long established firm of solicitors in Central London which specialises in litigation and debt recovery.

On the left hand column of their website there is a permanent section entitled “Community Services” under which is the logo for Macmillan Cancer Support.  “Oooh,” I thought. “Interesting!”  So I clicked on it .. and it took me to the Macmillan Cancer Support website.  Not so interesting.

There’s nothing exciting about Moon Beever’s association with Macmillan and I suspect it’s more about donating to a friend’s legacy (Debbie’s Fund) rather than corporate responsibility.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure the firm are acting will all best intentions and they should be applauded for the terrific fund-raising they’ve done.

However there must be many SME businesses out there who want to “do something” in CSR but think it’s horribly complicated or painful. I’ve come across a very simple way you can fulfil your CSR ambitions in only 10 days.  And here it is….

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Best Global Green Brands of 2012

toyota prius green brandThe 2012 list of the Best Global Green Brands was released by Interbrand this week, and nearly 40% are automotive brands. Considering that automobiles are one of the biggest environmental problems and consumers are demanding fuel-efficient vehicles more than ever, it’s not surprising that 8 of the 21 brands on Interbrand’s list of the Best Global Green Brands are automotive brands.

The automotive brands that made the 2012 list include Toyota (#1), Honda (#3), Volkswagen (#4), BMW (#10), Ford (#15), Mercedes-Benz (#16), Hyundai (#17), and Nissan (#21). These are companies that invest a lot of money into promoting their green initiatives. Since a significant part of the Interbrand scoring methodology relies on consumer perceptions of brands, automotive brands are rewarded for their green marketing investments.

Highlights from the 2012 Best Global Green Brands report include the following:

  • Industry: Automotive and technology brands dominate the list.
  • Newcomers: Brands appearing on the list for the first time include Nissan (#21), H&M (#46), and UBS (#50).
  • Biggest Position Jumps: Brands seeing the biggest jumps from 2011 to 2012 include: Danone (up 5 spots to #9), Ford (up 5 spots to #15), Starbucks (up 6 spots to #36), and UPS (up 6 spots to #43).
  • Biggest Position Drops: Brands experiencing the biggest drops from 2011 to 2012 include: 3M (down 10 spots to #11), Nike (down 9 spots to #26), and Allianz (down 9 spots to #30.
  • Countries: Countries that lead the list in terms of manufacturing and managing green brands are the United States (22 brands on the list), Japan (7 brands on the list), and Germany (7 brands on the list).

In 2012, corporate sustainability is no longer an option or a differentiator. It’s a necessity. Consumers don’t just want companies and brands to be green, they expect them to be green. As Jez Frampton, Global Chief Executive Officer of Interbrand, explains, “Sustainability has proven to be a strategic and profitable aspect of business and a brand-strengthening asset. It is crucial that consumers’ impressions of a brand are in close alignment with that brand’s actual environmental performance. Otherwise, a brand’s efforts in this area could serve as an under-utilized asset, or conversely, suffer due to accusations of ‘greenwashing.’”

The 2012 report shows that companies are focusing more efforts and budget dollars into sustainability, and they’re doing a better job of promoting those efforts, too. It’s very possible that there are other brands that could be considered greener than the ones on the Interbrand list, but they might not be reporting those efforts externally in a manner that changes consumers’ perceptions.

Are consumers aware of the green efforts your company and brand are doing? If not, it’s time to let them know!

Image: Autoviva

From Paper to the Cloud via Green IT


When companies first started moving information online, it seemed like an environmentalist’s dream, with the “paperless office” saving the rainforests. In fact running a website carries an environmental cost because of the power demands: not just for the site visitors, but on the servers that host and deliver the website, and the cooling mechanisms needed to keep this equipment from overheating.

So how can you reduce the environmental footprint of your site? In theory at least, cutting the time it takes somebody to visit your site and get the information they need will make a difference. A combination of clearer layout and more concise language will cut reading time, while optimizing the code on your site can cut the amount of data that has to be downloaded.

However, even shaving seconds off download time, while delighting your visitors (and Google) won’t save a huge quantity of power, and the server hosting your site remains active whether or not you have any visitors.

The reality is that the most effective change a business can make is to opt for more environmentally responsible hosting, whether that be through an outsourced service or with its own equipment. To put this into context, Apple says that one of their data centres uses the same power as 20,000 homes (20 megawatts). There’s been some discussion about the numbers, and obviously Apple may be a significantly larger power-consumer than your own company; nevertheless, your website will be contributing to the demands for power.

Given the overall move to digital, that’s a lot of power used by us all online…

Communicating the green journey

There are two main ‘greening’ questions to ask the company that hosts your website: what source of energy do they use to power their data centres and how efficiently do they use that energy: the answers to these questions matter to your audience and their perception of your company. For example, Greenpeace recently praised some web giants for using data centres located in cool places and using hydroelectric power, while criticizing other firms for using data centres that rely on “dirty” coal burning.

And then, of course, you’ll need to communicate your actions to your audience.


Click to enlarge viewHave a look at how Apple do it, using graphics and easy-to-read text (do scroll to see the whole page).

Other companies discuss ‘greening’ their data centres too—see, for instance:

  • highlighting success: First Group, who discuss how they’ve worked with their suppliers to cut energy usage and move to sustainable power, winning an internal award
  • indicating size and significance: Vodafone, who reveal that their data centres are responsible for 10% of their network’s carbon emissions.
  • external verification/assurance: Thomson Reuters, who list external organisations they’re working with on data centre efficiency
  • providing detail and results: EMC, who discuss their “journey to the cloud”—the virtualisation of their IT infrastructure, and who highlight the headline numbers
  • helping people understand the results: AT&T, who explain their overall energy savings by saying they were the equivalent of the electricity use of 13,367 homes for a year. This helps people visualise the scale of the savings.

There definitely seems to be a movement afoot…

Eight Tips For Corporate Volunteering

It’s almost certain that you’ve never heard of the the Global Corporate Volunteer Council (GCVC).  Created by the International Association for Volunteer Effort, its founding members include Citi Bank, Disney, Levi Strauss and Samsung.

Corporate volunteering is nothing new: a business releases its employees from their day job to allow them to engage with the civil society within which the company exists. How long the release is for varies between a day a month and a week a year.  Sometimes the employee receives a stipend from their employer, sometimes they don’t.

International corporate volunteering (ICV) is much the same beast but on a bigger scale.  Businesses place their employees on a volunteer basis in international projects where their skills can contribute to the achievement of a defined goal.  Sometimes these can take months to achieve, sometimes shorter.

Back in June 2011 GCVC published a final report into the international state of ICV, and it makes interesting reading.  Part of the report is “Seven Learnings” which, although aimed specifically at ICV, are almost equally applicable to any company of any size running a volunteer programme.

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