Sister Patricia Wolf may not seem very intimidating when you walk into her office at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) in New York. But when it
comes to getting corporate America to toe the line on issues of corporate social responsibility, this Sister of Mercy shows no mercy.
If you never heard of the ICCR, you are seriously out of the IR and CSR loops. This 30-year-old international coalition of 275 faith-based institutional investors has a global
mission of merging basic social values with corporate and investment decisions. Sister Patricia, now celebrating her fifth year as the executive director of the ICCR, has
successfully communicated with the CEOs of the world's largest companies that they are occasionally in need of (shall we say?) improvement. Among those who've listened to Sister
Patricia are Starbucks, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Lowes, Chubb, Monsanto, Staples, Sherwin-Williams, Caterpillar...and that's just in the past quarter.
"I think we need ICCR today because it brings to corporate attention issues which may not be on their radar screen for seven to 15 years," says Sister Patricia. "Corporate
leaders have said to us: 'It is important to pay attention to ICCR because it puts on our agenda issues that become explosive issues.' ICCR brings a moral voice to this debate,
in terms of social and environmental issues. Not that other people don't, but we look at issues from the lens of faith and it grounds our dialogue."
Which is not to say that the ICCR members only have a spiritual investment in corporate America. "One of the most important aspects of ICCR is that all of our members
represent institutional investors," continues Sister Patricia. "Our members meet with corporate leadership as shareholders, not as public interest groups. There is a very, very
sharp difference."
I Got All My Sisters With Me
Indeed, an ICCR campaign can create both PR and IR challenges for companies. One of the most recent involved Wal-Mart, which Sister Patricia dubbed "a company in need
of reform." Shareholder resolutions relating to issues including corporate governance, access to health care and diversity in the workforce were filed in January by ICCR members
including the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (Washington State), the Benedictine Sisters of Boerne, TX, and the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, NJ.
(Wal-Mart filed objections with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February to prevent these measures from being presented to the company's stockholders, either in
proxy or in person.)
But don't think of this as another example of Wal-Mart pile-on. Sister Patricia points out the ICCR membership does not single out specific companies with particular issues.
The ICCR members vote every five years to determine which issues to focus on (there are currently nine, ranging from social to environmental to corporate governance), and within
the organization there are working groups that research which public companies are not meeting ICCR expectations.
"We are all long-term institutional investors," she says. "We seldom buy stock to engage a corporation on a particular issue; usually the stock is held within the portfolio.
That gives credibility to the ICCR engagement. We work on multiple issues - we are not a single-issue focus group. The perspective of being a shareholder and wanting the company
to do well gives us a different leverage than other NGOs."
Yet the CSR impact advocated by Sister Patricia is more than just PR - it is also ROI. "If you show companies that these social issues also impact share value and these are
important issues, then the moral issue is so persuasive that they need to pay attention," she says.
Spreading The Word
Whether it involves paying fair wages to American retail workers or getting HIV/AIDS education and medication to truck drivers working for U.S. soft drink companies in sub-
Sahara Africa, no issue is too distant or esoteric for Sister Patricia to rally for. And getting people to pay attention and learn has been a hallmark of her career - she
originally began as a teacher and part of her academic work involved teaching at a juvenile detention facility. In some ways, she notes communications aimed at youthful offenders
and senior corporate executives is not really that different.
"The common ground is the ability to communicate your message well," she says. "You want to communicate a message that is clear and accessible and not fuzzy. And no matter
whom you are teaching, you need to teach with respect for that person."
One area where communications has been troublesome has been in ICCR's outreach to the Islamic world. Sister Patricia defines the results of this outreach as "poor."
"We've met with Dow Jones Islamic Fund and with an asset management fund on Islamic values," she explains. "They were right there to join, but didn't. We just approved
a plan, which we are sending to our diversity committee, to change our approach. Islamic funds are not going to come to ICCR easily (we are heavily Christian and Jewish), so we
need to meet Islamic funds within the communities in which they operate. We are working to develop a plan to be better able to achieve that."
While most of ICCR's contact is at the C-suite level, Sister Patricia coordinates joint press releases with corporate communications officers. Her advice to this sector of the
PR industry in regards to their CSR communications is clear and cogent.
"The material that is being put together needs to be easily readable," she says. "People today don't have the time or the patience to read lots of words. But they do want
information quickly. There was a report put together by Gap on its supply chain issues (ICCR worked with Gap for a long time). Gap put out a report that I could read, and
I'm not the ICCR practitioner on the supply chain. But I went on the Web and read the report, and I could tell where, on a graded scale, Gap rated their supply factories, in what
part of the world they worked in, what score they gave them, what the problem was, and how they intended to remediate it. The public relations person needs to keep in mind the
reader may not be an expert, but is interested. So how does the information accessible and usable? Somebody like me then reuses the information to communicate with others."
(Interviews with other association leaders can be found at the PR News article archives at http://www.prenewsonline.com.)
Contact: Sister Patricia Wolf, [email protected].